He’s practically the next Beckham, just ask Les.
I think that bid falls into the category “necky”
Prowsey scored 4 goals last season, 1 less than Richarlison which means at an average of £10m per goal we should be asking at least £40m.
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Sell him. Fuck it. Mr Gao needs the cash apparently.
He has had six seasons to establish himself in the first team and hasn’t managed to do so yet. Only good for dead balls, making him more of a luxury than Boufal and Gaston.
Or am I being harsh?
Yeah, a little.
I think with the right partners he could be good for us centrally probably more advanced than deep.
I always love his 100% effort. Can’t buy that.
First choice with Lemina, Davies, Armstrong able to do that job? Doubt it. But I think he’s a Hughes type of player.
JWP, in the current market, is worth more than 10m.
I’ve no real issue with selling him but time is running out for us to put together a good squad for the season. Not sure it would be wise to sell right now.
Well Forster ain’t going to Burnley.
JWP went to the same school as my step-daughters - hell, he even gave the prize day speech there a couple of years back. How could we possibly sell him?
I agree on the effort front and seems like a nice honest bloke. Also, I wouldn’t sell him for £10m.
It just irks me that in six years our ‘set piece wizard’ has managed two goals from free kicks. After six years people still debate where his best position is. Surely that is not the sign of a top player.
Let’s be fair, that story is probably complete and utter shit anyway. It was in the Sun for starters.
The more I think about it the more our midfield is all a much of a muchness and we are lacking flair and definitely pace.
It keeps coming back to the fact that we need to sell in order to buy (which still doesn’t sit right with me because player sales is clearly not the only revenue for the club (TV money in particular), but then again it isn’t my money) I don’t think the current squad is that much better than last seasons and I cannot help but feel that so far they have failed to address just how shit we were last year. Slow, predictable and porous at the back.Therefore is it a risk to lay the blame firmly at the door of previous managers and not look more closely at the deteriorating quality of the playing staff?
At the start of the summer I felt positive because at the outset the club appeared to be righting the wrongs of previous years, and did some business early on. I also felt that the ‘big’ signing would come late in the window as seems to be the case in years gone by (once said player has given up hope of a move to a Champions League team), but now we are being told it is unlikely that anything else will happen. You could argue there is an element of gamesmanship in this stance, but I think that would be more in hope than in expectation. It is particularly frustrating because I feel we are just one or two players away from having a top half side again.
Add that to the fact that if/when Austin gets his annual 3-6 month injury lay off, the ‘told you we needed another striker’ cries will be unbearable.
Also, 4 days from the first game and I honestly have no idea what our strongest team is and I find that perplexing. Again it just feels like a bit of a mess.
Whinge over. (For now!)
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You’re spiralling downwards mate. Snap out of it.
(Although to be honest, I don’t see a great season ahead… this is actually the least optimistic I’ve been for a few seasons…at with Pellegrino I thought he was coming in with new ideas and a high press…i don’t feel that Hughes will surprise us with beautiful football)
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You’re quite right and I think it’s because I have not enjoyed watching Saints for two years now and what is supposed to be an enjoyable past time and day out has actually been shit for quite some time.
I thought last year would be a wake up call and Ralphy boy admitted as much in that rhetoric filled interview.
They had the opportunity to prove they’ve learnt their lessons but so far I am not convinced that they actually have.
Obviously I’m aware that no balls have been kicked yet but I’m just apprehensive about being served up another helping of the same old shit. And as you say, with this crop of players, I’m not sure Hughes is going to be able to deliver the desired entertainment.
A faster brand of football certainly isn’t in the offing as we’ve still got no fucking pace in the side!
The difficult thing for us is that we cannot possibly keep up with the current transfer market (this time last year I had never heard of Harry Maguire and now he’s ‘worth’ £80m) and the last few years from the academy have produced very little. Overhauling our squad to something exciting would take no less than about £300-400m and probably increase our wagebill by about 40-50%, which to be honest I really don’t think we can do. What I am hoping for is that we have brought in some hard workers and those not afraid of getting a bit down and dirty, certainly Hughes instilled a bit of grit to our end of season and I’m hoping we can continue that, I don’t care about the pre-season results they have no bearing on what we do or don’t do in the league.
So roll on Sunday and our first 3 points of the season 
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Drastic action is needed, I think. Some options.
- Start a new club, Sotonians FC, and fall in love with grassroots football again, where transfer deals are done down the pub and depend on getting someone a date or a packet of pork scratchings.
- Fix the Euromillions for a decade so that all funds are surreptitiously funnelled into Southampton FC’s transfer budget. And then have a go at coming fourth.
- Bring back the little man, Nicola Cortese, and give the fucker backing and another project.
- Create the inaugural Speedball 2 league. Never explain why Speedball 1 was never a thing. Always insist the year is at least 2105. Ice cream. cc’ing @Korruptor because he loves this geeky shit.
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Agree with most of they vagstar. However while preseason results have no bearing over the Prem, preseason team and formation selection mean I’m concerned.
Some of that might not be on Hughes as we’ve had illnesses and late arrivals. But he seemed to be uncertain of how and who to play right up until the last friendly.
Plus 3 at the back should make us more solid and it doesn’t seem to have done so. 2 upfront seems to have left us overrun in midfield (although scoring goals again).
Spot on about the cost to overhaul the squad, though. Frightening to see it in black and white.
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The thing is, I feel like we are only a couple of players shy of getting ourselves back in to the top half mix. Forget trying to compete with the top six by overhauling the squad.
So we are talking £50-£60m not hundreds.
We just seem to have a very modest limit on what we are prepared to pay for a single player, and in this market that doesn’t give us a prayer. So if you can’t beat them, join them. I worry that we still don’t seem to get that and are stuck with tunnel vision of ‘buy cheap, sell high’. Or the ‘Southampton Way’ as the cynics call it. A great strategy until nobody wants to buy your players after a near catastrophic season. It is arrogant to think this will continue to work. £15-£20m doesn’t get you very much these days. £19m for Carrillo.
Just look, buying Championship players costs you that in today’s market. Eg Gibson £15m Traore £18m.
Burnley are trying to get JayRod for £18m after we bought him from them for £7m and sold him 12 months ago for £12m. That shows the level of inflation.
Little Bournemouth have just spent £25m on a bloke I’ve never heard of.
I guess my point is that we probably need to be looking at players in the £25m-£30m bracket to make a real difference to our starting eleven.
We seemed prepared to do that in January when desperate, but now the pressure is off it seems like they’ve reverted back to business as usual and HOPE the cheaper players come good.
Perhaps I need to just keep the faith but it feels like they are resting on their laurels once again by failing to add quality and spend more than they have recouped in player sales. We seem to be one of the few clubs to carry this model.
Part of me is envious of the fact that other club owners seem to dodge FFP by sponsoring their clubs with lucrative and inflated sponsorship deals from their other companies and investments. Kat could have renamed St Mary’s as the ‘Big Yellow Digger and Cherry Picker Stadium’ or some shit but for some reason she never did.
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Chelsea buying some goalie from Spain that I’ve never heard of for world record £72m
Bournemouth have beaten our record transfer twice! I’m not saying I want us to go out and spend loads…
…i just want us to find some good players! Why doesn’t anyone buy British anymore (I know we got Gunn and Armstrong)? The price differential between home grown and foreign is reducing. How many players have gone from championship to prem this season?
Again I agree with most of that but look at Burnley who are just well managed. Not my particular cup of tea from a football style perspective but they are looking to buy one of our offcuts to make them better. Money isn’t everything if you have a team ethos.
What we have thrown out with the baby on the emptying of the Southampton-way-bathwater is the synergies that can be mined when a team operates as one.
Think back to the first few games under Pochettino. We’d just returned from training in Barcelona and instantly we transformed from a bunch of average jouneymen with the odd bit of pace and talent into a single force that moved as one.
I’ll grant that we often didn’t score enough and we also didn’t seem to have a plan b but it was everything I loved about football right there. In my team.
One of the reasons I was so disappointed with the Hughes appointment (2nd time, both actually) was that he gets teams organised to defend by challenging the opposition to break them down. Its the only time his teams operate as one by getting organised behind the ball.
We used to aggressively defend by trying to get the ball from the opposition.
With the Hughes appointment nothing we used to do made sense anymore. It was an admission that we’ve stopped trying to implement a style of play based on a single deep-rooted team ethic where average players could be coached to become valuable - in both senses of the word.
And now, when we sit back and examine Hughes’ options, where he wants a more experienced player, another individual to do a job in a group of 3 or 4 as a group of defenders as a group of midfielders, a group of strikers we realise that we can’t afford those individuals.
My concern is that we can’t afford a team built from separate functioning components. We have to persevere to find that coach that can build it.
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A glimmer from training videos.
Under the Muppets our lads seemed to value recycling possession over having a pop at goal outside the 6 yard box.
The walk the ball in style that annoyed us & Arsenal fans.
Seen many more clips practising shooting from distance in pre season.
With the lack of pace that may be one of Sparkys plans…
I hope