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Reply | Anyone remember the old baths in Southampton.
at 19:18 28 Oct 2026
I think some of those bricks were mine because I was shitting bricks whenever I went up to the 3rd board. I only went up there because I was forced to by my older brothers. I never dived though, only jumped and tried not to die.
I could just about manage the 2nd which was the springy one on the far side of this picture. I thought that was brave at the time but it looks like nothing in this picture. |
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Reply | Arteta what a prat
at 14:04 28 Oct 2026
He got the ball, but not cleanly. He dived in aggressively, made contact and trapped Dowman's standing (right) leg in a scissor. That's a foul. Luckily it was only for a second. Dowman sort of buckled but his leg came free. If a scissor tackle traps a players leg and he goes over on it that can easily do ligaments. I'm not surprised Dowman reacted.
The Fleetwood player could have seriously injured Dowman, but Dowman wouldn't have even bruised the other guy with his reaction. So it's nuts that it's Dowman who gets sent off. |
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Reply | Arteta what a prat
at 11:26 28 Oct 2026
What I hated about this incident is the way it was refereed. If Dowman had rolled around on the ground, play acting, the Fleetwood guy would have been booked and Dowman would have been unpunished. Instead, Dowman stays on his feet, has a mild, honest reaction and gets sent off.
The lesson: next time son, just roll around like a tvvat because that's what referees like to see. No one wants to see play acting but that's what referees reward. |
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Reply | Saints Players Falling Foul Of The Law
at 11:20 28 Oct 2026
I remember the story (maybe made up for laughs) in Channon's autobiography, about some drink driving involving Osgood. The story goes that Osgood ran off but plod could see it was Osgood because his girlfriend was running faster than him. |
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Reply | Lewis Dobbin vs Ross Stewart
at 13:31 26 Oct 2026
Stewart was fit before they were putting him in the squad. He hasn't been injured, just unused. They don't need him with Idah and Vipotnik. If he'd been with us, he'd have had a preseason as you say and been available from the beginning. No one knows if he'd have been injured since, but we know for sure that Larin has been.
It seems it isn't going to happen but I would like to see Mubama given more of a chance. There have been glimpses of him doing all the things we need to do but he's not going to learn unless he plays real games. |
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Reply | Jason Wilcox
at 13:10 26 Oct 2026
I doubt that Mr Martin takes any counselling from anyone. He's too arrogant.
I also doubt that Wilcox would have helped him. He's had a similar situation at Man U with Ruben Amorim. Amorim faced constant criticism that his tactics weren't going to work with Man U's players. If Wilcox advised him to adapt then he was ignored.
Wilcox left us before the sh1t hit the fan. But he can't escape responsibility for the squad and coaches he's put together at Man U, at great expense and with disastrous results. |
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Reply | Lewis Dobbin vs Ross Stewart
at 12:07 26 Oct 2026
There's no way that Dobbin is a trade up on Stewart (who has been available for most of Swansea's games). I'm glad he played well on Saturday but that game suited him perfectly. He will struggle in other games.
Dobbin needs space to play in, which he got on Saturday because WHU attacked us. When we play teams who want to defend more that space will disappear. Then the only space will be in the air, where Dobbin isn't much use.
We might see that against QPR. They're in good form but even so will probably sit back. If Larin isn't fit we'll have a problem. You can see that Dobbin can play but he doesn't have the physicality to play as a centre forward. He needs someone to play off so he can play as a second striker. Hopefully we'll have enough regardless, but Saturday may be the type of game where we miss what Stewart can do and Dobbin can't. |
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Reply | Jason Wilcox
at 11:58 26 Oct 2026
No, our issues in the PL were because we had Russell Martin insisting on playing a style of football that our players just weren't good enough for. The idea that if Wilcox was still around he'd have solved that problem is bizarre. The only way that style of play would have worked is if we'd signed Man City's first team, not their youth team. |
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Reply | Jason Wilcox
at 17:12 25 Oct 2026
Who could have guessed that the man who appointed Russell Martin isn't very good at recruiting managers? At Man U he's appointed 2 interims and 2 permanent managers and they've all failed.
Actually, it might be the fault of the players that Wilcox has recruited, rather than the managers, but either way it comes back to Wilcox. Money hasn't been the problem. Their payroll spend is slightly behind City but well up with the other big spenders and more than twice what Bournemouth spend. |
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Reply | Floodlight Pylons
at 14:01 20 Oct 2026
Plough Lane and Selhurst Park had them too. I think Selhurst Park still has them. |
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Reply | Floodlight Pylons
at 13:56 20 Oct 2026
I think most of the old stadiums had them. Just in London I can picture in my head the pylons at Stamford Bridge and Upton Park, but I don't think Highbury had any (at least on my visits). |
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Reply | Where have all the young guns gone?
at 13:00 20 Oct 2026
It wasn't budget cuts. We closed the academy in Bath because we were forced to. The regulations say we can only have academies within a certain distance. We originally had an exemption because half our catchment area is in the sea. But I don't understand why we're prevented from having an academy in Bath but youngsters are allowed to be uprooted and sent hundreds of miles to Man City or wherever. The regulations were supposed to be about protecting youngsters, so how does that work? |
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Reply | Where have all the young guns gone?
at 12:09 20 Oct 2026
Agreed, we need a centre forward and Robinson is a winger. If he came back he'd be competing for a place with our other wingers.
But we still haven't solved the no 10 position. As you've said Azaz is great but we haven't got a deputy. Dobbin was supposed to be it but I'm not convinced. I've always rated Robinson and I think he has the ability to play as a no 10 if he's given time to adapt.
On Dobbin, he looks like a second striker and nothing else. That's fine, but we hardly ever play a second striker out of choice, and he needs a centre forward to play off. I'm not convinced that was money well spent when we could have just kept Archer who would have done much the same. |
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Reply | France Riots
at 12:53 19 Oct 2026
It may be true that Putin has something on Trump, but I doubt it. I think the reasons for Trumps behaviour are both more obvious and even worse than that:
- Trump prefers dictatorships to democracies, which he calls weak. The only countries he's praised are dictatorships.
- Trump believes in regional powers. He thinks he should dictate affairs in "his" corner of the world e.g. in Canada, Greenland, Venezuela, Cuba etc. Likewise he thinks that Putin has the right to dictate policy in "his" corner including Ukraine.
- Trump sees international relations as relations between strong men leaders. He said that North Korea wouldn't do anything stupid because he individually "gets on well with Kim Jong Un". He wants the same with Putin and Xi.
- Trump has no interest in Europe and sees no point in fighting to protect it or spending money to support it.
- Being friendly with Putin opens doors to valuable business deals for him and his clan, particularly in oil and mining.
Lots of MAGA followers in the US think all of these things too and don't see any of it as wrong. I think all of this is worse than Putin simply having something on Trump. |
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Reply | France Riots
at 18:49 18 Oct 2026
The amount of profit is set by the regulator e.g. in water the return on investment is now a weighted average of 4.03% out to 2030. Everyone can form their own opinion on whether that is excessive or not, but that is well below the return that an average company would look for on new investment.
Of course the total profits look big because the investments are massive. New investment in water infrastructure is about £20 billion pa in the UK, so at 4% that adds up to a lot of profit. |
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Reply | France Riots
at 17:51 18 Oct 2026
I agree with you on Thatcher's Right To Buy (and Osborne's Help To Buy) - but not on the privatisation of businesses. From what I see, privatisation was a success overall. Nobody would ever dream of saying that the likes of BT, BA or BP should be owned by the government today. They operate much better in the private sector and it's a fact of life that the private sector is more efficient than the public sector.
Where privatisation has been difficult is where they still act like government departments, because the companies are local monopolies and don't have any competition to keep them on their toes. Water companies are a prime example. In those cases it's the regulator's job to keep them on their toes and the water regulator has fallen down on the job. OFWAT has the power to agree the performance targets, the level of investment, returns, dividends etc. and punish the companies when they don't deliver. OFWAT hasn't used those powers well and successive governments haven't regulated the regulator.
But there's no reason why they can't do the job well. The CAA regulates the airport owners, which is much like regulating the water companies, because they are local monopolies too. But you never hear cries that the airports need to be re-nationalised. That's because they're regulated better.
There will always be some problems, but people forget what the problems were like when all of this was run by the government. Importantly, they also ignore all the additional debt and taxes that would be required if the government had to fund the investment needed by these businesses. Since privatisation there has been massive investment in all of these businesses that just couldn't happen in the public sector. That's led to massive improvements in operational efficiencies and that ultimately means better services for customers. |
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Reply | France Riots
at 14:06 18 Oct 2026
I think the key things are:
- Demographics. We used to have a large number of young and healthy workers supporting a small number of elderly and sick. That's been slowly reversing as the baby boomers, like me, have grown old.
- Climate change leading to expensive energy. Climate change is real but the policy response of our governments, of both types, has put us at a severe disadvantage to other countries by making energy too expensive. Energy is fundamental to economic growth and our taxes on petrol, gas electricity etc. are massive.
- Poor productivity growth, mostly caused by a lack of investment over many years, but particularly since the financial crash 2008. This is widely agreed on by left and right.
- The "housing ladder" and national obsession with home owning. Successive governments have had policies deliberately designed to push up the value of houses, with disastrous results. It's a stupid policy that was always going to end badly. If people saved up to invest in businesses e.g. via pensions or a "national share" instead of houses, we would all be better off. Germany doesn't have an obsession with home owning and is better off because of that.
- "Made in China". I hate Trump but one thing he has right is the damage that China has done by seeking to own the world's manufacturing, leaving millions of people in the west on the scrap heap. The west should have put concerted pressure on China to change policies - and still needs to.
- Values. Young people used to be taught the value of work. Now they are taught about entitlements. Tbf, this is partly because the stupid policies referenced above have robbed them of jobs and opportunities, leading to inter-generational conflict (as in France). [Post edited 18 Oct 14:14]
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Reply | Mubama
at 12:11 18 Oct 2026
It's a big problem. The news is that Larin's injury is actually a hamstring, nothing to do with the collision. So his injury will have been caused either by him injuring himself by unconsciously adjusting for his back injury, or more likely just general over use, which is the usual cause of hamstring injuries. Either way, that wouldn't have happened last year because he'd have been able to get some rest.
We definitely need to sign another centre forward in January. The really stupid thing is this was obvious in the summer. We should never have ended up relying on the unproven Mubama. Now we'll drop points and then probably have to over pay in January. |
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