Bournemouth 1 - 2 Saints

Today at the Fitness First stadium Saints continued their preparations for the new season with a solid, rather than spectacular performance. Goals from Kenwyne Jones and Bradley Wright-Phillips gave ten-man Saints victory. Saints were reduced to 10 men when Powell was involved in some "hand-bags" with one of the Bournemouth players. It seemed like a telling off would have sufficed, but the ref thought otherwise. It was good to see Claus complete 45 minutes and Jones looked in fine form. As I said before though, it was a solid rather than great performance.

A selection of photos are at:
http://s185.photobucket.com/albums/x69/ph11be/Saints%20v%20Cherries/
or here's the slideshow:

There was no sign of two triallist that had joined Saints for their first three pre-season games. Today, George Burley said that he was trying to arrange a season-long loan deal for Vignal from Lens. But he said that they would not be pursuing interest in Hungarian international centre-back Tamas Vasko. It still leaves a hole in the centre of our defence which urgently needs filling.

Still, pre-season has been encouraging thus far, with a Saints opening with a 4-2 win over Eastleigh and then 12-0 and 4-1 wins on the tour of Norway. So if Saints can strengthen the defence in the couple of weeks, a good season should ensue.

The whole potential takeover situation has become a bit tiring and after the club released a statement to the LSE announcing that there were three interested parties and talks were ongoing, I've decided to just wait and see and not get my hopes up. Takeover or not, this season looks like it is going to be fun!!