`ERE WE GO...

After a wait of, oh, at least three weeks, another football season is upon us. It started last night at Carrow Road, Norwich, where the home team lost their first game back in the Championship 2-3 to Watford. And this lunchtime, Sky begin their fanatical football coverage by showing Saints` home game against newly relegated Plymouth Argyle. It promises to be a tight game of two halves, to be fair.

Sadly for me, I can`t be at St. Mary`s today as we have a family wedding reception to go to down near Folkestone, so I`ll have to record the Sky programme and watch it later. I haven`t bought a season ticket this year - I get a bit weary with the long drive home in the depths of winter, so I`ll `cherry pick` the games I feel I can get to, probably starting in a couple of weeks when Leyton Orient are the visitors to St. Mary`s.

Expectations are running very high amongst the Southampton fans following last season`s impressive campaign and that could prove to be a problem. I detect that our billionnaire owner and our business high-flying chief executive will not tolerate anything other than promotion back to the Championship and it`s beginning to seem that decisions are being made for purely business reasons possibly without any `feeling` for the club`s reputation. For example, there are no facilities this year for season tickets to be paid in instalments; there will be a £3 surcharge for on-line matchday ticket purchases and just yesterday we learned that press photographers will not now be accredited to take pictures of games in progress, the press having to rely instead and pay for the images produced by the club`s appointed agency.

Whatever the commercial advantages of such moves may be, they seem to be shades of the nickel and dime, niggling stunts pulled by Rupert Lowe in the dark ages of our medieval period. For all the success that might be achieved on the field of play, the reputation of the club as a family friendly hub of the wordlwide community of Saints fans is important to us and I hope this is not forgotten in the club`s quest for `success.`