by Nick Mabey. It has been longer than usual since my last contribution to In Common. Like many fans of Southampton Football Club I have been through a range of emotions over the past few weeks; mostly anger, sadness and fear, but occasionally glimmers of hope. In trying to...
View from the Kingsland
View from the Kingsland: The Strange Season Continues
by Nick Mabey. It’s the beginning of April and we still have a quarter of the league season to go. Thanks to the World Cup every team has at least ten games to play and some as many as 13, when normally it would be five or six. Normally...
View from the Kingsland: Viva Women’s Football
by Nick Mabey. Earlier this week it was International Women’s Day and so I thought I’d take a break from the protracted misery, stress and occasional hope of the men’s team’s relegation battle to focus on celebrating the progress of women’s football, locally and nationally. This year’s theme is ...
View from the Kingsland: Life at the Bottom Part 3
by Nick Mabey. When I wrote my first ‘life at the bottom” article, on 4th January, I didn’t know it would be a series. Saints had just sunk to the bottom of the league and I’d hoped it would be temporary. Six weeks on we’re still there, and there’s...
View from the Kingsland: Life at the bottom part 2
by Nick Mabey. Three weeks after I last wrote we remain rooted to the bottom of the league. In that article (click here to read it) I said that if we didn’t beat Forest we could give up hope. Well, we didn’t beat Forest and yet hope is not...
View from the Kingsland – Life at the bottom
by Nick Mabey. How does the joke go? We must be the strongest team in the league, we’re propping everyone else up. That’s how it’s been for Southampton since the season resumed on Boxing Day. Rock bottom. It’s been a while since we were stuck at the foot of...
View from the Kingsland: being on the pitch not in the stands
by Nick Mabey. Almost exactly 12 hours after England’s sad exit from the World Cup I found myself inside St. Mary’s stadium with 800 other hardy (or is that foolhardy?) souls. We were lined up for the start of the inaugural Southampton FC 10k race, an event that started...
View from the Kingsland: Strange days indeed
by Nick Mabey. It’s November and the World Cup is in full swing. That’s not a sentence I ever imagined saying, and yet here we are. It wasn’t even a plan. We ended up here because someone realised, too late it seems, that it would be too hot to...
View from the Kingsland: Thanks and Farewell
by Nick Mabey. After what feels like months of speculation Ralph Hasenhuttl is no longer manager of Southampton FC. Tuesday 7th November saw him sacked with immediate effect following a run of results in 2022 that, spread over a season, would have seen Southampton relegated. It’s a cut-throat business...