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ex keeper here has signed for Portsmouth

You've got to be taking the piss??

i'm sure david james is terrified of loosing his place

How has that happened ive played with better goal keepers than Jon Stewart?

What next, Matt Bulman signing arsenal..........Stewart was a woeful keeper and a head case too

head case is a understatement, fucking hell some of the stuff hes done since leaving here is fucking ridiculous!
But hes a decent keeper to be fair

If its true them ime glad for the lad....hes a young lad and ime afraid the game is littered with ex town players who were crap here but get a lease of life elsewhere.

Perhaps their gonna get him to grow an afro and try and pass him off as a body double to sign David James' autographs. They certainly can't of got him to use as a premiership keeper.........who's he been at since he left Weymouth in 2007?

What has he done to be a nutcase?

 Care to offer some names?
 

I was thinking the same.

what does he do that makes him so nuts?

did he not try setting fire to the changing rooms when found out he was being released here, or somethink like that?

How about Jamie Cureton for a start,then maybe Akinfenwa who knocked Bolton out,then the young lad Duff,said he was too small so Cheltenham sold him for big money to Burnley 2 years on....then we could have had Henderson for peanuts,.....oh and didnt Freddie Eastwood score a hatrick in a trial match for the Town and wasnt even invited for a second game....not world beaters but players who have gone on to play well for other clubs,and big money moves.....so why could Colchester get Cureton scoring,Northampton get Akinfenwa fit?...my guess is Redknapp has seen something....but what does he know eh.

Cureton didn't want to be here.
Duff & Eastwood = tenuous.
Akinfenwa wasn't ever ours and we were right not to sign him.
You can't count loans - why the hell did we let Carrick and Milner go?!?!

Too many of your examples didn't even arrive at the County Ground - your argument is flawed :D

I was expecting you to mention players who signed permanent deals and we let go.

dean ashton. born here but slipped under our nose

Sorry Rich...Carrick and Milner were loan players fom prem clubs and we never had any chance of getting them.....Akinfenwa and Henderson were available and my whole point is we let them go,i didnt like Cureton but hes a good striker.....whats flawed about that?

That ol' chestnut.

Micky Channon, John Atyeo, Darren Eadie(!).... - all Wiltshire born, shame on us.

i dont think we could have kept cureton even if we had wanted him too.

We didnt get henderson because gillingham raised their price stupidly high to try instigate a bidding war, which we sensibly withdrew from

We didnt sign akinfenwa because he had a broken leg ffs! And sturrock didnt have a crystal ball available to him to help decide how good he'd be again when fully fit

The Milner and Carrick comment was a joke.

Cureton didn't want to play for us.
There was no guarentee that Akinfenwa would regain adequate fitness - he failed a medical - we had no money to pay fit players let alone injured.

We all know what happened with Henderson-Gillingham-agent-£££ saga.

None of those were a case of "stupid Swindon" in my opinion.

Basically what Dave said :D

Also a certain young man at Arsenal who we let go to Southampton for a grande....though i do accept that he was only 14 at the time so wouldnt put him in the list.

Yep and again, that wasn't a case of us being foolish.

In recent years there are very few players who have left us and gone on to truly amazing things. Brian Howard in the FA Cup is probably the best but, again, he wasn't doing the business for us (and that cup run was somewhat freakish)

I reckon we release more players which go from dross to absolute toss, than players that go on to better things.

haha he didn't try to set fire to the changing rooms

Ben Thatcher was born in Swindon.  He would have been 17 when we won promotion under Hoddle, but I'm not sure whether he still had any connection with the town by that point.  I'm sure Reg will know.

The other 'old chestnut' that used to be mentioned when this subject was being discussed was Roy Wegerle, who was loaned to us in 1988.

He has to rank with the likes of Given, Carrick, Milner, Davis et al in the 'providing experience' category surely?

  Fact is, throughout our history there have been very few players who we've seriously missed out on....Dudley Tyler, maybe, and Walcott although there was nothing we could could do to stop him going, we maybe could have got more compensation.

Had we kept Walcott and sold him, we'd have got a lot less money and it would have only gone in to certain people's bank accounts.

Chill.

Agreed to a point Reg....me saying littered was a bit optimistic.

 Hoddle didn't fancy Thatcher as he thought him a bit thuggish and not enough of a footballer.

 Wegerle we could have bought, but Macari didn't fancy him because he troed to play too much football in dangerous areas.

Was Matthew Mills ever on our books?

I know he was at Southampton and then Man City.

Doncaster paid £300k for him in the summer.

 Young David...for every source that has Ashton down as born in Swindon, you can find another that says he wasn't....if he was, he certainly never went to school in Swindon, or spent any significant time here, so you can't say he slipped under our nose.

HAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!!!!! :Ride On Fatbury's Lovestick:

Comedy gold 8)

What about Stan Collymore? His dad used to live in a doss house in Swindon or something...how did we let him under the rader???? WTF is going on!!!!!!!

wahay i caught me a reg!

STFC Dave has been fishing for a bite for a week or so now, and finally got one. Well done.

Legend!

  Mills, Matty Collins, and Pook were all at Braden Forest at the same time. Mills may have signed as say a 12 year old but he soon went to Soton academy, who are quite aggressive in our area, and operate a higher standard to our Cof E.

 Collins and Pook obviously signed with us, Collins we flogged on to Fulham where he's done little.

Ashtons dad was in the forces....so probably based in Wilthire and born in Swindon.

Southampton scouts went loco throughout Wiltshire during the 90's.

I think Southampton have a satellite academy in Bath, which helps them with the 60 minute rule. They picked up Walcott and Mills from us, and Blackstock from Oxford, and that's just off the top of my head. I imagine the Bristol clubs have lost a few to them as well.

 Still are....it's not necessarily a bad thing, because we can pick up their scraps like Lukas, flog them onn after a couple of years and make a tidy profit.

On the point of ex players Ince is making a good job of management....why didnt the club offer hm a role,i mean surely we are better than Macclesfield.

Darn tootin' - I don't live in Wiltshire therefore didn't know they were still prolific. Bristol Rovers were similar back then.

 Its kind of inevitable...you're allowed to operate a certain distance from your base, most of Soton's is water...

Paul Trollope went on to have a decent playing career after being released by us, though he looked a long way off being able to challange for a place in the first team when he left in the early nineties.

walcott was never under contract here.trained here for about 6 months as an 11 year old.swindon were compensated for the training they'd given him.
rules have changed since then so clubs have to agree deals for any kid under contract who wants to leave

Johno is getting on really well at Pompy, James conceeding 10 in 2 games its only a matter of time till Johno makes his prem debut haha

[url width=199 height=250]http://i50.photobucket.com/albums/f332/vivaset/stewart.jpg[/url]

Or goes out on loan!

Im still in shock that they signed him. I thought he couldnt get in Weymouths team.

Same here... It's quite remarkable. Fair play, but he really was just a bench warmer at Weymouth too!

he was injured when last season started with a broken knuckle, then when fit he got into the team, then he got into some off the pitch trouble which weymouth booted him out for, then when hollins came in they re-signed him, and off the field trouble again seen him booted out, Harry must see he has something, hes a loon but a good keeper

All good keepers should have a loon element about them.  Christ old Redsack has done well with James so it'll be an interesting one to keep an eye on.

i covered arsenal pompey and he was warming up in front of me and i almost fell off my chair. i must've missed this thread.

i couldn't fucking believe it.

You can tell he's a livewire... in the Newcastle yoof game at the end of that cup run t'other year, i recall him steaming out to 'have a word' with someone who had just mown down a town player (may have been Andy Carroll) on the half way line...

Best player I can think of that town missed out on was Hassan Kachloul. Saw him on trial in a reserve game and he was quality. I remember thinking to myself that we have to sign him. Strangely, Andy King didnt agree with me.

Who was the other southampton striker we could of had, was a quality player had to retire due to injury

I must admit I thought Bernard Tchoutang (sp) the Cameroon international looked class, cant remember if it was Todd or King that didnt rate him saying he was too small and lightweight.

Went on to win the African nations cup with Cameroon.

McMahon werent it? Tchoutang was quality too, i think that was the scouse cunt aswell.

1995/96 or 96/97 i believe?

EDIT-1997/98

Cameroon International. I remembered he wanted Premiership wages.
Didn't we ended up signing Darren Bollocks instead?

I remember it was in the same game that Phil Cuervo played for us on trial, that was a man I would loved to have never left us!

We could have had Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, Fjortoft recommended him so I'm told.

Is there any truth we had Sebastien Deisler on trial when he was 18 or some such?