A change is gonna' come.

Some of my best football related moments in the last two years have come courtesy of Nigel Atkins. He took over my football team, Southampton, when they were near the bottom of League One. First season in charge, he got them promoted to the Championship. Next season in charge he then got them promoted to the Premier league. "Back to back" promotions, no other Southampton manager has ever done that. In fact very few football managers have ever done that!

On Friday, because of the snow, I was working from home. During a break for coffee, I briefly checked Twitter. This tweet popped up. "Southampton Football Club has appointed Mauricio Pochettino as First Team Manager having relieved Nigel Adkins of his duties." My jaw dropped and and I mouthed "what!!!!!" I stared at the screen unable to take what I was reading in. On Wednesday night we had gone to the home of the European Champions (Chelsea) and having gone 2-0 down came back to earn a 2-2 draw. To me that was the night I felt we could rightly sing "We are Southampton, we're Premier League" and get taken seriously.

Now Saints Chairman, Nicola Cortese, has form in sacking managers. Adkins predecessor, Alan Pardew, was sacked after winning 4-0 away from home! That had been a shock, but worked out very well by his appointing Adkins. This was worse though, we had only lost 2 of our last 12 games and were 15th in the League.

Reaction to the sacking has been generally appalled at what we have done to a "good and honest manager". That's from the media and from fans of both Saints and other clubs. Everyone wishes Adkins all the best in the future and he will always be greeted like a hero at St Mary's, even if he turned up as Pompey manager.

Thank you Nigel for all the happy moments that you gave me and all other Saints fans.

Madman at the screens

Like thousands of others, maybe millions, this Christmas has bought me an iPad mini.

My eldest son, Matthew, bought one on the day that they were released and yes he did queue up outside the Apple store at 7 o'clock in the morning! Seeing the joy that he has got from his, made me convinced that this was the next addition that I needed to my gadget life.

My first impressions are very favourable. I've rarely turned on my laptop since I've owned it and can see that remaining the case. The screen is big enough to see almost every website very clearly and apps designed specifically for it are generally very impressive.

I also have an iPhone so a bit of the "Wow" factor was reduced, some of it is just what I've experienced on the iPhone on a bigger screen.

So what is different?

Firstly the newsstand app. I now read the Guardian on a daily basis, have a free copy of Stuff magazine and I'm considering subscribing to GQ again. Reading a newspaper or a magazine on a tablet is a very different but fun experience.

Next is the improvement in using the Apple browser, Safari. It's always been difficult on my PC, let's remember is not designed for a PC. It's fairly basic on an iPhone, but it is excellent on the iPad. It also means that through iCloud, articles I've read on my iPad I can also carry on reading on my iPhone if I don't get a chance to finish them.

The final initial benefit I've seen of the iPad is reading books. I have a Sony e-reader and that's been great but let's be honest, it's limited to just reading books. It's also very slow. If you copy a PDF onto it to use that in a meeting, it better be a very slow meeting, otherwise you'll be way behind. Through differing apps the iPad allows you to read PDF's, Kindle, iBooks and EPUB books.

So, so far so good. A very good investment.

PS this blog was mainly dictated using Siri!