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Man for Man Marking, Until It Isn't
Bournemouth
makes their way east to visit St Mary’s for the biggest game of their season.
It’s not our biggest game of the season but everyone knows that. I maybe
could’ve understood their fans getting over excited about it a few years ago
because they were never anywhere close to us in terms of league position, but
times have certainly changed this year in particular. The chasm between them and us is still huge
because they are miles better than us. Bournemouth are currently sixth in the
division and can have realistic hopes of qualifying for Europe next year and
maybe even sneaking into the Champions League. Saints on the other hand, are
shite.
Saints journey into the abyss has been well documented but how did Bournemouth,
complete with their 11,000 capacity shed, get to the stage where they can be
sixth in the Premier League? They have
undoubtedly recruited well and made good decisions over a period of time but
another factor is timing. The first time
they got promoted, they broke all the new FFP rules and all they got was a
small fine once they were in the Premier League. This was no doubt paid off by
the mysterious Maxim Demin, a Russian ‘businessman’ chap who was their owner at
a time when mysterious Russian ‘businessmen’ chaps passed the fit and proper
person’s test for football club owners and no one really cared where the money
came from.
Eddie Howe eventually got them relegated and then they hilariously gave the
manager‘s job to the walking teeth and suntan that is Jason Tindall, they took
five minutes to realise that was an error and wrote off the rest of the season
under Jonathan Woodgate. They then appointed
Scott Parker and his cardigan, who got them promoted again. They realised quickly that Parker was shite in
the Premier League and was trying to get himself sacked, and so appointed Gary
O’Neil who managed to keep them up, before they, in a move reminding me of us
ruthlessly swapping Adkins for Pochettino, appointed Andoni Iraola, who after a
shaky start has emerged as one of the best managers in the Premier League. They
stayed up last season and now are amongst the 17 clubs ring fenced by the
current PSR rules. Timing.
I admit this all sounds a little bit bitter and twisted but fair play to them
for being as good as they are. I’m only providing a bit of historical context
and none of the above matters right now and no one really cares. They are where
they are this season on merit and it should be appreciated just how good they
have been. Manager of the season will of course be Arne Slot, but if the award
was actually for what you achieve with the resources you have, then Andoni
Iraola, along with Nuno Espirito Santo would be 100% in the running. Currently, Bournemouth have a team that is the
envy of virtually every club who didn’t apply to join the European Super League
and a couple who did, cough Man United and Spurs. A perfect blend of youth and experience with
pace and power all over the pitch, all overseen by the aforementioned Iraola.
You would normally expect them to be picked apart in the summer and they might
lose one or two, but it won’t be anywhere near as bad as it has been in the
past for teams who have overachieved their stature, due to the aforementioned
PSR restrictions. Timing… Pre-PSR, you
would expect them to struggle to hold onto Sememyo, Kluivert, Adams, Kerkez,
Huijsen and Zabarnyi, as well as Iraola of course.
Is it a derby? Boring question asked every time we play them… still no. I will be interested to see if there is any
heightening of the security around the newly reconfigured away end at St
Mary’s. I would be very surprised if there is.
There will be for Pompey at home next season.
It’s a sad state of affairs at the moment. Previously, a home game against
Bournemouth would’ve been seen as a real opportunity to get three points
against the team who are going to be down near the bottom with us. However, I see this now as a game where we
might get something out of it if absolutely everything goes our way but
equally, we could well get absolutely battered. A lot of course depends on
which Saints team turns up.
Ivan Juric’s press conference this week yielded the information that THB was
not going to be fit, which means Juric has to make a decision as to who the
third central defender is going to be alongside Jimmy Champo and Bednarek. It
will be interesting to see if he thought last weeks shambles was a success in
that regard. Personally I want to see Welington at left-wing back. The Flynn
Downes situation has not repaired itself when it has had a week to do so, which
implies to me there is one, if not two grown men on either side of this
argument acting like complete fucking dickheads. There was also a very large
hint that Tall Paul would be in the side today, which will hopefully mean more
of a midfield three and Paul upfront with Sulemana or Dibling. We could play a
back four… which we should do, but we won’t.
Bournemouth have had a lot of injuries this season and as a result at the
moment are playing Lewis Cook at right back. There are not many weaknesses for
us to attack but if you had to pick one then that would be it. For us to win
this, Sulemana has to run him ragged and also has to have some sort of end
product to either assist or score a couple of goals. Kepa is a strange
goalkeeper as well, capable of looking like one of the best in the world one
week and then looking like Bambi with gloves on the following week. We have to
hope we get him on a bad day.
The game against Bournemouth at their shed, earlier on in the season was the
first time when I really thought Russell Martin was losing the plot. It was a
great day, containing as it did, being mocked by the Bournemouth manager and
players after the game when they quite rightly pointed out that they’d rather
have chances than possession and that they knew we would doze off and give them
a goal at some point. It was the start of us becoming a laughing stock. A win
today would go a long way to at least stopping that talk, and then Champions
League qualifying form until the end of the season and we might stay up… ha ha
ha.
So, anyway, I’ve just parked the car and I’m just sat in the car listening to
the radio, waiting for the team news and here’s Adam Blackmore reading out the
names and he reads out with Smallbone starting alongside Aribo in midfield. Passers by might have been slightly confused
to hear me shout ‘fuck off’ at very loud volume but such as the life of being a
Saints fan at the moment. Yes indeed, Will has been picked in a two-man
midfield with Joe Aribo, a combination which never worked when we tried it in
the Championship last season and once again I find myself clinging to the
faintest of hope that maybe it will work today.
Maybe Fernandes will play deeper so the lack of running, tracking and
pressing won’t be such an issue, but deep down, I know it fucking won’t work.
Tall Paul is in the side and the spare central defender, as in the totally
unnecessary one, is Nathan Wood.
With the Bournemouth fans over to my left as I sit in the Chapel, it’s amusing
watching people come in and have absolutely no fucking idea where they are
supposed to be sitting. Oh, that would be the away fans in the home end
phenomenon, last seen at home to Newcastle.
Bournemouth, as you expect look the more confident as the game starts but the
first time Saints get the ball, Sulemana takes on Lewis Cook and gets
absolutely trashed and that’s a yellow card for the makeshift right back. Well
at least that gives us something to go for.
Another ten minutes go by Kerkez bundles past Tall Paul on the left before
his cross is cleared out. Bournemouth pick the ball up and it goes wide left to
Christie, who curls it in with his left foot and there is Outtara, in between
Bednarek and Wood to head the ball into an empty net from six yards. Three
central defenders, one centre forward and he’s managed to get away from all of
them. Fucking pathetic and 1-0. This could get really ugly really quickly.
Barely two minutes later and Bournemouth build down our left, with Cook’s pass
infield being intercepted by Bednarek, who turns and shanks the clearance out
as far as Kluivert about thirty yards out.
A touch left to Christie who smashes it into the corner of the net from
the edge of the box. Ah, that’ll be the fat lady singing for this particular
game then. Wankers.
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With that, Juric makes a tactical switch and Sulemana is moved over to the right hand side so we don’t even have the entertainment of him running at Lewis Cook anymore. Another break from midfield inspired by Christie and Kluivert gets in ahead of Wood, but Bednarek rescues the situation. Fernandes is trying his best in midfield and he spins past three players before flying forward and finding KWP whose low cross towards Tall Paul is cleared by the Zabarnyi.
Semenyo decides it’s his turn to terrorise us and turns past Jimmy Champo who falls over in slapstick fashion. Because out man-to-man defensive system has gone to shit with that action, Smallbone tries to cover and Semenyo chops past him and Smallbone dives on his face leaving Outtara with a free shot at Ramsdale, which he blocks from an angle.
Half time and that was absolutely fucking shit. A normal manager would be changing the formation now and making a couple of substitutions. We do get the second part at least, with Welington and Wood being taken off for Big Les and Sugawara. KWP has gone to the left-hand side and Big Les has joined Smallbone in midfield, with Aribo dropping into the back three.
KWP tries to make a difference at the start of the second half but his cross is blocked back out to Smallbone who passes the ball across the pitch straight to Kluivert, who is not wearing a red and white shirt. Off he goes, bursting through the middle and finding Semenyo on the left and he dances past Aribo, Bree and then Sugawara and smashes it and Ramsdale pulls off a brilliant save to knock it over the bar.
Over comes to the corner and an unmarked near post header by Christie and Ramsdale claws it out of the top corner. Another brilliant save. We try and take advantage with Dibling picking up the ball in midfield and he turns past three players before finding Tall Paul who falls over the fucking ball. Great feet from Tyler and drunk giraffe feet from Paul. All part of the plan though and we eventually win it back through Aribo who gives it to Tall Paul who this time, doesn’t fall over but pokes a pass to Sulemana, one touch, bang, goal, where the fuck did that come from? Great strike.
The arrogant gloating from the Bournemouth fans to my left has gone a bit quiet now. There are ten minutes of normal time to go and we are flying forward. Bournemouth have clearly taken their foot off the gas and are now struggling to put it back on. We try and help them as Huijsen puts in a cross from the left and via Bednarek’s sliced 50p-head attempted clearance that goes sideways, KWP tries to head back to Ramsdale but loops it over him and Rambo has to take off again to push it over the bar.
Normal service is resumed as Scott puts Semenyo through, who knocks it to Tavernier, who cuts inside KWP before absolutely drilling it past Ramsdale to make it 3-1 and give the scoreline what it deserves. Oh well, ten minutes of being half decent, but that’s all folks. Game over.
We tried hard for the last fifteen of the game, but we are so limited. Fernandes is trying his best in particular but the game has gone. We are not good enough and that’s all there is to it. Aribo and Sulemana are given a few minutes off, with Manning and Archer somewhat pointlessly coming on in their place and all there’s left to do is to listen to the Bournemouth fans singing songs about us. They definitely have more songs about us than they have about themselves and I think they have more songs about us than we’ve got about ourselves. Enjoy it while it lasts boys.
Well, what a 100% predictable pile of shit that was. Depressingly inevitable in every way it was always likely to happen anyway but then came that team news. Oh my God. The pathetic booing of Will Smallbone as he got substituted tells you that he is the latest in a long line of Saints scapegoats but let’s get this right, he is what he is and it is not his fault he gets picked to play from the start today. That is 100% on the manager. I’m not having Ivan‘s excuse that Lesley needed a rest. Bullshit. If you’re going to make a decision to play Smallbone from the start then own it and don’t pretend like you had no other choice. The fact that Smallbone was on a lot of the set pieces tells you that this had been planned for most of this week. As I’ve already said, it’s not Will’s fault that he is just not good enough to be a Premier League player in a team like ours. He’s not bad when we are on the ball and he did some good things today when we were trying to build up but that game was predictably lost in the first 20 minutes with him and Joe Aribo totally failing to get to grips with the Bournemouth midfield and therefore providing no cover whatsoever for the defenders behind them, who admittedly didn’t do themselves any favours either. So when you have only two central midfielders and one of them is an absolute liability when you haven’t got the ball, and he other isn’t great either, it is going to be absolute carnage.
You end up with the situation that we had today where Tyler Adams is completely free to orchestrate everything from the base of the midfield and Justin Kluivert is completely free and Bournemouth can find the spare man at will. Most of the time that was Ryan Christie and two superb bits of wquality from him decided the game in the first half. We tried our man to man marking thing with Bree on Senenyo, Bednarek on Ouattara and Wood on shuttle runs between where he should be and where he was, disappearing up his own arse not knowing where he was supposed to be.
So, three central defenders and yet Outtara is completely free about 10 yards out to nod the first goal into the net. Three at the back quite often means that no one takes responsibility because they’re all waiting for one of the others to do it. This is if they haven;t been dragged out of the defence to follow their man. The man Bednarek is supposed to be marking scores the goal but the first thing he does is turn around and try and blame Nathan Wood, who is admittedly not marking anyone.
Bednarek tried to take some responsibility for the second goal and went out into Wood’s channel to go and clear the ball but he unfortunately shanked it right back into the middle of the pitch to Kluivert and one pass later Christie smashes the second goal into the net. That’s Christie who was supposed to be picked up by one of our midfielders. Honestly, it’s absolutely criminal.
Bournemouth switched off after the second goal and we got to halftime just the two adrift because of this. We didn’t do a thing to suggest that we were going to get back into it. Our one route to anything positive was down the left-hand side where Sulemana had been hacked down by Cook in the first couple of minutes to earn the Bournemouth man a booking. In the event of the second goal going in, Juric swapped Sulemana to the other side where he was completely ineffective and Cook was allowed to play the rest of the first half with no fear of accidentally getting a second yellow.
The opening half an hour of the second half was completely shit as well with nothing much happening aside from Ramsdale pulling out two ridiculous saves to keep it at two. Once we took Smallbone off and partnered Fernandes with big Les, we suddenly looked like a functioning team again with Sulamana out on the left and he duly scored his first goal of the season out of absolutely nowhere to make us think just for a second that we might get back into the game.
Ramsdale Knows He Just has 14 More Games of This Shit
Though they were a bit panicky for a few minutes after our goal, all it did however was make Bournemouth realise that they had to wake up, which they did and it didn’t take long for Tavernier to blast in the third goal that finished everything off.
For the second week in a row, Ivan Juric did himself absolutely no favours. Playing with a back three in this manner is consistently killing us. We concede an average of three goals a game and we don’t really create much going forward. I can only be envious of the way Bournemouth set up with all of the areas of their team working in unison to attack or defend, depending on the situation in front of them. There is no doubt in my mind that Bournemouth could’ve won the game much more comfortably than they did today. Bournemouth are basically a very very good side and we are not. We are shit. We have some shit players and we have a shit manager not a great combination. Two of our better players, Tyler Dibling and Big Les were left out of the team today and instead of that we had the likes of Nathan Wood, Will Smallbone and Jimmy Champo shoehorned into Ivan’s one and only way of playing. If there has been a worse back three in Premier League history than Wood, Bednarek and Bree, then I would be absolutely amazed.
It was almost like he’d not given a single thought to the threats Bournemouth were going to provide. One v One defending against a team with players who will run at you at every opportunity. Yeah, that’ll work well. Unathletic midfielders against quick technical midfielders – great idea genius. If Iraola was going to pick a system and a way of playing to play against, then what Juric put out there against him was it.
Bournemouth were predictably excellent and apart from the right back, who is only playing there out of absolute necessity, have the correct player in every single position and they all know exactly what they are doing. One thing I didn’t appreciate before the game was the fact that the front four Bournemouth players are all capable of taking all the player and beating them. They virtually never turn back which meant that our man for man defensive model was always going to struggle. Semenyo gets the ball for example and even if he has a player in front of him, he just takes them on. If he beats a player then that means a defender has to leave their man to come to you and then you have the choice of taking on the second player who is scrambling, or playing a 1-2 with the newly free player. The amount of last-ditch tackles our defenders have to make is crazy. Traditionally, the way to play three at the back is to have two players marking and one spare to sweep up behind. If everyone is marking someone, which is our system, then you need a midfield player to drop in or a full-back to cover around and we just don’t have that.
Most alarmingly, he also blurted out that you need to have dynamic players to play the way he wants to play. Am I alone in finding this an absolutely incredible admission because he’s basically saying that playing this way isn’t going to work with the players that we have. Since day one it has been obvious that playing this way requires two dynamic players in the centre of midfield. We have two of those who could possibly fulfil that role in Flynn Downes who is currently banished and Lesley Ugochukwu, who apparently needed a rest after the game seven days ago. I am really beginning to hope that Juric is just a placeholder until we get a proper manager in in the summer. I cannot imagine either Dragan Solak or Johannes Spors are impressed with these quotes.
Not that it matters but we play Brighton at home next week. I was looking at this as a potential win up until they beat Chelsea 3-0 and we produced this stinker of a performance. Will it be us getting past Derby’s 11 points record low or will it be the final part of a triumvirate of shit home performances in three consecutive weeks. I know what I would have my money on.
Up the fucking shite Saints