League 1 Match 21 - Southampton 3 Tranmere 0

33% of Tranmere's fans at St Mary's

Tranmere were our visitors today and like everyone that we seem to play, they’ve hit a bit of form and have won their last couple of matches. They are currently being managed by their physio. I can see the logic in this as my sister is a physio and she’d be better at managing Tranmere than John Barnes. Regardless of a couple of wins, I was expecting Saints to be far too strong for todays visitors.

Mention Tranmere to any Saints fan and of course, you think of the 3-0 up, 4-3 down game and forget the fact that we’ve played them since then in the League Cup and won 6-1 in a game that featured a 40 yard lob for a goal from Chrissy Marsden Football Genius.

Today, Pards had a selection issue as Murty had injured his ankle when he dropped his pie on it in training so who would go to right back?. I was hoping that Thomas would slot in there but Liability James returned there with Antonio coming into the midfield on the right. The rest of the team was as you’d expect and Dismal Forecast was on the bench.

And then the first half was shit.

I could really leave it at that but to expand…the football was shit, Saints were shit, Tranmere were shit, the linesman was a different brand of shit altogether and the referee was several different types of shit all piled up on top of eachother.

The linesman, referees assistant or whatever! – Harding wins a tackle and quite clearly knocks it out of play off the Tranny winger… lino gives throw to them though to be fair, he did have a view that was obstructed by fresh air and he was three yards away. Two minutes later, the Tranny right back is looking to play it up the line and the lino is watching for offside instead of watching where the ball was. If he’d watched the ball he would have seen that it was already a yard off the pitch when the pass was played. League 1 lino’s are the best.

From about the 10th minute onwards, Tranmere were intent on spoiling the game as much as possible and were aided and abetted in this by the fat moron with the whistle. I would love this guy to referee Man Utd one week to see what Fergie makes of his fitness levels. Little fat berk. Lallana breaks away with the ball and he brings it back for a foul on Perry who has already got up and was fine. Why ? Is it because he thought Perry was injured or had a head injury… no, it’s because he was a shit ref and shit refs allow shit teams to make a shit match of it. If you clamp down on time-wasting then they can’t do it any more… if you make them leave the pitch to get treated then they won’t lie down for no reason, if you add on the correct amount of injury time, they will be less inclined to waste time etc etc.

There was the odd flash from a few players with Harding, Hammond and Schneiderlin probably being the pick of the bad bunch. The right hand side of our team was abysmal with Antonio and James doing a passable impression of a Comedy double act and a bad one at that – think Cannon and Ball or the Krankies. James is consistently in the wrong place and kicking it anywhere and Antonio is running into blind alleys, forgetting the ball, falling over the ball and generally making me ponder the wisdom of my assertion a few weeks back that we should sign him.

It gets to the half hour mark before anything noteworthy happens and this is a shoving match between Rickie Lambert and about three Tranmere defenders. This went on for about a minute while the fat chuffer with the whistle waited for his taxi to get him to the area of the action. Bookings all round. It livened things up though and Lambert smashed in a shot which the keeper parried away. After a brief rise in the standard of entertainment to ‘mediocre’, we sank back down to ‘shit’. It was now half time and I had soup. It was the best thing so far.

Dad and I pondered the half time team talk that Pards was delivering deep in the bowels of SMS at that moment. We thought that it would probably not be pretty and that Saints would be a different team in the 2nd half and so it proved as we looked a lot more purposeful as soon as fatty wheezed himself into position and got us all underway again.

Five minutes in and a decent move involving Hammond, Schneiderlin and Lambert ended with Connolly feeding the ball into the path of the marauding Harding who drilled it into the net across the keeper first time, for a really good goal, a great strike and we were up and running.

Everyone appeared to have upped their game with the one exception of Antonio who had maintained his first half standards. He did once playa great ball up the line to where he should have been but as he wasn’t, it went straight out for a goal kick. Schneiderlin and Hammond were completely bossing the midfield though the formers new found aggressive streak nearly landed him in trouble when after earlier taking a yellow for the team with a quite deliberate trip, he then accidentally tripped again and was lucky that fatso wasn’t up with play.

Fatso couldn’t fail to get the next decision right when a James corner from the right was quite unnecessarily handled by a defender. It was the sort of handball that used to be committed by players who were later investigated for throwing matches. Penalty to Saints, Lambert, bang, 2-0 game over. Exit Schneiderlin before he could get sent off to be replaced by Wotton.

Five minutes later and it was party time as Saints were awarded a free kick about thirty yards out, just left of centre. Only one man was ever going to hit it and Lambo looked almost nonchalant as he bent it over the wall and into the top corner. Goal by Saints Number 7, Matt le Tissier… it was that good. The joint was rocking now and so was the Tranmere keeper who dropped a cross for no reason at all and got away with it purely because no one could believe the plonker had dropped it.

Connolly was replaced by Papa Waigo N’Doffside and Saints tried to keep the elusive clean sheet. If we couldn’t do it today then we never would as Tranmere, who were shit in the first half, were even more shit now. The game ran down, Mellis replaced Lambert who got a standing ovation and the N’Doffside count reached two before Fatty blew the whistle to end what was eventually a very comfortable win.

Overall, there were many plus points but we really won this with only about 4 players on decent form… Harding had his best game for a while and Schneiderlin, Hammond and Lambert all made a difference. It’s hard to judge Bart, Jaidi and Perry as Tranmere never attacked. James improved 2nd half but Lallana and Connolly had quiet matches which I guess they are permitted from time to time. Only Antonio was dreadful all match and I thought Wotton put in a decent shift when he came on, winning tackles and retaining possession.

Over the next few weeks we can’t afford any passengers with Norwich in the JPT southern Semi Final on Tuesday and Dirty Leeds away on Saturday. Win those two and we really will be looking healthy. As it is, we’ve moved up another place in the table and the world is a fine place. As for Tranmere… you may have noticed that I haven’t mentioned a single one of their players by name because I can’t be bothered to look it up as they were dreadful and added nothing to the game. Their supporters in the ground were Barry, Ian and Brian.