Today we are at home to Carlisle who will forever be associated with our JPT Trophy win from last year. This year, Carlisle have managed to make the final again and are back at Wembley where as we spectacularly did nothing of the sort. They started the season brightly but in the League at least, have fallen away. Top scorer Gary Madine has been sold but none of this took place before they beat us up at their place. We owe them one.
Don Nicola broke his silence on a couple of issues. The first was the transfer window frenzy regarding Alex Chamberlain where he basically blasted a number of Premiership clubs for the way they tried to do business – saying they only seemed to care from a business point of view and not from a human point of view – no face to face negotiation, just a fax. The quote of ‘we care about the boy’ stood out in the middle of a cesspit of people only caring about their own self-interests. What this said to me was that our Chairman is a man of his word. What he says, is indeed what he means and in turn, it is what will happen. He said Alex wouldn’t be sold and he wasn’t, he in fact said no one would leave and they haven’t (Forecast, Wotton and Pulis don’t count here). What’s not to like here? We have a Chairman who does exactly what he says he’ll do and he flies directly in the face of the ‘we’re a big club and we will do what we want’ attitude and fights his and our corner. It’s so refreshing to find someone not prepared to accept the norm. Compare and contrast with our previous incumbent who in the main just bent over and took it, selling everyone at the first opportunity.
The other and more contentious issue is Cortese versus The Legends of SFC. There seems to be this expectation in football that you get handed everything on a plate. For example – a footballer signs a four year contract and then, no matter how badly he plays, cannot have this contract terminated without it being paid up in full - unless he does a Bosnich and starts sampling Columbian marching powder or whatever. Compare and contrast to the real world where you sign a 6 month contract with an employer and if you’re shite or if they just fancy getting rid of you for their own reasons, you’re history at a months notice at best. If ‘real world’ rules applied to footballers, do you think Anthony Pulis and Tommy Forecast would still be picking up a wage at SFC? I don’t see why current and former players should get things on a plate but at the same time, there should be some recognition and gratitude shown. I feel that the Legends aren’t doing themselves or anyone else any favours by digging at the club in the gutter press (that’s the Daily Mail) but I also don’t think it would do the club any harm to give events organized by the legends, their official support and stamp of approval. At the moment it’s like schoolboys having a pissing contest and all that happens in pissing contests is that no one wins and everyone gets covered in piss.
The defensive shambles at Peterborough saw the Axe of Adkins wielded with the blade descending on the neck of Dan Seaborne with Radhi Jaidi being restored to the side. When the team was first announced on the big screens, I thought we were playing some revolutionary new formation as we only had one centre back as they’d read out Ryan Dickson instead of Jaidi and put his picture up on the screen. Despite being on the front of the program, Bart was still on the bench and Recently-Not-so-Superkelv was still in the team. The midfield saw Dany N’Guessan restored to the left wing in place of Lee Barnard. One major bonus was that Adam Lallana was on the bench. Carlisle’s manager has said that they have the player to deal with Chamberlain in Gary Borrowdale... we’ll see.
Today was the day I decided to take my 6 year old son to his first proper game as my Dad couldn’t go, so I replaced one messy eater who doesn’t know what’s going on and can’t go 45 minutes without a pee, with another. He came to the Swindon JPT nightmare earlier on in the season and the Ajax friendly (70 minutes – fell asleep) but this was his first league game. We had played Saints v Carlisle on the Wii before we left and the result was Saints 2 Carlisle 3... whoops. David Connolly is usually fit on the Wii, Dean Hammond has red hair and Paul Wotton can do stepovers and beat people for pace ... bizarre. We watched TV in the concourse and saw some Granny Shagger score with a fantastic overhead kick v Man City... hopefully someone will do that for us today.
The first major action of the day was Chamberlain getting his first run at Borrowdale and entirely expectedly, he pushed the ball past him and Borrowdale made no attempt to get the ball and just blocked him off quite blatantly. It was a challenge that wouldn’t have looked out of place in ice hockey and totally warranted a yellow card.
After good work from Sir Rickie, Harding found himself taking on the full back on the left and whipping over a decent cross which went straight back to Sir Rickie, whose volley almost worked as a 1-2 as it was so bad, rocketing off the pitch just in front of Harding by the left corner flag.
Carlisle have a centre back called Michalik who looks like he’s been built by Dr Frankenstein. He makes Jaidi look small and caused a slight bit of consternation in our box by getting his oversized head on a corner but Superkelv made a comfortable save.
In direct contrast to Richard Chaplow, Dean Hammond was having a decent game and he sparked the best move of the match with a strong run forward before feeding The Gulyman on the right. The Brazilian master pulled it back into the path of N’Guessan who from 10 yards, shanked it over the bar with his right foot swinger. Bad miss, groan.
Chappers, as I hinted at earlier, was having a shocker and he showed the one flaw in his game by basically piling into a player when he should have just shepherded him away. It was a bad foul in truth and I reckon he could have been off if the ref had seen it from the side I was. Yellow was all he got though but the ref was soon to give his other card a trip out of his pocket.
Chambo then had his second run at Borrowdale and knocked the ball too far. However, Borrowdale still thought it was a good idea to grab his arm and pull him over even though the ball was heading out for a goal kick. The lino flagged and Borrowdale spat his dummy out before taking out all his toys and throwing them on the ground. Whether it was for the foul or the tantrum, the ref wasn’t happy and produced a second yellow and off you go – well done, you repaid your managers confidence in you really well.
From the resulting Harding free kick, Fonte planted a header straight at the keeper but from the next attack, a Gulyman cross from the left was competed for and won by Chamberlain (probably the smallest played on the pitch) and his resulting cross was headed past Collin the keeper by Sir Rickie for 1-0 and baby cradling celebrations – congratulations to Sir Rickie and his missus. I was delighted that we’d seen a goal and even more so that my boy saw it and celebrated like a loon - the Dad’s amongst you will appreciate this. Carlisle immediately brought a sub on with Robson coming on at left back. I remember him from Wembley, diving about when he realised he couldn’t get past Dan Harding.
We had arrived at half time and I had not sworn as yet. Even the Chuckle Brothers behind me had not provoked me with their continual stream of drivel. We hadn’t played particularly well and seemed to have less energy than a very limited Carlisle side. As a rite of passage, I took my lad to the refreshment stand, got him a pint and a pie told him he now had 5 minutes to finish it before barging past people coming out through the ‘In’ door and having a pee as you’ll never last til the end. Not really... we actually dissected the goal we’d just scored and how we managed to lose to Carlisle on the Wii when they weren’t very good. We were 1-0 up at half time in that game as well.
There was a major surprise at the start of the second half as Lallana came on for Chappers – I presume to avoid the ‘referee evening things up’ scenario. We lined up with Sir Rickie up front, N’Guessan wide left, Chambo wide right with Lallana and the Gulyman pushing on from midfield. It looked like a line up that would bury Carlisle but it didn’t quite work out that way as we reverted to hoofball and persisted despite getting nowhere with it as we only had one forward. Occasionally, football broke out on the pitch, again instigated by Hammond who fed a pass into the Gulyman, who stepped over it to give Sir Rickie some space to fire in a shot that was deflected straight to Collin.
The disjointed rubbish continued for much of the second half with there being far too much of a gap between Sir Rickie and the rest. Though in theory it looked an attacking line-up, N’Guessan was struggling to get past the full back and Guly and Lallana seemed reluctant to break forward. Carlisle for their part, continued the game plan they had when they had 11, which was to bang it forward for Jaidi to head away. The other part of Carlisle’s game plan was to kick lumps out of anyone who came near but the ref decided to referee the second half differently to how he reffed the first when he booked just about every tackle. He had to book a few though as some of the tackles were ridiculous. After one misplaced pass I uttered the word ‘crap’, which was seized upon and repeated the next time the same player repeated the mistake. He’s crap isn’t he Dad….. Ahem!
We had one more chance as Chamberlain played a neat 1-2 with Lallana and saw a decent shot well saved by Collin, diving to his left. Carlisle managed a header from Dr Frankenstein’s creation which brought a ‘one for the cameras’ save from Davis but as far as goalmouth chances goes – that was about it. Robson did his diving thing in the last 5 minutes when he was shot by an imaginary sniper from on top of the Gas holders. Mind you, Fonte did the same when he was given a hospital pass by Davis.
To summarise.... that was rubbish but we won. It was a really poor second half but you can’t demolish teams every week. In truth, the win was very comfortable as Carlisle never looked like scoring and only had two efforts on goal, both headers from their beast of a centre back which both resulted in comfortable saves for Davis. You have to laugh when a Carlisle ‘highlight’ on the telly, was a winger beating a man and the ball going out for a goal kick before he pulled it back to a Saints defender. On the other side of the coin, we scored our goal in the immediate aftermath of them going down to 10 men and before they’d made a sub to sort things out. I thought Dean Hammond was our best player today with Sir Rickie, Chambo and Jaidi being the pick of the rest. Chaplow had a shocker and he was joined in that by N’Guessan who had a ‘winger on an off day’ game. It can happen and it’ll happen again.
A lot has been made about the booing of N’Guessan in the same way that Puncheon got stick earlier in the season. The similarities are that if you waft an easy chance over the bar then the crowd are going to groan because there is the immediate emotion of disappointment involved. Personally, I think you wouldn’t be human if you didn’t groan at an easy looking chance being missed. Ironic cheering when a player gets substituted is something else though as it’s nothing short of moronic as it’s pre-meditated. Get a grip... he wears our shirt so support him. We’ve seen what he can do already in the Exeter game and like I said, there were a few out there having poor games today.
Nigel wasn’t happy with the performance and was downbeat afterwards with no talk of buses. I had a bus of my own to worry about and would I be able to get one to transport my son across the Itchen Bridge... no, we had to walk, well I did anyway... carrying a 6 year old who got progressively heavier as we went. He enjoyed the game, probably more than I did and he wittered on about Lambert, Jose Fonte and do Prado all the way home. Though the second half was boring, he enjoyed all the yellow cards being handed out.
“Lambert’s goal was better than Rooney’s wasn’t it Dad?”
“Why do you think that?”
“Because Lambert’s goal was real and Rooney’s was on the TV”.
Quality.
Don Nicola broke his silence on a couple of issues. The first was the transfer window frenzy regarding Alex Chamberlain where he basically blasted a number of Premiership clubs for the way they tried to do business – saying they only seemed to care from a business point of view and not from a human point of view – no face to face negotiation, just a fax. The quote of ‘we care about the boy’ stood out in the middle of a cesspit of people only caring about their own self-interests. What this said to me was that our Chairman is a man of his word. What he says, is indeed what he means and in turn, it is what will happen. He said Alex wouldn’t be sold and he wasn’t, he in fact said no one would leave and they haven’t (Forecast, Wotton and Pulis don’t count here). What’s not to like here? We have a Chairman who does exactly what he says he’ll do and he flies directly in the face of the ‘we’re a big club and we will do what we want’ attitude and fights his and our corner. It’s so refreshing to find someone not prepared to accept the norm. Compare and contrast with our previous incumbent who in the main just bent over and took it, selling everyone at the first opportunity.
The other and more contentious issue is Cortese versus The Legends of SFC. There seems to be this expectation in football that you get handed everything on a plate. For example – a footballer signs a four year contract and then, no matter how badly he plays, cannot have this contract terminated without it being paid up in full - unless he does a Bosnich and starts sampling Columbian marching powder or whatever. Compare and contrast to the real world where you sign a 6 month contract with an employer and if you’re shite or if they just fancy getting rid of you for their own reasons, you’re history at a months notice at best. If ‘real world’ rules applied to footballers, do you think Anthony Pulis and Tommy Forecast would still be picking up a wage at SFC? I don’t see why current and former players should get things on a plate but at the same time, there should be some recognition and gratitude shown. I feel that the Legends aren’t doing themselves or anyone else any favours by digging at the club in the gutter press (that’s the Daily Mail) but I also don’t think it would do the club any harm to give events organized by the legends, their official support and stamp of approval. At the moment it’s like schoolboys having a pissing contest and all that happens in pissing contests is that no one wins and everyone gets covered in piss.
The defensive shambles at Peterborough saw the Axe of Adkins wielded with the blade descending on the neck of Dan Seaborne with Radhi Jaidi being restored to the side. When the team was first announced on the big screens, I thought we were playing some revolutionary new formation as we only had one centre back as they’d read out Ryan Dickson instead of Jaidi and put his picture up on the screen. Despite being on the front of the program, Bart was still on the bench and Recently-Not-so-Superkelv was still in the team. The midfield saw Dany N’Guessan restored to the left wing in place of Lee Barnard. One major bonus was that Adam Lallana was on the bench. Carlisle’s manager has said that they have the player to deal with Chamberlain in Gary Borrowdale... we’ll see.
Today was the day I decided to take my 6 year old son to his first proper game as my Dad couldn’t go, so I replaced one messy eater who doesn’t know what’s going on and can’t go 45 minutes without a pee, with another. He came to the Swindon JPT nightmare earlier on in the season and the Ajax friendly (70 minutes – fell asleep) but this was his first league game. We had played Saints v Carlisle on the Wii before we left and the result was Saints 2 Carlisle 3... whoops. David Connolly is usually fit on the Wii, Dean Hammond has red hair and Paul Wotton can do stepovers and beat people for pace ... bizarre. We watched TV in the concourse and saw some Granny Shagger score with a fantastic overhead kick v Man City... hopefully someone will do that for us today.
The first major action of the day was Chamberlain getting his first run at Borrowdale and entirely expectedly, he pushed the ball past him and Borrowdale made no attempt to get the ball and just blocked him off quite blatantly. It was a challenge that wouldn’t have looked out of place in ice hockey and totally warranted a yellow card.
After good work from Sir Rickie, Harding found himself taking on the full back on the left and whipping over a decent cross which went straight back to Sir Rickie, whose volley almost worked as a 1-2 as it was so bad, rocketing off the pitch just in front of Harding by the left corner flag.
Carlisle have a centre back called Michalik who looks like he’s been built by Dr Frankenstein. He makes Jaidi look small and caused a slight bit of consternation in our box by getting his oversized head on a corner but Superkelv made a comfortable save.
In direct contrast to Richard Chaplow, Dean Hammond was having a decent game and he sparked the best move of the match with a strong run forward before feeding The Gulyman on the right. The Brazilian master pulled it back into the path of N’Guessan who from 10 yards, shanked it over the bar with his right foot swinger. Bad miss, groan.
Chappers, as I hinted at earlier, was having a shocker and he showed the one flaw in his game by basically piling into a player when he should have just shepherded him away. It was a bad foul in truth and I reckon he could have been off if the ref had seen it from the side I was. Yellow was all he got though but the ref was soon to give his other card a trip out of his pocket.
Chambo then had his second run at Borrowdale and knocked the ball too far. However, Borrowdale still thought it was a good idea to grab his arm and pull him over even though the ball was heading out for a goal kick. The lino flagged and Borrowdale spat his dummy out before taking out all his toys and throwing them on the ground. Whether it was for the foul or the tantrum, the ref wasn’t happy and produced a second yellow and off you go – well done, you repaid your managers confidence in you really well.
From the resulting Harding free kick, Fonte planted a header straight at the keeper but from the next attack, a Gulyman cross from the left was competed for and won by Chamberlain (probably the smallest played on the pitch) and his resulting cross was headed past Collin the keeper by Sir Rickie for 1-0 and baby cradling celebrations – congratulations to Sir Rickie and his missus. I was delighted that we’d seen a goal and even more so that my boy saw it and celebrated like a loon - the Dad’s amongst you will appreciate this. Carlisle immediately brought a sub on with Robson coming on at left back. I remember him from Wembley, diving about when he realised he couldn’t get past Dan Harding.
We had arrived at half time and I had not sworn as yet. Even the Chuckle Brothers behind me had not provoked me with their continual stream of drivel. We hadn’t played particularly well and seemed to have less energy than a very limited Carlisle side. As a rite of passage, I took my lad to the refreshment stand, got him a pint and a pie told him he now had 5 minutes to finish it before barging past people coming out through the ‘In’ door and having a pee as you’ll never last til the end. Not really... we actually dissected the goal we’d just scored and how we managed to lose to Carlisle on the Wii when they weren’t very good. We were 1-0 up at half time in that game as well.
There was a major surprise at the start of the second half as Lallana came on for Chappers – I presume to avoid the ‘referee evening things up’ scenario. We lined up with Sir Rickie up front, N’Guessan wide left, Chambo wide right with Lallana and the Gulyman pushing on from midfield. It looked like a line up that would bury Carlisle but it didn’t quite work out that way as we reverted to hoofball and persisted despite getting nowhere with it as we only had one forward. Occasionally, football broke out on the pitch, again instigated by Hammond who fed a pass into the Gulyman, who stepped over it to give Sir Rickie some space to fire in a shot that was deflected straight to Collin.
The disjointed rubbish continued for much of the second half with there being far too much of a gap between Sir Rickie and the rest. Though in theory it looked an attacking line-up, N’Guessan was struggling to get past the full back and Guly and Lallana seemed reluctant to break forward. Carlisle for their part, continued the game plan they had when they had 11, which was to bang it forward for Jaidi to head away. The other part of Carlisle’s game plan was to kick lumps out of anyone who came near but the ref decided to referee the second half differently to how he reffed the first when he booked just about every tackle. He had to book a few though as some of the tackles were ridiculous. After one misplaced pass I uttered the word ‘crap’, which was seized upon and repeated the next time the same player repeated the mistake. He’s crap isn’t he Dad….. Ahem!
We had one more chance as Chamberlain played a neat 1-2 with Lallana and saw a decent shot well saved by Collin, diving to his left. Carlisle managed a header from Dr Frankenstein’s creation which brought a ‘one for the cameras’ save from Davis but as far as goalmouth chances goes – that was about it. Robson did his diving thing in the last 5 minutes when he was shot by an imaginary sniper from on top of the Gas holders. Mind you, Fonte did the same when he was given a hospital pass by Davis.
To summarise.... that was rubbish but we won. It was a really poor second half but you can’t demolish teams every week. In truth, the win was very comfortable as Carlisle never looked like scoring and only had two efforts on goal, both headers from their beast of a centre back which both resulted in comfortable saves for Davis. You have to laugh when a Carlisle ‘highlight’ on the telly, was a winger beating a man and the ball going out for a goal kick before he pulled it back to a Saints defender. On the other side of the coin, we scored our goal in the immediate aftermath of them going down to 10 men and before they’d made a sub to sort things out. I thought Dean Hammond was our best player today with Sir Rickie, Chambo and Jaidi being the pick of the rest. Chaplow had a shocker and he was joined in that by N’Guessan who had a ‘winger on an off day’ game. It can happen and it’ll happen again.
A lot has been made about the booing of N’Guessan in the same way that Puncheon got stick earlier in the season. The similarities are that if you waft an easy chance over the bar then the crowd are going to groan because there is the immediate emotion of disappointment involved. Personally, I think you wouldn’t be human if you didn’t groan at an easy looking chance being missed. Ironic cheering when a player gets substituted is something else though as it’s nothing short of moronic as it’s pre-meditated. Get a grip... he wears our shirt so support him. We’ve seen what he can do already in the Exeter game and like I said, there were a few out there having poor games today.
Nigel wasn’t happy with the performance and was downbeat afterwards with no talk of buses. I had a bus of my own to worry about and would I be able to get one to transport my son across the Itchen Bridge... no, we had to walk, well I did anyway... carrying a 6 year old who got progressively heavier as we went. He enjoyed the game, probably more than I did and he wittered on about Lambert, Jose Fonte and do Prado all the way home. Though the second half was boring, he enjoyed all the yellow cards being handed out.
“Lambert’s goal was better than Rooney’s wasn’t it Dad?”
“Why do you think that?”
“Because Lambert’s goal was real and Rooney’s was on the TV”.
Quality.
This is nothing short of magic :-D
ReplyDeleteThe difference between your dad taking you to your first Saints game and this game is that somewhere in the belly of the internet your son might find and read this in 20+ years and have a laugh ;-D
My first game was Pompey v Saints at Fratton in 1976... scarred for life.
ReplyDelete