Premier League Match 1 - Manchester City 3 Southampton 2

Inspired by Lawro

Finally, it is here.  It seems so long ago that I was sat in SMS watching Roy Keane using his fingers to unnecessarily count down the last 12 seconds of our life in the Premier League as our manager ‘Arry Redknapp twitched away on the sidelines, outwardly looking concerned but inside as we know, not giving a shit.  Seven years later and we’re back now in the Premier League and ‘Arry is currently looking for a job and failed manager Roy Keane keeps himself in the game by having to sit next to Adrian Chiles on ITV while everyone watches BBC.  Who the fuck is laughing now?  Talking of which, a good start to the weekend was seeing Lee Barnard scoring for Bournemouth at Fratton Park about 4 hours after we’d loaned him to them – he was happy, Bournemouth were happy but still chanted “if you all hate Scummers, clap yer hands”.  Bring him back and loan him to someone else the ungrateful bastards.

The Premier League is starting today (for us) and the excitement affects people in strange ways.  For me, I had a momentary lapse of morals as we were live on Sky Sports 1 and decided at about 1.30pm that I’d get Sky Sports for a month so I logged on to Sky.com and it told me that I could get Sky Sports 1 for £13 – that’ll do… Computer says NO!!!… you are not the primary account holder.  Interesting that…as I’m the only account holder so I got on the phone and I’m talking to a bloke from Northern Ireland who tells me over three conversations punctuated by hold music that they spelt my name wrong as the primary account and they’d spelt my name correctly on a secondary account and linked them.  This took half an hour and I needed to be transferred to another department (evidently on the sub-continent somewhere) to sort it out…. more hold music, more explanation… it’s done now Sir.  No it isn’t…it still doesn’t fucking work so I’m back on the phone and this time I’m in China and following the instructions again, entering my mis-spelled name and my correctly spelled name – nothing.  “I can add the Channel from here Sir but you have to have all the Sports Channels and there’s no on-line discount and will take two hours”… let me think, that’s 15 minutes after kick off at double the cost, assuming you’re true to your word from China.  Fck off.  So I tried – I had a moment of weakness and tried to buy Sky Sports but fuck ‘em, there are other ways to watch a match when you can’t go, as we all know.

I remember writing some of these reports in League 1 where I tried to write a bit about the team we were playing and I had no idea about the opposition.  “They’ve got a big bastard up front and they smash it at him from everywhere”.  Looking at the Man City team makes me wish I knew nothing about them.  My 8 year old could tell me all about the City players as there are World Cup winners and £20 million pound players wherever you look.  All the big guns are playing and Mancini has pulled a bit of a masterstroke in not picking Milner which would have at least guaranteed us some possession.  So, what does Nigel do to counteract City picking all their best players... he leaves out Sir Rickie...what the actual fuck is he on?  Sir Rickie on the fucking bench, J-Rod on the wing, Guly at centre forward, James Ward-Prowse starting, Hammond and Chaplow nowhere to be seen… wow... and Adam Lallana is skipper.  I’m hopeful rather than expectant as the game starts and my last thought it that we have to avoid getting beaten by five to not be bottom of the league following Norwich’s first step towards relegation which came yesterday in the shape of a 5-0 defeat at Fulham.

Our (on the face of it) horrifying team selection is forgotten as we start well, making some promising inroads with the Fox and J-Rod combination down the left giving Zabaleta a few problems.  It’s looking relatively comfortable until Aguero’s break down the left is halted by some excellent pace and a great tackle by Clyne which ends with Aguero not getting up. The break in play for Aguero’s eventual replacement with Dzeko sees City wake up and start to dominate possession.

We still have our moments though and in one of these, J-Rod is wiped out by Lescott.  It’s inside the box and anywhere else on the pitch then it’s a foul as he’s gone launching in and not got the ball but Howard Webb decides it is elsewhere on the pitch and it’s not a foul anyway.  Five minutes later and I’m howling as Tevez turns Jos in the edge of the box and goes down like a sack of shit that refuses to go on as a substitute and Webb points to the spot without a second thought.  To be fair he got that one right as it was definitely inside the box and definitely a foul, much like the one up the other end.  David Silva is on the penalty and he’s not gonna bloody miss is he?  Haaaaaaaaaa! What a load of shit as he scuffs it down the middle allowing Superkelv to fall on it and keep it out.

The rest of the first half is all City and sees us defending progressively deeper and deeper but we’re doing ok and trying to pass it when we can with Ward-Prowse and Lallana showing up well in midfield.  On 35 minutes our luck runs out as Nasri reminds everyone that he’s not just an odious little shit but a good player as well and he pops a lovely ball through to Tevez who looks offside but he cares not as he advances and beats Not-so-Superkelv very easily at his near post.  Replays are inconclusive, only proving that the lino was in the wrong place – it looked offside to me and like the J-Rod incident up the other end, it could have gone for us but neither of the decisions did.  This is City Mr Webb, not United... have you been transferred?

It’s now a case of holding out til half time which we manage but you do wonder how on earth we’re going to get back into it.  Guly has run around with no service reaching him while Punch has worked hard defensively and provided nothing up front whilst J-Rod has not given Fox much help and has looked as much like a left winger as Margaret Thatcher.

It’s all City start of second half again being aided and abetted by Howard Webb who is only refereeing against one team at the moment and Yaya has his cloak of invisibility on every time he fouls someone.  City create two massive chances as first Nasri wriggles away from Clyne and Punch and squares to where Dzeko shows what an average footballer he is in showing no anticipation and just spooning the ball up for Superkelv to grab.  Then Yaya picks out Clichy with a superb cross only for the full back to half volley it at the moon when he really should have scored.

A third great City chance comes and goes as they tear us apart down our left before a Tevez crosses and Superkelv flaps it out to Nasri who cushions it back to World Cup Winner Silva who continues his general shocker by hitting the bar from six yards.  Nigel decides not to wait for the inevitable and Sir Rickie comes on for J-Rod with Guly going wide left.  With the big man on the pitch we immediately look like a completely different side and the ball is now sticking and we’re having a bit of possession and looking more confident and begin making inroads into the City half for the first time since the Aguero injury.

And so it came to pass that Sir Rickie started the move and plays in Lallana whose scuffed cross breaks to JWP who gives it back to Sir Rickie.  His attempted 1-2 with Guly bounces back to him off of Lescott and he sidefoots it first time past Hart and into the corner and we all go absolutely mental.  The celebrations are brilliant as Foxy attempts the high jump record and falls off the top of the pile of bodies and over the advertising boards which earned him a booking for ‘jumping too high’ as it will no doubt say in Webb’s report – he didn’t do it on purpose so to my mind, that booking is absolutely ridiculous.

A substitution apiece as both teams bring on internationals with City bringing on Nutbagotelli for Silva and us bringing on Steven Davis for JWP who takes the deserved plaudits as he goes off for some warm milk and a sleep as it’s nearly his bed time.  Another dangerous cross from the right it put behind by Clyne and then something incredible happens.  The corner is headed away by Fonte and out to City new boy Jack Rodwell who plays a shite pass out to wing straight to Lallana and we’re off, breaking at a pace that I can’t remember ever seeing from a Saints team and suddenly we’re five on three with Lallana swapping passes with Davis before the latter passes the ball into the far corner of Hart’s net to give us the lead.  It’s quite insane at this point.  We’re 2-1 up away from home at the Champions and our two subs have both scored within 5 minutes of coming on.  Foxy manages not to jump too high this time and a fucking great cat has just been thrown amongst the pigeons.  Stop the season now please Mr Webb and Nigel, bring on another sub.

It’s now very open but almost exclusively City and sadly it doesn’t take long for them to equalize.  Fonte heads out a corner to the edge of the box but it falls to Yaya Toure in acres of space.  He scuffs his effort but it pings around before falling to Dzeko and even he can’t miss from there and he sweeps it into the net for 2-2.  Back we come and Punch nearly gets himself free in the box and eventually tees up Lallana whose shot is blocked out to Yaya who sells Morgan an outrageous dummy before setting off up the pitch and feeding Tevez whose cross is on a plate for Balotelli who uses his right when he should have used his left and sidefoots the sitter wide.

There are 10 minutes to go when it goes wrong again as Clichy fires in a cross from the left which Foxy fails to deal with and manages to head it back into the middle of the penalty area for that horrible little shit Nasri to smash into the net and pull the now tedious t-shirt slogan celebration..  We have our moments in the last ten with Sir Rickie heading down a Punch cross for Fonte to hoof over the bar but despite Billy Sharp coming on for Punch for the last 5, though we have decent possession we can’t fashion another chance and so, despite an excellent performance, at the end of it all, we bloody lost.

So where do we start with that one.  Well, it was good that we didn’t get drubbed.  The positives were that it was a decent performance, an exciting performance and it shows that we’re not as far away from being decent in this league as we might have expected.  Sir Rickie scoring is a massive thing and the confidence it will give him is immeasurable.  As soon as he got his two goals against Ipswich in the 3^rd game in the Championship, it became obvious he was good enough for that level and the 25 further goals he got proved that.  Defensively, Nathaniel Clyne looked good but the biggest plus was how well Jose Fonte played when many expected him to be a weak link – I think the level of the opposition forced him to concentrate on defending.  However, all three goals had elements of iffy defending in them that could be improved.  In my opinion, Superkelv should have done better on the first goal, we were all too deep for the second goal allowing the ball to come straight back in after we’d cleared a corner and Foxy’s assist for Nasri was a shocker brought on by the pressure we were under.  As an aside, anyone remember the Cup match we won on penalties at Old Trafford years ago?  Jeff Kenna put a very similar header across our own goal to allow United to equalize in that game.

James Ward-Prowse and Lallana had decent matches and Morgan was OK but he has to ‘man up’ a bit.  The ease at which Yaya brushed him off at times was laughable.  Luckily, no other midfielders in the league are as imposing as him.  On the wings we need to get it sorted but we all knew that and hopefully by the time the Wigan match comes round, we have one or both of the linked targets, Gaston Ramirez and Matt Phillips and Ian Holloway is doing his nut in a straight jacket somewhere.

JWP’s appearance on live TV prompted another laughable Twitter spike in Pompey fans trying to claim some sort of credit as he’s from Portsmouth.  He can’t help where he was born and he also can’t help who his Dad supports – the things he could influence have led him to be playing for Saints so jog on...

Nigel was of course asked why Sir Rickie didn’t start and his response was fascinating in that he didn’t want him getting tired chasing the ball up on his own and thought he’d have better impact as a sub.  I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt on that one but let’s not forget, we could easily have been 4-0 down by the time he came on in the 60^th minute.  Also, the 11 on the pitch at the start must have been wondering how we were going to score without the main man on the pitch.  Next up is Wigan at home and Nigel has to get his selection spot on for that game – 2 up front or 1, J-Rod on the wing or a new signing.  We have optimism, this was a decent performance and Mark Lawrenson likened our attack for the second goal as being like the Red Arrows.  He’s a tit but that was a good line.

I think that having got into the position we were in at 2-1 up, with a bit more belief we could have made a better fist of the last 20 minutes.  We had it for the first 10 minutes and we had it as soon as Sir Rickie came on.  Bizarrely, we also had it at 3-2 down but the key period was when we were in front and City (as Champions do) just took over as we seemed to collectively not believe we were in front.  Mind you, every Saints fan thought that as well.  It is strange feeling so positive after a defeat.

Southampton are Back.