FA Youth Cup 3rd Round - Southampton U18s 7 Portsmouth U18s 0

I Know! Same Picture Every Time..

The Skates were in town for the FA Youth Cup 3^rd Round game.  The draw was made a while ago and n order to get to play us, they had to beat Barton Rovers and I have no idea where that even is.  Anyway, they duly scraped through 1-0 and so are here under the lights at SMS, in front of a crowd of nearly 4000.

The Twitterskates seem to think that they’re going to win but they surely can’t be favourites as we play in the Premier Youth League against decent sides and they’re in a vastly inferior league.  There’s also the fact that we have a much vaunted Grade A Academy and the last I heard, they were debating whether to even have one at all given their financial turmoil.  Pompey’s first team has been in freefall recently which has seen them hover above the trapdoor into non-League football and lead to the sacking of Guy Whittingham who fell firmly into the ‘nice bloke, shite manager ‘ category.  Their new manager is Ritchie Barker who is present tonight. 

In other fishy news, one of their current players posted a picture of himself with Adam Lallana and got endless bile and vitriol spat at him by some Pompey fans.  To be fair, it was a rather stupid thing to post, a picture of you acting like a fanboy with your biggest rivals captain.   So that was a player from today not being particularly bright and then the news that a player they had last season has just been arrested for match fixing which though amusing, is not really Pompey’s fault.  It appears Sam Sodje’s crime was to arrange a bet on himself being sent off and then deliberately and bizarrely punch an opposition player in the bollcks and then do it again to make sure he got sent off.  I was at the infamous game at Coventry in 1994 when Bruce Grobbelaar let in a very suspect goal in the first minute before we screwed up his plan with keeping possession for the remaining 89 minutes and winning 3-1 with Ronnie Ekelund to the fore.  I will never be convinced that Bruce was innocent so Saints fans of older than a certain age have been there.

Tonight, the game starts in fairly even fashion with a Pompey full back having a half chance but it swings towards Saints as the game settles down and we go 1-0 up in the 27^th as Gallagher rolls around Whatmough too easily and squares for Hesketh to arrive and finish well.  With half time approaching it’s 2-0 as chaos following a corner is resolved with Mason scoring from close in.  Mason is of course the player who made headlines when he signed for Real Madrid when he was about 6.  I have no problem accepting Real Madrid cast-offs.

As the second half starts to becomes obvious that this is going to be a slaughter as the Pompey lads seem to have shrunk in stature as Saints stepped it up.  Saints get a free kick on the right hand side of the box and no Pompey player reacts as it’s rolled to Targett who has a free shot.  Pompey keeper Bass (no fish jokes please) does well to save but with the Pompey defenders playing statues, Big Sam Gallagher slots home for 3-0.  It’s 4-0 soon after as Hesketh pulls a trick out of the Gazza’96 book and flips the ball over a defender with a shock of blonde hair and scores easily.  

A Leggett chip to the back post and a Sir Rickie-esque header back across from Big Sam makes it 5-0 before he completes a hat-trick with a goal i can;t quite work out as Targett’s ball kind of hits him on the knee and bobbles past Bass in apologetic fashion via a post.  I actually feel a bit sorry for the keeper as he’s done his best and has been their best player by a mile but he’s had no help from those in front of him.  It’s also nice to have a new ‘Big Sam’ to talk about as opposed to ‘Fat Sam’ from the West Ham Total Hoofball no Striker Academy of Football.

Whilst I take no pleasure in a bunch of kids getting mullered, I do take great amusement from the spectacle of Pompey fans leaving early.  There’s less than 4000 in here mate so no need to beat the traffic.  By leaving early they probably missed the last goal as substitute Mark Irvine ran through to fire past a totally unprotected Bass to make it 7-0. 

So the Saints go marching on in the FA Youth Cup and this could be there year where we underline the status of our Academy by doing well in it.  This competition is a straight knockout competition so there’s always the possibility of getting a really difficult draw or just putting in one substandard performance and then you’re gone.  The test of how good these kids are is solely how many of them make it to the first team squad in the future.  At a time when there’s a lot of publicity for the Man United Class of 92, maybe in 20 years time we’ll be seeing a line-up of Gallagher, Hesketh, Sims, Mason, Debayo and Targett or any other combination of todays line-up in a Class of 2013 film.

The facts are that when we came into some money with Markus and Nicola taking over, we spent it on infrastructure and on the Academy.  When Pompey were in the money, they spunked it all up the wall on players they couldn’t afford as has been well documented elsewhere and whoever the owner was didn’t give a single thought to the future.   I use the term ‘owner’ to apply to all of them - Mad Mandy, The Arms Dealer and his son, The Invisible Arab, The Fat Ice Cream Seller Bloke and the Loan Shark.  The investment in our Academy is bearing fruit now with Premier League standard players coming through the system to supplement (in the main) wise expenditure on experienced players.  Tonight, based on the eligibility rule of 18 or under on 31 August 2013, I think we could also have played Luke Shaw, Harrison Reed, James Ward-Prowse and Calum Chambers if we’d wanted to, not to mention Omar Rowe, Jordan Turnbull, Jason McCarthy, Sam McQueen, Jake Sinclair and Ryan Seager.  Just imagine... the one player with any first team experience who did play was Sam Gallagher and look what he did.   At the other end of the scale, Pompey (I think) had one of their players from this game who has played a couple of games in League 2 whilst many of the others look like park players like I myself was when I played for Havant Schools against a Benali and Wallace brothers inspired Saints Academy in the mid-80s.  Yes, we got annihilated as well.

Obviously natural ability plays a large part but if you had two players of the same natural ability and one went to Saints and the other to Pompey – who do you reckon would turn out best?  If I was one of the parents watching their son play in blue last night, even if (god forbid) I was a Pompey fan, I’d find it hard to not wish my son was playing in red.  This is nothing new of course as 12 years ago, Mark Chamberlain who was a Pompey player and worked for Pompey at the time, sent his own son to play for Saints.  It’s a sad state of affairs down the wrong end of the M27 and one they really have to address with some longer term planning and financial commitment.  It sure isn’t going to be easy but in any walk of life, you have to get the foundations right otherwise sooner or later, it’s all going to come crashing down irreparably.  If you have strong foundations then you can build again and the foundations are the youngsters in the Academy, unless you of course are Chelsea or Manchester City when the foundations are the size of the owners’ wallets.

I’ve seen a few articles praising Rupert Lowe for turning round the Saints Academy which is only fair as he did recognize that it needed to pick up again after not producing a great deal for a decade or so.  However, that praise should come with the caveat that Lowe’s stated aim was to produce players to sell on, as he cared more of the financial bottom line rather than what was going on on the pitch.  Now, in the Liebherr-Cortese era, the aim is markedly different as it’s to produce players to play for our first team, not some other clubs’ first team.

Saints fans should do some crowing about this result – not particularly because it was 7-0 but because it shows how well we have done through the long term planning and investment and it should make us smile at the gulf between the rivals and wallow in a bit of smugness with the comparison between how to do it and how not to do it.  The Pompey kids will have been gutted to have been dicked 7-0 but hopefully for them, it will be character building and good for their longer term development and some of them can turn into decent players for them in the future.  You have to remember that these are kids, even if they wear a blue shirt.

I did however smile at some of the comments from the Twitterskates afterwards which were along the lines of “it was only a youth team game” and “when was the last time you beat us?” and “it’s Premier against League 2”.  Well, the last Pompey win against us was that very dodgy FA Cup game when they were in the Premier League (and were in administration) and we were in League 1.  Before that, their last win against us was in the 2004/5 season, the same season we last beat them and we beat them twice that season.  I swear some of them still think David Norris scored the winner a couple of years back and the ‘you haven’t beaten us for years’ contingent will in the next breath, talk of winning the league in 1939.  Do you think they’d have been crowing much if they’d won 1-0 last night, let alone 7-0?  Of course they would.  My personal favourite though was one missive which read something like  “the lads may have lost 7-0 last night but they’ll wake up this morning and not be Scummers and they’ll be glad”.  Erm... no they won’t – they should wake up and aspire to be of the standard of some of the Saints boys and hope that Jason Dodd or Paul Williams or even Mauricio Pochettino saw something in them that might make Saints make an enquiry.