Wednesday, May 13, 2015

Premier League Match 36 - Leicester 2 Southampton 0


Groundhog Day... all over the place

The threat of relegation can do strange things to a team.  In Leicester City’s case it’s made them win matches and insult journalists on a regular basis.  Both should be applauded really.  Ex-Saints manager Nigel Pearson has masterminded both the wins and the insults and he’ll be celebrating another win unless Saints can play a hell of a lot better than they have in the last few away games.  Are you as ostrich?

We didn’t appeal the red card given to JWP last weekend which seems odd to me as it was almost universally thought that it wasn’t even a foul, let alone a red card.  In a season where we’ve been involved in the West Ham goalkeeper Adrian getting a clear red card overturned and Chelsea’s Nemanja Matic getting a game knocked off for allowable retaliation, maybe we think the system so random that JWP could have had his ban increased to 6 months for a frivolous appeal on the grounds that we are not based in London.

“In goal, Paolo Gazzaniga” – what?.  My first reaction was one of complete horror as memories of all his previous appearances for the first team came back to haunt me.  Oddly enough though, last week I was thinking that it maybe was time to give Gazza another go.  Superkelv is obviously, being 54, coming to the end of his career and he’s not exactly adding much to the performances of late so why not.  Gazza has been playing regularly for the Under-21s so he’ll have a bit of confidence so why not?

Elsewhere, the team is more or less exactly how I wanted it to be.  Harrison Reed starts in midfield alongside Big Vic and Toby Alderweireld is back in defence where he belongs alongside José Fonte.  Shane Long is benched (his best position) and Eljero Elia is in to try and give a compelling argument for us taking him on in the summer.  Another with the same problem is Filip Djuricic who is on the bench.

A feature of Leicester in the past few weeks has been the blistering starts and we seemed to be coping ok, having most of the ball in the first five minutes.  From Leicester’s first attack however, Toby is forced to give away a corner and the ball into the box is met by Huth but it flies over.  Leicester only need one more sight of our goal to take the lead in depressing manner.  A throw in goes to Mahrez who seems to mis-control it and gives Steve Davis a 70-30 advantage in the tackle.  Instead of clearing everything out, Davis tries to dink the ball over Mahrez foot and loses it.  Harry Reed has lost him as well and he strolls between them and pings a shot between José Fonte’s legs and past Gazza and into the corner.  From a defensive point of view, this is a nightmare goal.

Ten minutes of nothing go by with Saints having a lot of possession and doing precisely nothing with it.  Leicester attack again by Fonte wins the ball and knocks it back to Gazza to clear. He shanks it about 10 yards and loops it up in the air and the ball breaks to Vardy.  We’re in panic mode and all over the place at the back.  Toby and José both close the ball down and Vardy’s cross finds Mahrez all alone and 6 yards out. 2-0, 19 minutes gone.  Utter, utter wank.  This one is 95% down to Gazzaniga and it’s taken all of 19 minutes to prove what we’ve known all along – he isn’t good enough.  I know anyone can shank a kick (Superkelv did it a week or so ago and José bailed him out) but it always seems somehow inevitable when the Argentine is between the sticks.  He does however have nice hair which sadly doesn’t make up for the fact that he isn’t very good.

There’s a long injury break as James knackers himself as Bertrand goes past him with the disappointing thing from out point of view being that Bertrand’s excellent run and pull back came to nothing.  Eventually, James is replaced with Drinkwater.  We are not taking advantage of any disruption there might have been for Leicester and we have long periods in front of Leicester and get precisely nowhere.  Mané heads over the bar after a Clyne cross is half cleared, and then headed back across by Steve Davis. The next decent chance again falls to Leicester as Mahrez puts Vardy clean through but he lived up to his billing of not being a particularly good finisher and Gazza came out and blocked as Vardy half hit the shot.

Right on half time we get a free kick 30 yards out when Big Vic is fouled and Toby Alderweireld smashes it on target but Schmeichel comfortably tips it over.  Half time and what a load of shit.  Leicester didn’t havw to work too hard for what will no doubt be a match winning lead and we’ve attacked with no purpose whatsoever.

After half time we come out with a bit more urgency but still don’t create much in the first 20 minutes.  Djuricic and Long are on for Davis and Elia and the on-loan Serbian sets up Mané with a decent bit of skill for Sadio to curl a nice effort goalwards but Schmeichel was again equal to it.  And that my friends was just about that.  The game was played out with Cambiasso nearly making it 3-0 but instead hitting the side netting.  Miraculously, David Tosser Nugent came on as a sub and didn’t score but there was a welcome Leicester sub as Dean Hammond came on for the last 15 minutes and took the time at the end to come over to the Saints fans.  That was probably the highlight of the day which kind of tells you something.

The opening line of this blog was about how the threat of relegation can do strange things to a team – so it seems does the prospect of playing in the Europa League.  Today is the first game where you could look at various players at various points and wonder if they really want it for the club or are they just looking out for themselves.  The Manager (unlike Pochettino at Spurs) obviously really wants it and I felt sorry for Ronald Koeman today.  Most fans were calling for Toby Alderweireld to move back to defence and for Harry Reed to be given a start and that’s what we got but it made no difference to the performance.

Most people were not calling for Gazzaniga in goal however and it has to be said that he threw in his usual performance including having a major hand in throwing away a goal.  He’s simply not good enough.  He’s League 1 standard and Superkelv in Championship standard and we’ve known this for three years.  With both him and Superkelv I always have 90 minutes of just hoping they get through the game without making a complete bollocks of something.  I’ve said this before but you have to wonder how bad Cody Cropper is if he can’t get ahead of Gazzaniga in the pecking order.  Ronald Koeman said afterwards that he needed to look at Gazzaniga as he weighs up what to do with the Fraser injury situation for next season.  I get that but I and most other Saints fans could have told him that Gazzaniga is not good enough yet and won’t be good enough by the time August rolls round.  You could argue that it sends out the wrong message in ‘trying out’ a player but would Superkelv in goal today have made any difference?  No it wouldn’t have.

Do the players not care or are they just knackered?  One theory is that they were all up for it whilst we were still in with a shout of the Champions League placings and once that went then they all realised how tired they were.  Personally I think they’re just knackered and the squad is too small for an entire season competing at the top end of the league.  When it became obvious that nothing was happening in this match I found myself thinking about how much we’re missing Jack Cork as a good player who came into the team when others were unavailable and did a great job.  Steve Davis for example has been right off for about a month now and Jack could have done a great job there.  I hope that for next season that we bring in more players than we lose – last year we replaced the players we lost but we needed to bring in about 4 more, numbers wise.  I understand why we didn’t because if you bring in 10 or 11 new players then it becomes impossible to integrate everyone and you become QPR under Harry Redknapp.

Speaking of QPR, they and Burnley got relegated this weekend.  One will be missed and will carry a lot of goodwill with them and most people will hope they do well next year – the other is QPR who will carry a massive squad of overpaid shite and the prospect of a massive fine for breaching the Financial Fair Play rules.  This may seem harsh but they cheated (that’s what it is) in their last season in the Championship and got promoted off of the back of it. Good riddance.  Chris Ramsay has done his best with the shower of shit left to him by Redknapp.  It’s Harry’s relegation and it’s worse than the one he couldn’t be arsed about when he took us down in 2005.  He said at the time that we were fucked when he took over and to an extent he was right but QPR were fucked when he left and he can’t have it both ways.  I’m sure he will though, the complete Ballbag.

At our end of the table, Fucking Liverpool got a decent draw at Chelsea who are on the beach and Fucking Spurs got gubbed 3-0 at Stoke as Pochettino plays the game of sticking two fingers up to the Europa Legue in the hope he gets given another season to try and get Spurs in the top 4.  The perfect scenario would be for us to finish 6th, them 7th and then Arsenal win the FA Cup so that Spurs’ big North London rivals screw them up next year as well as finishing above them.  Talking of Arsenal... well they went and lost to Swansea on Monday night so we are now in a 3 way fight for 6th, 7th and 8th.

With two games left of the season, the home one with Villa has now become the most important game of the season.  Lose that and we’re finishing 8th and not qualifying for Europe.  This game also has significance also as it will define the mood of the summer to some extent.  Whether we finish, 6th, 7th or even 8th – the season will be seen as a success bearing in mind the expectations before Koeman came in.  However, we’ve had a poor end to the season and losing to Villa before an incredibly tough last game at City would put a bit of a dampener on things.  Villa are one of the form teams as well but hopefully they’ll have one eye on the FA Cup Final in a few weeks.


All in all, not a good weekend....

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