Premier League Match 15 - Bournemouth 1 Southampton 1

Calm Down

Bournemouth away and another stupid Sunday kick off, this time at 1:30.  A short trip through The New Forest to the Vitality Dean Court Subbuteo Tiny Shit Small Ground which holds 11,000 people. Slightly surprisingly in this age of Financial Fair play that they can afford £20 million for defender and £20 million a week for Jermain Defoe’s pension fund. The good news for Jermain is that Bournemouth is full of old people and the funny smell around the town is the unmistakable musk of piss and Werther‘s Original‘s.

Regardless of the huge amounts of money that they’ve spunked up the wall, Eddie Howe has to be praised for the job that he’s done in keeping them up for two seasons and to be fair, it would be a shock if they didn’t stay up the season as well. I don’t see them progressing much from last season despite the investments they’ve made but they have too much to struggle near the bottom with the real shite of the division.

The FA did eventually decided that Pep Guardiola should probably be sectioned, or at least that he had a case to answer for the Nathan Redmond thing and so the FA charged him, probably because representatives from Manchester United on the FA Committee kicked up a stink about the fact that Mourinho only has the fart out of place and he gets charged and a touchline ban. I haven’t seen the outcome of any enquiry into Guardiola and his behaviour, but I would be willing to bet my house on the fact that fuck all will happen. The guy clearly thinks he’s a legend and the FA will clearly agree with that and as he hasn’t done anything to seriously piss them off in the past, he will get away with it, sure as Lukaku can volley Brighton player twice and not get banned.

Away from domestic football, we had the draw for the 2018 World Cup in Russia with England getting about as good a draw as they could possibly have got, being in a group with Belgium, Tunisia and Panama. It will be interesting to see how we can fuck that one up. I haven’t even looked at who we are likely to play in the next round if we finished second in that group because as you know with England, it never pays to think too far ahead.

So having had a good performance against Everton and having changed half the team and had a good performance against Manchester City, what would Pellegrino do today Well, I could kind of understand it but I wasn’t particularly impressed with the line-up. First of all, Charlie Austin was picked as a striker which absolutely had to happen. Behind him, Sofiane Boufal came back in as did Dusan Tadic and JWP. Then the issue that I wasn’t too impressed with. The two defensive midfielders were Oriol Romeu which is fair enough and the other was Steve Davis. No, just no. With Lemina and Hojbjerg both available, there is absolutely no way that Steve Davis should be picked in that position. To me it has to be probably one out of Davis or Tadic else we have not enough tacklers or not enough pace in the side. We reverted to a back four with Jeremy Pied coming in for the injured Cedric and big Wes was preferred to Yoshida.

We start the game on the front foot and are moving the ball quickly and looking dangerous with Boufal linking up with Bertrand and he played a great ball outside the full back to Tadic whose pull back towards Austin was poked clear by the lunging Ake.  With Pied playing his first game for a while it was going to be interesting to see if the delivery from the right was any good and the first chance he got was when Virgil strode out of defence and gave Pied loads to time and space to pick out a player but he expertly picked out the first defender though we did at least get a corner out of it.  Seeing as it was from the right, Tadic swung it over instead of JWP and up went Virgil with a free header and it slid off his head and just wide.  Shit – has to hit the target there.

We react to the near miss by sitting back and allowing Bournemouth to get a foothold.  I have no idea why we do this but we do and are lucky not to go one down as a cross from the left finds Smith on the right and his shot is deflected goalwards by Defoe and Fraser flinches up an arm and it pings off him for a corner.  Miracle save to be honest seeing how quickly the ball was moving and how close Defoe was.  From the corner, Ake gets in front of Pied and heads goalwards only for Fraser to parry it out and we get it away.

From the next corner Bournemouth win, it’s worked short to Smith and he runs into the box, toes it away from Boufal’s lunge and goes over.  Shit, that looks like a penalty, but the referee Jon Moss has given it as a dive and booked him and Defoe for arguing.  I’m watching on TV and the first replay looks like a foul but the second shows he’s on his way down before the tackle so spot on ref.

Serves You Right You Rat-Faced Cheating Fucker

Meanwhile, we decide that it might be good to get the ball up their end for a bit and JWP fires over a superb cross but Austin’s header is saved by Begovic and bounces down to Tadic whose shot is blocked by Francis’ elbow at close range.  All our players are appealing but no chance lads.  There would have been zimmer frames all over the pitch if that had been given having not giving the Smith one.

Having briefly been positive and having an attack, it’s back to defending and Hoedt makes a mess of a header and it rolls to Daniels who absolutely creams it with the outside of his left foot and it doesn’t miss the top corner by very much.  Hoedt’s dodgy few minutes gets worse as Davis needlessly gives him the ball when he could have gone forward but then Hoedt fucks around trying to beat King, loses the ball and Bournemouth work it from King to Surman to Fraser and with Pied nowhere near him, he drills it into the net.  Pathetic and that’s all she wrote until half time.  It’s bloody ridiculous – we are clearly better than them individually but we’ve allowed them to dominate the last 20 minutes – why?

The second half sees Pellegrino basically admit he got the selection wrong but it’s not Lemina coming on but Redmond for JWP.  Maybe Guardiola’s one call for the day from the Asylum has been to Mauricio, telling to put his man on.  Anyway, we start well with Boufal working a shooting chance on the left and Begovic saving well low down.  We have a go at being out of the game when some shambolic defending by half our team where no one gets a foot to the ball ends with King scuffing a shot across the goal and Stanislas being unable to turn it in at the back stick.

It’s a temporary foray for Bournemouth though as it’s all Saints now. A neat 1-2 between Bertrand a Boufal sees Austin get an effort on goal and saved by Begovic and another spot of pinball, this time in their box and Tadic’ shot deflected over the bar by Francis.  The corner is half cleared and Lewis Cook tries to run it out of defence but he’s hunted down by Romeu who takes the ball and feeds Redmond on the right and his low cross is expertly drilled low into the net by Austin.  His celebration of goading the Bournemouth fans to calm down was really quite funny – it was as funny as they are pathetic so yes, very funny.

Bournemouth fans Fuming at Austin

He should have been able to bring the celebration out again two minutes later as Boufal put Bertrand away and for once, there was no quality on Berty’s deliver and it neither threatened to goal nor connected with Austin who was in space and 6 yards out.

Lemina in on for Tadic but he goes deep and Davo is pushed forward.  Straight afterwards we have a scare when King shoots and Fraser again parries out and it hits Wilson and bounces wide.  Wilson has come on for Defoe who has done the square root of fuck all.  It should be the winner…. Romeu feeds Boufal who plays a superbly weighted ball to Bertrand on the left and he reaches it at full pelt as it reaches the goal line and the cross is met by Austin at the near post but he thumps it just over.  Fuck… needed a bit more of a deft one like the first against Everton.  Nothing much happens in the 3 extra minutes with the only real chance coming with the last kick as Smith’s corner is met by Ake who no one has bothered to mark but he gets it all wrong and heads miles over.

Final whistle and I can’t help but be a little bit disappointed that we didn’t win it but over the 90 minutes you have to say it was probably a fair result. Personally, I really don’t think Bournemouth are very good and if we played the whole game on the front foot like we played the second half then this game was there for the taking. To me, though they had a few chances, Bournemouth didn’t ever look likely to score unless we fucking handed it to them and sure as shit, that’s what we did with Wesley Hoedt paying the price for overconfidence. Having said that, Fraser Forster produced one of his worldy saves to keep out Defoe’s close range effort when he deflected a shot with his zimmer frame. The ridiculousness of Bournemouth giving a three or four year contract to an ageing Jermaine Defoe looks ridiculous at the moment. He was very very average today before he got substituted.

We had the Adam Smith penalty incident in the first half which got everybody talking and mostly talking bollocks.  I’m sorry, whatever you pundits say, that was a big horrible fucking dive and he totally deserve to get booked. What the fuck the referee’s doing allegedly apologising to him afterwards is beyond me. He was on his way down well before Boufal got there and though it was a stupid tackle to be going for, the fact is that the rat faced little twat was on his way down before any contact happened. How anyone can watch the slow motion replay and think he didn’t dive is completely fucking beyond me. Forget all that shit about him having a right to go down. Fuck off. If he gets put down then it’s a foul if he doesn’t get put down and he manufactures it himself then it’s not a foul. It really isn’t that hard to understand that.  He didn’t get put on the deck by Boufal, he got there completely on his own and he’s a fucking cheat.

As for TV pundits - I would like to see a promotion and relegation for pundits in the media. Phil Neville has proved to be a complete fuckwit so he is now relegated from MOTD2 to MOTD3 on the red button.   If he proves to be a fuckwit on that as well then he gets relegated to Radio talkSHITE alongside such twats as Robbie Savage and Joey Barton and the non-footballers who think they know what they’re talking about like Mike Parry and Adrian Durham.

So, back to why we didn’t win. I thought the team selection was very suspect today. Leaving out a fully fit Mario Lemina is questionable at best and leaving out Pierre Hojbjerg after the couple of games he has had is a bit strange also.  As said at the start, I feel that only one of Steve Davis and Dusan Tadic should be playing. I understand that the decision to play JWP after the Everton game, but he was fucking dreadful today and was deservedly substituted. Pellegrino got that one right though because Nathan Redmond had a good 45 minutes, with him setting up the goal for Charlie Austin.  Right footed Redmond on the right perhaps.  Mad ‘out there’ idea I know.

I’m changing my mind about Charlie Austin. He still looks cumbersome and he still looks like he’s drunk 10 pints before he plays but he’s given our team a focal point and we now look more like a team when we’re attacking, rather than like a collection of individuals not playing together and all being frightened to go anywhere near the penalty area. For someone who can’t run, he has a brilliant habit of finding himself space in the penalty area and he will know that he should’ve scored the winner from the Bertrand cross to the near post. Anyway Bournemouth fans, I thought we were your new super rivals But it seems that you can’t let go of your non-league mentality and have to reserve extra vitriol for the player who used to play for Poole Town.  I guess we can’t be too disappointed with four points from the last three games but it really should have been six.  Six would have been good, four is average.

Next up we have Arsenal at home and this Arsenal side is really no different to any other Arsenal side of the last 10 years. They can destroy you on their day but you know if you get about them, then they are flaky and it is an opportunity to get a result against one of the big clubs. It’s an opportunity that we need to take next week and if the manager gets the midfield selection and the mindset right, I see no reason why we can’t add a further three points to the total.