EFL Championship Match 21 - Coventry 1 Southampton 1

 

Who's This Goalscoring Winger and Where's He Been?

I always get in a bit of a time warp when I think about Coventry City.  They were the team along with ourselves that for years, defied the odds at the bottom of the Premier League in the 90s and always stayed up, until one day of course, we didn’t.  Both teams of course went on the down to League 1 journey for various reasons.  Saints of course found their way back to the top flight where we stayed for 11 years but Coventry haven’t and at various have been playing in borrowed stadiums and generally having an ownership nightmare with the infamous SISU (remember them?).  Our most memorable relatively recent game against them was the game that sealed our promotion at the end of the 2011/12 season when we won 4-0 at St Mary’s. Sir Rickie being carried from the pitch by the supporters is the enduring image of the day.

Coventry Memories

The Coventry of today are managed by Mark Robins, who is roughly 6 years into the job which is a level of longevity that you don’t often get at Championship and League 1 level. As a rule, he has them playing decent football and having seen them play Leicester on the first day of the season and being very unlucky to lose, I expect them to be slightly higher in the table than they are.  As it stands, they are in the big middle bracket of teams who will have one eye on the playoff places and who won’t be anywhere near the relegation shake up at the end of the season.

Russell Martin has been a little bit cryptic in his press conference for this game is suggesting that a player who plays regularly will be left out so everyone is guessing who that might be. My money is on either Stuart Armstrong or Charlie Alcaraz. Maybe though, there’s a shake up coming in the defence with Jack Stephens being fit again though I would severely hope that is not the case because it’s not the defence that’s been our problem recently.
 
It’s also been a bit of noise this week about Mason Holgate, who may be returning to Everton who have the option to recall him. Whilst I think it would be sensible from our point of view to keep him here, you could understand Everton being slightly bothered about his lack of minutes and maybe the player himself would like to go back and fight for his place there as opposed to here. With Jack Stephens being fit again, he has definitely dropped a place down the pecking order through no fault of his own, so I couldn’t blame him if he wanted to go back to Everton or go out on-loan somewhere else.

When the team news landed, it saw changes in midfield but it wasn’t Flynn Downes coming back unfortunately.   A midfield three of Shea Charles, Will Smallbone and one of Joe Aribo and Stuart Armstrong seems somewhat lacking in pace., containing as it does, two players who don’t run much. Alcaraz got left out but there was no place for either Ryan Fraser or Sam Edozie, leaving the whole of the front six looking somewhat pedestrian.  It seems a bit odd as one of Russell Martin’s pre-game soundbites was for the forward players to basically make things happen.

The game started and immediately settled into what you would expect to be the pattern, with Saints having the vast majority of the possession with Aribo seemingly stationed on the left wing.  The first time we stretched the Coventry back line was KWP beating players down the right but nothing came of that as the ball ricochets off Stuart Armstrong and out.

A good tackle in the Coventry half by Smallbone sends Aribo away down the left and his first time cross bounces off one of Che’s Trampolino boots though Shea Charles struck the loose ball into the net, he had clearly kicked through a Coventry player in order to win it, so no surprise that it was disallowed.

When Coventry finally attack it gives us another chance to win the ball and we have a three on three break with Stuart Armstrong finding Adam Armstrong out on the right and he cuts inside and smashes it straight at the goalkeeper.  It’s the kind of three on three break that every team in the world practices in training, but we’ve bollocksed it.

There is minor excitement after Aribo wins a corner and we go all ‘training ground set piece’ and it’s quite a nice move involving Manning and Stuart Armstrong who feeds the ball into Adam Armstrong and he smashes it goalwards but it’s well blocked by a Coventry defender.

Che then slides are very good ball in between the defenders for Adam Armstrong who has two choices, either take it first time or fuck it up and he chooses the latter, by taking a touch and getting shoved off the ball.  You can sit on the ground appealing all you like but that’s
never going to be a penalty in a million years.

Coventry‘s first real pressure on our goal comes after a corner has been headed out and they work it back in on our left and well inside the penalty area, Smallbone goes sliding in and makes little or no contact with the ball and he’s very, very fortunate that the Coventry player doesn’t throw himself to the ground because that looked like a penalty to me

Saints have moments up the other end but nothing concrete and a bad final ball and a bad finish happen in the same move.  KWP has as a chance to pick out someone on the edge of the box but over hits it and when Manning returns it from the left, it drops to the feet of Adam Armstrong, who smashes it at a passing aeroplane

Coventry are getting more and more of a foothold in the game now in a week challenge by Che Adams at the edge of the box sees a shot just wide of the post and then the tricky Sakamoto on the right wing tees up former Everton donkey Ellis Sims with a chance he’s clean through against Baz, but in typical clueless fashion, he just smashes it straight at his chest.

Half-time and meh! Not a lot going on here in terms of looking like scoring. Very pedestrian as predicted and in an attacking sense we seem to have a bit of a conundrum.  Our midfielders are not good enough to put chances on a plate for our strikers and our strikers are not good enough to convert half chances or score a goal out of nothing. On a few occasions we have got in and around Coventry‘s defence, it has look slightly shambolic so that’s absolutely has to be more pressure on them in the second half.

Ballboy Gets Ball Back After Arma Shoots

Disappointingly but predictably, no changes are made at half-time and it carries on much the same as you’d expect with us in possession and Adam Armstrong smashing another shot at the moon.  There is a massive warning from Coventry just after that as they build up again down the Manning Chasm on our left had an easy ball in is met by the in-form O’Hare, who crashes a shot off the bar and over.

It’s a warning that is not heeded however as Smallbone and Aribo get in a bit of a panic and put Manning under pressure. He should deal with it, but he turns the wrong way and loses the ball to O’Hare who drives forward.  I am screaming at Manning to pull him down but he does fuck all and O’Hare gets the ball away to Wright, who cuts inside THB and smashes it into the net. Once he has lost the ball Manning absolutely has to take the yellow card there for the team but for some reason, he seemed determined to show that he was not fouling the player. All well and good mate, but now we are one nil down.

With Russell Martin readying some substitutes at the side, it is just a case of who comes off because to be perfectly honest, any of the front six could be removed and they couldn’t complain. In the event it’s Che Adams and Shea Charles who go off to be replaced by Ryan Fraser and Sam Edozie.

With the injection of attacking players and of course still being behind, immediately comes a bit more life with a Edozie and Aribo combining down the line on the right to set up a shot for Stuart Armstrong that he drills straight of the goalkeeper.  Down the left we go with Manning, Stuart Armstrong and Fraser and after some play which sees us put together some nice passing, give the ball away a couple of times and win it back a couple of times, Stu plays a ball to Fraser and his cross into the middle is flicked on by Adam Armstrong and Edozie controls it at the back post before drilling it across the keeper and into the net. Great finish.

Saints have definitely got Coventry a little bit rattled now and we continue to win the ball high up before Edozie’s cross is cleared to the edge of the box where Aribo picks it up, jinks round one player before taking aim at the top corner and narrowly putting it over.

Another move involving KWP, Edozie and Aribo gets the ball to Adam Armstrong about ten yards out and his first shot is blocked and his second flicks off a defender and off the top of the bar for a goal-kick, of course. At least this one wasn’t aimed at a passing meteorite.

There are about ten minutes to go and we’re on top and then…. nothing.  We almost lose it as Coventry cut us open and create a decent chance with Baz pulling off an excellent save at his near post in spectacular fashion to preserve the point.

The end.  In the main - boring shit. It looked stodgy from the team selection and that was exactly how our performance panned out. We had a brief fifteen minutes of urgency when we went behind but once we equalised, we just went back into passive mode like we had settled for a draw. With all due respect to Coventry, they were absolutely bang average and not to beat them when you’ve got designs on getting promoted is absolutely piss poor.

It's probably an okay result if it was a normal season in terms of points total needed to be challenging the top two automatic promotion places. However, in this season where we have two runaway teams, a draw at Coventry following a draw at Watford, it’s really not good enough. Put it this way, today was the kind of performance and result that leaves me thinking that the success or otherwise of our whole season is going to be resting on three games in May.

I’m looking at the stats after the game and apparently, we had 78% possession and from there we mustered three shots on target. Coventry’s 22% possession produced four shots on target. If you convert that to minutes, Coventry had the ball for approximately 20 minutes and got four shots on target, so one every five minutes of possession, whereas Saints had the ball for 75 minutes and had three shots on target, approximately one every 25 minutes.

Asa team, we are not scoring the necessary amount of goals to win games like this comfortably, which we should be doing.  It does make you wonder about the lack of minutes that Sam Edozie gets.  He was told at the start of the season to increase his end product and he has – so where has he been?  Benched in favour of Suledjenepo and losing the impact sub role to Ryan Fraser, who to be fair, has been very good at that.  Moving forward there definitely has to be a case for one of them to start and the other to come on if required.  Russell addressed afterwards that we don’t score as many goals as the other top sides but it’s up to him to give us the best chance to do so.  He talked about letting the strikers off the leash before the game and that’s something that would certainly suit the like of Edozie and Amo-Ameyaw for that matter.

At the other end, the goal we conceded was absolutely dreadful, with Smallbone and Aribo pissing around on the left-hand side and putting Manning in the shit but when Manning loses the ball to O’Hare, he just has to take one for the team and bring him down before he gets to pass away but he doesn’t.  The other point with the goal is that our midfield did not get back and Shea Charles didn’t cover himself in glory because if he had sprinted back instead of jogging, he would’ve been there to meet Wright when he checked inside THB.

We can still make it a decent week when we take our 13 game unbeaten run into Saturday’s visit from Blackburn.  Nothing less than three points will do.

Up the fucking Saints