League 1 Match 5 - Swindon 1 Southampton 0

"Roberto, what's it like working at a club that changes manager every 6 months ?"

What a week. After the last two matches with had much in common, namely ‘Southampton 0’ being at the start of both results, we had a week of ‘New Manager Bingo’ which of course brought the usual lies, guesswork, rumour as fact, crap written about Cortese bollocks from the press and the usual over-reaction, jumping to conclusions, guesswork, slagging of Cortese of our supporters. In amongst it all was Southampton Football Club saying ‘nothing to see here’. In summary, Nigel Adkins of Scunthorpe is the man in the frame and he’ll get the job if the clubs agree the compensation figure. End of. Anything else is irrelevant.

The big disappointment for me was that it wasn’t sorted before today’s trip to Swindon, a team we always lose against. In my mind, this meant that we were much more likely to lose today and consequently, I had zero expectation from this game. Our team was the same as against Rochdale with the midfield lining up in a diamond formation with Hammond at the back, Chamberlain and The Invisible Man wide-ish and Puncheon bringing his end-product-free brand of playmaking to the hole behind the front two.

Spoiler alert – if you don’t want to know the result, look away now….. ok, ready…

We were shit and we lost again.

For those of you still with me, Saints won a few corners inside the first few minutes and from one of them, swung in Puncheon and missing the first defender for a change, Aaron Martin thumped a header against the bar. It was quite a boring game with not a lot of goalmouth incident until 20 minutes when Superkelv blocked an Austin effort. He didn’t block Pericard’s header on 25 which sailed into the net but thankfully he didn’t have to as the offside flag did it for him. The rest of the first half was quite frankly dull but at least we weren’t losing yet. Half time, 0-0.

The second half started with that rarest of things, a Saints shot as Harding summoned up a kind of 9-iron chip volley effort that bounced off the bar, though in truth, it was never giong in and no one was going to get on the end of it. Swindon took the lead and won the game on the hour mark as Charlie Austin again, swept home a lose ball again, whilst all our defenders watched as the ball bounced back into play off the bar. Mind you, Fonte was about to clear it when he was thumped in the back but 'League 1 Ref' decided not to give it. Oh for fucks sake.

Post goal, Saints produced next to nothing with the only real incidents being Kelvin Davis clattering into Austin and forcing him off injured and a Wottonesque “the ball has gone, one, two, three, four…. Lunge” tackle from Dean Hammond which on another day, would have brought a red card. There were some ‘more of the same’ substitutions from Wilkins with then man who Wilkins had chosen to play in the hole and spark the attack, being replaced with Guly do Prado (who must be wondering what the fuck he’s done coming here – I’m a Serie A player – Get Me Outta Here) and then Chamberlain being replaced with the great attacking game changer, Heather Mills. Again, this weeks attacking bench warmer, Ryan Doble, didn’t get on even though we had a sub left to make and needed a goal. It’s shite really, no other word for it.

What a surprise, we played Swindon and we lost. What a surprise, we had most of the possession and most of the shots and we lost. What a surprise, we had a caretaker manager and we lost. I’d love to know the stats of what our record is down the years when we’ve had a caretaker manager. I mean, it happens so fucking often for us that you’d think we’d have some sort of plan in place just in case. I can’t be arsed to look it up but Wilkins is Played 3, Lost 3, scored none, conceded 6. Dodd and Gorman were bloody terrible and Wise and Bassett weren’t all that either. Then we have Gray and Wigley who were both shocking as caretaker managers and used that as a springboard to get the job full time… when unsurprisingly, they were terrible. Well at least there’s no chance of the caretaker becoming permanent this time with Dean Wilkins.

Today was the most predictable of defeats and the most predictable of goalscorers. As you may have gathered from the stetchiness of the match report, I couldn’t really keep in touch with the game today but I wasn’t bothered as I pretty much knew we’d lose. The season starts as soon as we get a new manager and we could really do with that being before our next game. We’re currently 8 points behind the leaders of the division – another game with a caretaker manager in charge and we’ll be back to where this blog all started – League 1 Minus 10….. or maybe 11.