Premier League Match 31 - Southampton 2 Chelsea 1

Torres tries to protect his missus from John Terry

Two weeks is a long time in football and it seems very very boring when you haven’t had a game.  In the Championship and League 1 we got used to having 3 or 4 matches in two weeks and we’ve had none.  What we have had is two England games which have resulted in a completely pointless 8-0 win against San Marino and a completely dismal 1-1 draw against Montenegro which leaves England in a pretty dodgy position regarding qualifying for the World Cup.  As touched on last week, Roy Hodgson went for his tried and tested players against Montenegro and unsurprisingly to everyone – Carrick, Cleverley, Milner, Johnson and Welbeck were all somewhere between average and a big pile of shit.  My venom and scorn is reserved for the manager though.  Euro 2012 was a free hit but now we’re seeing the conservative, safety-first, old school, old fashioned, reactive, yes man, big club pandering clueless manager that Liverpool fans warned us about.  Montenegro had a spell after half time where they had about 6 good chances and it was only thanks to Joe Hart that we kept them out.  Our midfield was nowhere and he waits until 75 minutes, after we just conceded to bring on a sub.  He then said that there was no obvious change to make – I’m sure that Lampard, Chamberlain, Parker and Defoe were delighted with that statement.  Anyway, today it will sure be nice to support a team where the midfield has a bit of pace and invention and they can get about the park and pressure the opposition and chip in with a goal or two.

I guess the main Saints related news is that Nigel Adkins has got on a different bus and is in a different building and it’s in Reading which is a real shame for a few reasons.  Mainly, that we have to play them in his first home game in charge and lets hope we don’t get a result like we got against Redknapp and QPR a few weeks back – however, the law of Sod says that we’ll get beat in that game.  Despite not thinking very much of them as a club and not thinking much of their support, I hope he does well at Reading as long as it’s not at our expense but I would have thought he could have done better like Alan Pardew did – and I don’t mean with the ladies.    I thought Nigel would end up at Leeds, a much bigger club and the last time I checked, based in Adkins’ neck of the woods oop North.  Still going down though Nigel.

Mauricio Pochettino has recalled Punch and Steven Davis to replace Adam Lallana who is injured yet again and Gaston who has been half way around the world playing for Uruguay in World Cup qualifiers.  Luckily for him, the Uruguay manager doesn’t see ‘plays for Southampton’ as a reason not to pick him, unlike his England counterpart.

There is a question mark over the Chelsea team selection and it’s a fat Spanish question mark in the rather blobby shape of Rafa Benitez.  With an FA Cup quarter final coming up against Manchester United on Monday, the smart money was on the fact that he’d be more focussed on that one due mainly to the fact that as he’s leaving at the end of the year, an FA Cup win would look better on his CV than finishing 4^th in the Premier League.  True to form he made 7 changes from their last league game but the side still boasted about 9 players you could call regulars and one of the others was the player who used to be Fernando Torres.

As we get ready to go, it becomes apparent that Torres is wearing the Mask of Zorro.  If he wasn’t wearing it then there would be a chance that someone might mistake him for a £50million pound striker.  Apparently he has a broken nose and I really fail to see how it’s going to help him if someone smacks a ball in his face or catches him with an elbow.  It wouldn’t be funny if that happened at all – I mean, I wouldn’t laugh and nor would anyone else.

Saints start well and the first cross to the back stick sees Sir Rickie nod down and J-Rod arrive and send it into orbit.  The man from Burnley with the Spanish name is troubling Chelsea a bit more five minutes later as he received a pass from Corky and flicked it immediately over Terry and set off towards goal before sidefooting a backpass to Cech from the edge of the box.  We have another half chance a few minutes later as Clyne and Sir Rickie build down the right, Clyne’s cross is blocked and Sir Rickie smashed the rebound goalwards, only for it to hit Ivanovic and spin behind for a corner.

Chelsea are producing absolutely nothing up front and seem to have no bite in midfield as Yoshida is allowed to pick out Shaw on the left who feeds Sir Rickie (insert ex-fat pieman joke here).  The big man passes to J-Rod who plays a superb 1-2 with Steven Davis before burying it under the Phantom of the Opera to make it 1-0.  Superb goal!

Stung by being behind and in response to the legendary tactical genius that is Rafa Benitez, Chelsea wake up a bit and have the ball in the net from Zorro but the ref has spotted that he’s shovelled the ball past Maya with his hand before clipping it into the net past Artur who has stopped.  The upshot of all this is that a group of Chelsea twats who are behind me in the Kingsland get a bit too vocal and there is a mini-kick off.  I would never advocate violence to sort but the bottom line is, if you go in the wrong end and then give it the large one, it’s only going to end one way and you’re pretty stupid if you don’t realise that.

Luke Shaw is having a bit of a ropey game at left back but he gets in the way of a Moses cross and it flicks off him and over the bar for a corner.  Marin’s flag kick is headed powerfully into the net by Terry who has a free header from 6 yards.  Bollocks.  Later replays confirm that Big Jos slipped over and may or may not have been given a shove by Terry but it’s not a foul and has to go down as an error.

Straight from the kick off we play it back to Maya who sends it long towards Sir Rickie who is barged in the back by Ivanovic to give us a free kick.  John Obi Mikel then probably accused the referee of being racist and the ref has a word with him and his captain, John Terry – just the man you’d want as a character witness.  Meanwhile, back to the free kick and credit the ref for getting the wall back ten yards.  Zorro is in the wall and having a right old moan so I’m of course hoping that the free kick flies straight into the net but as a close second I’m hoping it hits Zorro in the face.  OK, we’ll take the first option as Sir Rickie curls it over the wall and into the corner with Cech floundering.  Fucking brilliant, 2-1.

The rest of the first half passes without too much incident.  There is no Chelsea threat on our goal, Zorro is crap and all is well with the world unless you’re a Chelsea fan sat in the wrong end.  There’s a guy who sits along the row from me who always arrives five minutes late for each half and has said sorry for doing this twice a game for the past 5 seasons, suggesting that his apologies aren’t very sincere.  Anyway, as he leaves for his 25 minute half time break, I was pondering the FA Cup game when he brought his mate who was a Chelsea fan and a complete dick.  Part of me was hoping the same guy was the one getting a slap elsewhere in the ground.

As the teams come out for the second half there is a bit of as issue as King Artur has gone off to be replaced by Superkelv who is playing his first game since he was awarded the two year pension top-up a couple of months back.  Saints start the second half pretty well with Clyne firing a cross at the near post that Cech had to parry away but then a change came over proceedings as Chelsea looked like they actually gave a shit for a while.

Superkelv produced his first save as he kicked away a Lampard shot but the flag was already up anyway.  Zorro was attempting to put himself about and there was definitely something a bit elbow-ish about an aerial challenge he put in on Maya.  Mild-mannered Jos was not terribly impressed by it anyway.  We nearly shoot ourselves in the ass soon afterwards as Morgan brings down Zorro and we’re all complaining about the award as Zorro takes it quickly to Marin who crosses to Moses whose scoopy shot is going in until Superkelv pushes himself up off of his Zimmer and pushes it over the bar.  Good save that man.

Say what you like about John Terry – shagger, racist, thug etc but bloody hell, is he brave.  He slipped when going into tackle Punch so as you do, he tackled him with his head at ground level.  As the ball went loose he slipped and tried the same head tackle on Corky and lost the ball.  Corky then got excited at had a shot so whoever has Row R, Seat 365 in the Milton Road End is the winner of the ‘Jack Cork Can’t Shoot for Shit’ Sweepstake.  Back to JT and he ends up rolling around on the floor with Sir Rickie and with the Chelsea man’s track record, it’s no wonder Sir Rickie gets up pretty bloody quickly.

It’s pretty even once again but Fat Rafa was always going to bring on some big guns and Hazard came on for Marin which we countered by bringing on JWP for Punch.  We now had four central midfielders on J-Rod in midfield and no one seemed too sure who was going to play wide.  In the event we kind of went 4-4-2 with Steve Davis on the left and JWP on the right.  J-Rod was having an excellent match and skinned Ivanovic before seeing his left footed blast parried by Cech.  The rebound came out to Mikel who was dozing and JWP would have got in before Terry stepped across and blocked him off.  Mikel then probably accused JWP of being a racist for creeping up on him like that.

The Terry-JWP incident was never a penalty (despite some shouts from the crowd) but Yoshida running Moses off the ball certainly seemed to have a bit more chance of being given but thankfully the ref wasn’t interested.  Good old fashioned shoulder charge, sort of.  We seem to gone into full fledged ‘hanging on’ mode now.  Ramires is on for Mikel who probably accuses Ramires, Benitez and the 4^th official holding his number up, of being racists.  Zorro, suddenly suspiciously looking like the ex-player formerly known as Fernando Torres, goes on a jinking run past 4 players and tees up Moses who waits so long that the sea of defenders doesn’t part but crashes in on him and we get away with it again.

Rafa then proves that he doesn’t give a shit about being popular when he makes the sort of substitution that is going to achieve nothing positive by removing Oscar (who has been crap to be fair) and bringing on Yossi Benayoun who is a) crap and b) not Demba Ba.  It’s fair to say that the Chelsea fans aren’t impressed.

The momentum shifting substitution does the trick for us and Sir Rickie feeds Morgan who put JWP in on goal on the right but instead of having a shot he tries to pick out Steven Davis and it’s cleared.  Davis was in the news again a minute later as he gifted the ball to Hazard on the right who burst through to the bye line before lashing one across the face of goal, much to the annoyance of Moses and Lamaprd.

Foxy is on for Davis on the left wing as the Northern Irishman is clearly knackered but it’s not all over yet as Morgan trashes Hazard at the other end to give Chelsea a free kick about 25 yards out.  Frank Lampard is a great player but he’s no Sir Rickie and it’s with much relief that his free kick sails over the bar and out for a goal kick.

There are 4 minutes of injury time and the only real incident in that time is a flare up in midfield in which JWP showed that he’s not going to get pushed around as he went head on with Ramires.  Goof stuff, full time, get in there and up, up, up the league we go.

In the post match interview, there are a cursory couple of questions about today’s win before the interviewers get down to what they really want to ask and it’s about next weeks game.  Mauricio’s interpreter gives it the full ‘why the fuck are you asking this dumb question’ face in response to “Will you thank Nigel Adkins for the squad you inherited?”.  I only wish that Mauricio had read the book of Gordon Strachan interview techniques and replied with an answer about an out of date yoghurt which is more important. As it was, he responded with a curt “No”.

I thought we were excellent all over the pitch today with the centre back pairing of Big Jos and Yoshida having magnificent matches, even allowing for the fact they were playing against Zorro.  Honestly, Darius Henderson gave us more problems last season than Zorro did today.  J-Rod and Sir Rickie were a right handful up front and gave Terry and particularly Ivanovic a hard time of it.  I felt we lost our way a little bit at the start of the second half when we had the 4 central midfielders on but we sorted it and restricted Chelsea to one shot on target in the second half.  Looking at the game now, it was comfortable but it sure as hell didn’t feel like it at the time.  Though we’ve gone up a few places in the league (above Newcastle, Sunderland, Norwich and Stoke), there are still only 4 points between us and third bottom Aston Villa so we can’t relax yet – we have to get something from Adkins away next week and then follow it up with 3 points in what should be an interesting clash of styles, our pressing game against West Ham’s hoofball.

So, there will be more calls for Sir Rickie to be called up by England and they will be ignored by Roy Hodgson who will stick with the crap he usually picks.  Mind you, Andy Carroll scored a couple today to take him to 4 for the season so I expect he’ll be straight back in.  Enough of worrying about England though, it’s bad for your health and a waste of time.

Part of the joy of beating one of the big boys is reading and hearing the mainstream media explaining the ‘off day’ that they suffered.  It’s not worth getting annoyed about it but the Chelsea fan blogs are well worth a read.  One was talking about Jack Cork and how he was there for years from 8 years old and never played.  The blogger was saying that even if he was there now he wouldn’t have made his debut yet which may be true but he said that the reason was that he wasn’t good enough.   If you offered me a straight swap, Mikel for Cork, I know where I’d tell you to stick it and I’m sure everyone else of a red and white persuasion would tell you the same.

I'm looking forward to going back to work on Tuesday for an encounter with Chelsea Wanker who is one of the worst kind of big club charlies.  Pre-Abramovic he supported Crystal Palace which tells you all you need to know.  Chelsea fans eh! love 'em.  He has had his photo taken with the Champions League Trophy though.... Bring. It. On!!!