Premier League Match 20 - Norwich 1 Southampton 0

Show Me The Money!!!!

Norwich.

On the plus side it’s a chance to start 2016 with 3 points and on the negative side there’s everything else.  As a team, Norwich appear to be just about keeping their heads above water without being particularly good which is testament to the job that Alex Neil has done with them.  They had a win at Old Trafford recently and a win at home to Villa and will be looking to continue the upsurge in form against us.

We should be going into this game with a bit of confidence after the Arsenal game and the first half against West Ham when we played pretty well.  It would be nice if we’d bothered to play in the 2^nd half at West Ham but everyone is making the right noises.  I was hoping for a 4-4-2 like we had against Arsenal but before the game it emerged that some quite sizeable shit had hit the fan.  Sadio Mané had been warned on Thursday about his poor attitude in training andtwo hours before kick off, he decided to be late for the team meeting when final tactics are discussed.  Unsurprisingly, he was dropped and so the team was changed with JWP brought into the side.  The only other options were to bring in either Gaston or Ryan Seager to play up front so as none of those were preferred, I think we can safely assume that we were always going to go with one up front.  Even though I think he’s bang average, this would have been a great opportunity to give Juanmi a go from the start but for some reason he wasn’t with the travelling party.

Cuco Martina is again preferred to Maya Yoshida at right back which is a bit like choosing between two particularly nasty methods for your own death.  Jordy Clasie was back in midfield in place of Oriol Lechter who was suspended after picking up his 5^th booking of the season in the last game before the amnesty.  Norwich have some players were aware of like Wes Hoolahan and Alex Tettey and a new striker called Mbokani who is an odd looking fucker to say the least.

We start well and look like we’re playing a different sport altogether to Norwich at a different pace.  We have the first good chance as Tadic hooks a cross over and Long gets up well above a hesitating keeper but his header loops over the bar.  We continue to be the better side but have a go at gifting Norwich a chance when José has a mare and Howson puts an effort wide.  Then JWP has a chance after good work from Bertrand and Tadic but the words ‘JWP’ and ‘chance’ ar ein the same sentence so you can guess that it doesn;t end in ‘goal’. Straight at the keeper.

Virgil has a moment and puts an atrocious pass across the pitch straight to Hoolahan.  He sets howson away on our left as we all shit ourselves and try and get back but luckily, Howson butchers the chance and puts the cross behind everybody.

It’s time to look away and it seems that Norwich have scored as Martin gets down the Norwich right and whips in a cross which Mbokani bundles past Stekelenburg and just wide.  Martina has actually put in some good defending there to cover over and put him off and he has another good moment from the restart as he picks up the ball on the right and curls an exquisite pass behind the Norwich centre backs straight to Long who takes a great first touch and as we all shout ‘shooooot’, he takes a shite second touch and runs into Rudd and all we get is a corner as it bounces off a defender.   Great ball, wank finish.  Bertrand’s corner is met by Long beyond the back post and he gets a good header down which bounces up and Rudd shovels it over the bar.

The first booking arrives and you can’t argue with Twattenburg on this as Redmond skips infield, lays the ball off, time passes by and then Big Vic slides in and wellies him up in the air.  Another corner and it looks for all the world that Virgil is going to meet it and flick it into the net but everyone misses it and it flashed across and out for a goal kick.  More decent play from us and a chance is worked for Clasie on the edge of the box and he hits it well but Rudd pushes it past the post.  It’s actually been quite an entertaining first half with the worry being that we’ve proved time and again to be only capable of playing for 45 minutes.  Norwich are spirited but very average and it’s a game we really should win.

The first 10 of the second half pass in the blink of a fucking great yawn as neither side puts anything together.  Norwich are creating as little as us.  They have a couple of situations without getting a shot on target.  Tettey, who is a Norwegian international and about as Norwegian as I am, fires miles over the bar and ex-Skate O’Neil’s corner causes confusion in the box and Stekelenburg does well to shovel it out of the area.  Norwich make a substitution and on comes a fat version of Gabby Agbonlahor.  He looks properly fat this guy.  I bet he scores.   They’ve gone 4-4-2 with the introduction of fatty but we’re still playing 4-5-1, Mané is still not on the pitch for us and JWP, playing as the most advanced of our midfielders has got as much goal threat as you’d expect from a man with one penalty to show for 100 odd games.

We have a chance and it’s from real creative play as Stekelenburg bombs a goal kick forward and everyone misses it.  Tadic looks like he’s in and there is a perfect opportunity for him to shoot, on his left foot and all he has to do is thump it but he lets it go and ends up going wider before lifting it over the bar.

On 73 minutes, Fat Agbonlahor picks up a clearance and before he had chance to turn, Big Vic comes crashing in and flattens him with the ball miles away.  For fucks sake and Twattenburg has no choice but to send him off.  I have had many issues with Twattenburg in the past but he was 100% right here.  You fucking idiot Victor.  Now we’ll see how we respond to a setback.  My money is on Norwich having one shot on target and scoring.

Straight away we look like a disaster and Brady gets down the left and gets a cross in which is cleared as far as Hoolahan who has his shot superbly blocked by van Dijk.

And so it came to pass from the next attack that Fat Agbonlahor picked up the ball on the right wing and cut inside Clasie whose effort at a tackle was absolutely abysmal and laid the ball across the top of the box to Tettey who sidefooted a superb shot into the top corner to give Stekelenburg no chance at all.  Oh look, they got a shot on target and fucking scored.  Well done Victor you cunt.  We’ve responded to a setback in the usual way and crumbled within two minutes and now I expect we’ll crumble further and do nothing.

After the Norwich goal we did fuck all for the rest of the game.  There’s no point in pretending otherwise.  Show Me The Mané, Harry Reed and Gaston came on as subs and did nothing and that was it.  Nothing.  Against a painfully average Norwich side, we did nothing and the ref may as well have saved us all the last 15 minutes and just blown up when Tettey’s shot hit the net.

As a visibly angry Ronald said post match, you want players who want to play for the shirt, play for the fans and play for the club. We have two at least, who have no interest in any of those things. Victor Wanyama and Sadio Mané are guns for hire who only give a shit about money. If we paid them 150 grand a week they wouldn't give a shit about moving to a big club and playing in the Champions League or winning trophies or whatever. Wanyama has already played for a club in the Champions League that wins trophies in their domestic league but he moved to us because we pay more money than Celtic do. Mané moved to us from the Austrian league, again for the money and I remember his agent saying when he signed that he wouldn't be at Saints for long. He virtually went on strike to get out of Salzburg and forcing through his move to Saints so we really shouldn't be surprised.  

These players dress it up as ambition when in fact all it is, is chasing the money. It's just a job to these lads and I don't think they'd give a shit if they were permanently sat on the bench at a big club as long as they were earning 150 grand a week for doing it. The sooner you realise that these two players and a number of others are complete cunts then the easier your find it to make sense of it all. I don't expect loyalty as loyalty is for fans only and why would someone from Africa be loyal to Southampton but what I do expect is respect towards the club that pays them and the fans that support them and the manager who has achieved more in the game than they ever will and was 5 times the player they’ll ever be.  The way you show that respect is by putting in the performances to the best of your ability.


It looks to me that Wanyama deliberately got sent off today. It was the same as his red card against Bournemouth when the second booking was an absolutely fucking stupid challenge bearing in mind he already been booked. Once is a brain fart but twice in a couple of months is a deliberate act as far as I'm concerned. In addition, earlier in the season of course you had the Midtjylland debacle when he basically refused to play, playing a massive part in wrecking all last seasons work.  Mané deliberately missed the team meeting having been warned about his attitude just two days earlier. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out why he's acting up.

If I was Steve Davis, Jose Fonte or Kelvin Davis or any of the other players who obviously care, I would not be remotely impressed with the actions of either player especially given that everyone worked so hard last season and this season we are just throwing it all away, The most obvious example of that being the Europa league exit.

All the club can do about it is make the best of it. We have to weigh up whether it's best to keep two twats who are good players or whether it's best to take the money for them now if indeed big clubs are interested and muddle through the rest of the season and hope we can stay up.  Personally I'd stick a 30 million price tag on Wanyama and a 50 million price tag on Mané for the January window, telling them that that's what they're worth as they are 'so good'. Then, we could agree to sell them for more reasonable values in the summer as long as they stay focused for the rest of the season.  Neither of them will be here past the summer unless all the clubs that might be able to afford them, decide that they’re twats who aren’t worth the bother.  Maybe they’ll notice that Vic can’t pass the fucking ball and has been shite for 90% of the season or that Sadio has only scored 3 goals and most of the time has been all fart and no shit.

A major flaw in the strategy of the club to recruit players from smaller leagues is that if they turn out to be any good, then they will do the same to Saints in time. What damage are they going to do whilst they are looking for their move away?  We talk about doing character checks on players but that side of things is obviously not working too well and you only have to look at the two twats that we still have and Dani Osvaldo to prove that. We have Victor deliberately getting himself sent off and generally not giving a shit unless we are playing against a big club that he wants to audition for. We have Sadio who deliberately defies his manager and doesn't try in training and then we had Dani Osvaldo who chinned his own captain. All of these cunts were trying to engineer moves out of the club.

As I write I see that Victor has apologised and said that he just wants to do his best for the team. Bollocks mate, absolute bollocks, you want to do the best for yourself. I'm afraid that's just a PR exercise though hopefully it was triggered by someone like Jose Fonte telling him what a complete twat he is.

As for the game, well of course we should have won but of course we didn't. It was yet another one-half performance as it was a really poor second half even before the twat got sent off.  It was painfully obvious that Norwich were going to have one shot on target and fucking score and so it turned out. It was also painfully obvious that once and they had scored, we were going to do absolutely nothing to get back into the game and sure enough, we didn't manage a single fucking effort on goal in the 15 minutes that remained. We of course should have been the lead by the time the twat got sent off but the horrible miss by Long in the first half and Tadic and his lack of willingness to shoot in the second half meant that though they were absolutely shit, Norwich were still in the game.

Positives... Well I thought that Clasie played ok but he was beaten far too easily for the goal by Fat Agbonlahor. Other than that it was the dependables who looked decent like Fonte, Bertrand & Davis.  Long worked hard before tiring in the second half but the ‘creative’ players in our side, JWP and Tadic were 98% shite as usual.  I have issues with Ronald today, not over the two twats but over the team selection.  We have to go at these average sides.  Two up front would have been fine today so either Seager or Ramirez should have started or at least push Tadic up as an advanced number 10.  When Norwich pushed up a second attacker when Fatty came on, we did nothing different.  Alex Neil made a sub to try and win a game and we did nothing – unless you count Victor kicking Fatty up in the air and getting sent off.

Down to 13^th in the league and looking over our shoulders which is likely to be the way of it from here on in.  The transfer window is open and we need to strengthen.  I don’t buy the line that everyone’s happy with the squad and it depends on injuries to the strikers whether we get anyone in or not.  We need a right back, a winger and a striker in my opinion but more important than that, we need to find a solution to the ‘twat’ problem that we currently have.

PS... I first became aware of the Mané story in the morning when Alex Crook took to twitter and reported it with his opinion attached that it was linked to the transfer window.  He predictably got a load of stick for shit stirring and doom-mongering and then got all precious about the fact he was being criticised.  The only reason I got to see these Tweets is because others retweeted it onto my timeline.  I can’t see Alex Crook’s stuff (which is no loss) as he blocked me last year after I had a pop over his ‘Morgan Schneiderlin was forced to train with the kids’ work of fiction piece which ran in a national newspaper.  Now, I happen to believe that he’s dead right over the Mané issue but I also believe that as a journo with an audience of transfer-window battle weary Saints fans, if he strays from reporting facts and just reports speculation then he’s going to get stick and it’s pathetic that he gets upset about this and no doubt he went on another blocking spree on Saturday.   Even though I think Crook is correct in his guess, no one knows for sure except Mané and his agent.   Ronald Koeman doesn’t know so I find it very unlikely that a local journo will know. So Alex Crook: grow a pair and understand that in your position you have to stick to facts or shut the fuck up about the abuse you will inevitably get.  It’s a been a day for assholes.