Simpson Clears the Danger
There
was a strange occurrence in the build-up to this game in that I was reading
here and there that some alleged Saints fans wanted us to lose today. You what?
I get that we all want Leicester to win the league because we can’t
ourselves and I get that we don’t want Tottenham or one of the usual suspects
to win it but wanting your own team to lose… do one! If you have this attitude then you should
really question whether you should bother going to Saints matches or commenting
on social media. Pathetic.
Hopefully
the Leicester supporting Saints fans won’t be buying one but this week we’ve
also had the announcement of the season ticket prices next year which was
pretty disappointing as far as I’m concerned.
Billions received on a TV deal and it really wouldn’t have killed the
club to drop all the prices. As far as I
can see, a few blocks near the corner flags are cheaper but that’s it. Personally, as my boy is now over 11, I’ll be
paying £100 more than last season. I
knew his ticket would be more expensive but was kind of hoping that this would
be offset by a reduction in the adult ticket price.
So,
Leicester are top of the league and yes it is a good thing. It’s highly amusing in this age of massive
money that a team can win the richest league of all by resorting to
basics. 4-4-2 for starters with
defenders that defend, a central midfield that defends, pace and trickery on
the wings, pace up front. That’s it! Oh yes… they play as a team and everyone
grafts their bollocks off. What’s not to
like? It’s brilliant. This is their one shot – the players know it,
the manager knows it and the fans know it.
Win the league though and they players should hang around for another
season but you know that Vardy, Mahrez and Kante will be in demand. Liverpool and the like will assume they can
sign any of them with the logic being ‘but we’re Liverpool’. The big clubs of course are all about marquee
signings though so will paying £30 million for a striker who came from
non-league who looks like old man Steptoe sit comfortably with the money men
and image marketers. Don’t get me wrong,
I love Jamie Vardy as a player and I wish he played for us.
With
Spurs having dropped points on Saturday, Leicester have the chance to go seven
points clear with six games to go if they beat us today. The Daily Mail obviously want this to happen
because they’ve run a story, based on nothing, regarding players not liking
Ronald Koeman’s methods. There are no
quotes of course but Tadic, JWP and Mané all have a problem with him
apparently. Here we fucking go
again. On a more positive note, we have
a fully fit squad with the exception of Shane Long who came back from playing
for Ireland with a knee injury. This bad
news has been offset by the good news of the return of Charlie Austin and
J-Rod. Ronald decided to revert to the
3-5-2 formation which brought Cédric and Targett back into the side and Big Vic
was preferred to the very unfortunate Romeu in midfield. Last seen tearing up Liverpool – we had Sadio
and Graziano up front. A quick check of
the bench and YESSSSS…. Juanmi is not on it, useless little fucker.
Leicester
have distributed those bloody plastic clappers to their fans so there’s a sound
which sounds like a swarm of locusts as the kick off approaches. This is on a par with vuvuzelas at the 2010
World Cup or playing applause through the speakers. I know we’ve done the piped applause before
the clappers would be step too far.
The
start of the game is very cagey as we sit deep to try and make sure that
there’s no space behind us for Vardy to run into. Also, Mané is playing to the left of a
midfield 4 with Davis on the right which kind of gives us a 5-4-forty
yards-Pellè formation. It’s tough on the
Italian and he barely gets a decent pass and has no support even when he does
get it. Consequently, the game is being
played in our half but Leicester aren’t doing much with it. It is worrying every time the ball goes
towards Vardy though as by comparison, José has got a caravan on his back. Mind you, Vardy has controlled that with his
hand which enabled him to have a run at him.
It
hakes half an hour for us to have anything resembling a chance as Cédric gets
down the right and for once, fires over a decent cross with some pace on it and
Graziano flicks his immaculate hairstyle at it and nods it just over the
bar. The big man is warming to the task
now and takes a ball on his chest and Mané is on his bike and is found with a
slide rule pass. Sadio is away from
Simpson and Morgan and it’s him gain Schmeichel. Round the keeper he goes and shoots but in
the time it takes for him to do this, Simpson has got back and it hits him and
is cleared. It’s hit his arm, surely
that’s a penalty... and a red card. Not
a bit of it. In his defence, his arm was
tucked in to his body but he’s definitely moved his arm towards the ball
deliberately and knocked it away. In my
opinion the referee has bottled it but the rules, such as they are, make it
easy for him to do so. No one on Sky is
even talking about it being a handball.
Great clearance, great defending, I love Leicester, fuck off.
Ooooooooh!
José’s had a thump from 35 yards, forcing Schmeichel to tip it over the
bar. Where did that come from. It’s all us but we make nothing of the corner
and hen guess what. Leicester attack
down the right and Bertrand scuffs a clearance.
We appear to have recovered but the ball ends up out on our right and
Fuchs finds space and just delivers it and Morgan gets up above his marker to
head it past Forster. Bollocks. Why the fuck is 5 foot 4 Clasie marking their
centre back – oh hang on, Morgan has shoved him right out of the way in order
to head the ball. That’s a foul all day
long. They’re gonna win the league. Two decisions, two bottle jobs from the
referee and Niall Quinn in the commentary box is knocking one out with
excitement.
The
one remaining incident before half time is a Leicester break and Vardy takes a
heavy touch allowing us to win the ball.
He then steams into Steve Davis and takes everything out. Yesterday, Kouyate at West Ham got sent off
for similar but it’s Leicester so not today.
Not even a free kick and Michael Oliver was probably surprised that
there was some handbags as a result as José took issue on Davo’s behalf. Half time.
Bullshit.
It
seems to be the way of things that if we set up for a game with three centre
backs and then go behind – we swap to 4 at the back and Targett gets hauled
off. This time his replacement is Dusan
Tadic. Almost straight from the kick off
the ball gets knocked to Vic who looks like he’s had tranquilizers at half time
and he takes a crap touch, loses it to Vardy and then forearms him in the face
to stop him getting away. Here’s comes
another red card.... oh it’s yellow.
Saved only by the relative proximity of Jose and Virgil.
The
opening 15 minutes aren’t really going anywhere. We’re OK without looking dangerous and of our
three players behind Pellè, only Tadic is doing anything but when it comes to
the business end of the pitch, the crossing is poor. He doesn’t shoot on a couple of occasions
when he could have and then, following a good period of pressure on the edge of
the Leicester box, there’s a woeful pass to Pellè, straight off the pitch. He’s fighting for the ball well though and
Drinkwater picks up a booking for wrestling him to the ground which is the
first thing the ref has given against Leicester all day.
José
has a go at gifting them another goal as Drinkwater escapes down the right and
curls in a low cross which Fonte needs to prevent going to Vardy, which is
achieves by looping it at the top corner and it’s a good job our keeper is 7
feet tall as Fraser gets up and flips it over the bar. Though we’re having most of the possession,
it’s Leicester who look the more dangerous in the final third. Vardy burns past Cédric and slides the ball
across to the back stick. Fraser is on
the front post and Simpson has the whole goal to aim at but he sidefoots it at
the middle of the goal and Fraser gets across to block it when we’d all given
up.
Charlie
Austin is coming on for Davis who has been pretty average and I expected J-Rod
to be joining him but oh no... of course we have to take Clasie off because he
turns into a fucking pumpkin or something if he plays longer than 65 minutes so
JWP is on.
Charlie
Austin is making a nuisance of himself and gets the ball on the right and
hammers over a cross which is blocked at close range by the hand of Huth. His arm is miles out from his side and it
hits the palm of his hand. It’s not even
worth appealing to be honest. Not today
lads, it’s Leicester. Leicester have
taken off Okazaki and brought on Ulloa who is probably going to be the answer
to a quiz question in a few years... name the worst striker ever to win a
Premier League Winners medal. He’s
dogshit. Immediately we are grateful for
Ulloa’s inability as he gets played into space on the left but butchers it with
a horrific first touch. We’re very open now and Leicester carve us open on the
right and Vardy bears down on goal but there’s a big Fraser boot to negotiate
and he can’t.
The
remaining 10 minutes is played out comfortably by Leicester. They play keep ball for about five minutes in
our right back area and we get out of there eventually when Austin dives to win
a free kick. Vardy does a full length
comedy dive in front of the ref which is usually taken a dim view of and gets a
yellow card. Not today lads, it’s Leicester. We eventually win a free kick out on the
right which JWP can’t put in the right area and so Leicester, Sky, the watching
millions who aren’t Spurs fans and those thundercunt Saints fans who wanted
Leicester to win... go nuts. Hurrah.
Not
happy. We got the shitty end of the
stick regarding decisions with the Simppson one being the game changer but the
bottom line is that we didn’t create enough to unduly bother the watertight
Leicester defence. How many saves did
Schmeichel have to make?... one I reckon which was a pot shot from our centre
back. Ronald was off on one afterwards
pointing to the fact that over the last 3 games we’ve had 3 good shouts turned
down. He was only talking about the
Simpson one from today and not the Huth one.
I know Simpson’s arm was by his side but he deliberately moved it
towards the ball so that’s a penalty. It
wasn’t there as part of his natural running motion unless he’s a cripple. If the Simpson one wasn’t given because his
arm was by his side then I guess the Huth one wasn’t given because he didn’t
mean it. Why is his hand out there
then? There is no need for his hand to
be out there? If you look at the
shithouse Alderweireld when he goes to block a cross – he’s always got his
hands behind his back and he’s probably the best defender in the country. The rules are so vague and so referees are
always going to err on the side of not giving anything. Fact is that Mané should have scored. He should have either slotted it past the
keeper or buried it low once he went round him.
It was similar in a way to the Tadic chance at Stoke where the striker
had to make ultra-sure he was going to score before having a shot...oh
dear. Just hit it lads...
Judging
by what I’m reading I’m in the minority but I thought Pellè had a good game for
us up front. The support from Davis and
Mané was lacking today and we created little and the crossing into the box was
pretty poor. The one moment of genuine
quality from us today was Pellè’s through ball to Sadio which deserved a
goal. Shane Long was definitely missed
as he would have pulled Leicester’s defence about more though I have a feeling
he would have spent most of the game offside as they are so well
organized. I was hoping we were going to
get J-Rod on in the second half but having made the tactical change at half
time, we then had to save up a substitution for when Clasie inevitably has to come
off. That’s getting annoying now. If he can’t play 90 minutes then don’t start
him ahead of Romeu or JWP as it restricts us tactically if we want to change
things. I found José Fonte’s performance
a bit alarming today as he was towing the proverbial caravan. Maybe this was accentuated by the pace of
Vardy but the skipper needs to sort himself out or else he’s going to find
himself under pressure for his place next season as long as we sign another
centre back. Another disappointment was
Cédric whose crossing was almost uniformly woeful. There was no quality on the deliveries which
made it easy for Huth and Morgan to knock everything away. The one cross he was involved in that had any
quality was from Fuchs for the goal as Cédric failed to get close enough to
him.
As
for Leicester – well Sky certainly got the result they wanted. It was amusing to hear Ranieri describe
Simpson’s block as a ‘save’ but I think we can excuse his command of the
English language for that one. The
performance of Kante was analysed afterwards, mainly the ground he covered and
the amount of times he won the ball back.
They didn’t talk about the number of fouls he did though which must have
been up near double figures by the end of the game. He never appears to go off his feet though so
he’s not going to get booked. There’s a
lesson for Big Vic in there somewhere.
Other interesting stuff is that Leicester allow more crosses than any
team and they just concentrate on defending the middle and the evidence seems
to show that that works just fine and it certainly did against us – a team that
known for getting crosses in. We, on the
other hand, allowed their cross to come into the box and then left Clasie to
mark their giant of a centre back.
In
summary, I do like it that Leicester play 4-4-2, all know their jobs and work
incredibly hard with pace up top, skill on wings and proper defenders and as a
rule, they pick the same side each week.
I hope they win the league but I hope they win it without too much help
from referees and too much fawning from the media. As for us, well we can of course help
Leicester (if they haven’t won it already) by messing up Tottenham and the twin
shithouses of Pochettino and Alderweireld on the penultimate day of the season.
Today’s
defeat leaves our target of 6th looking a bit further off seeing as
we’re 4 points behind West Ham and they have a game in hand. Even if we don’t make it, I’d prefer us to
still be in with a shout so the season doesn’t just peter out over the remaining
six games. Next up is Newcastle and Rafa
Benitez at home and they are right in the shit having failed to beat both
Sunderland and Norwich in their last two games.
We usually do well against them at home and there’s no reason why next
week should be any different.
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