So Good That Opposition Players Tackle Each Other Rather Than Him
West Brom at home and the God of Anti-football, Tony Pulis is in
the building. West Brom actually started the season well with two wins but ever
since then they've been complete crap and playing the only way that Pulis knows
which is to basically take a goalkeeper, eight centre backs a defensive
midfielder and a battering ram of a striker and hope it works. I am of course
exaggerating slightly but not too much. Jay Rodriguez joined them in the summer
and I never saw how he would fit in to a Pulis side but I think he's played
every game so far and has scored one goal. Bizarrely, I saw him mentioned in
regard to getting called up by England again. You have to be fucking joking
unless he's turned into a completely different player in the three months since
he left us. The Baggies did pull off a very impressive loan signing when Grzegorz
Krychowiak arrived from Paris St Germain. Robert Lewandowski takes all the
acclaim when Poland play but it's Krychowiak who bosses the game. I am looking
forward to seeing him play today and hoping that he is not as good as I think he
is.
Apparently West Brom have a bit of a goalkeeping crisis with
both their first choices, Foster and Myhill being injured. Apparently, Foster
injured his knee having a kick around with his four year old in the garden. My
money is on Foster time wasting and taking ages to get the ball back into play
so his four-year-old got pissed off and kicked him on the knee.
Most of speculation about Southampton this week has been centred
on whether Sofiane Boufal would get a start in place of either of our
underperforming wide players. There was also the opportunity to go out with
three at the back after a weeks training with everybody available but in the
event, the formationa stayed the same and Nathan Redmond did get left out but
Steve Davis came in and not the Moroccan. From the players picked it looked
like Shane Long on the right, Tadic on the left with last weeks two goal hero Manolo
Gabbiadini up front.
There was a bit of sunshine as we walked up to the turnstiles
but there was also the threat of it absolutely pissing down at some point. A
major boost when I got to my seat was that there was no plastic fucking clapper
attached to it. I guess that the club
thought that with Pulis and West Brom in town, anything that could potentially
be used as a missile was not a good idea.
Away we go and West Brom are set up with
Livermore, Krychowiak and Barry in midfield – that’s another 3 defenders
basically. Chadli and J-Rod are wide
with Rondon up front on his own. Within
a couple of minutes it’s obvious that Rondon is going to have half the pitch to
himself as far as supporting Baggies players goes. Good old Tony Pulis – ever predictable. Gareth Barry has the first shot and it’s a
pot shot as a clearance rebounds to him but it’s always going wide as Fraser
had it covered.
We’re having all the possession without
creating too much until we win a cheap free kick on the edge of the box as
Long goes down in a heap as he kicks Livermore.
It’s just to the right of centre about 35 yards out and up steps Bertie
and it flicks off a head in the wall and pings off the angle of post and bar
and away.
We are the better side from that point
which isn’t hard. Bertie looks up for it
today and it breaking forward well with J-Rod not tracking him very well. From one such foray forward he feeds Tadic
who stabs his shot straight at Foster.
We have a chance from a corner as Davo puts it in and it seems to catch
on the wind and drops in the penalty area and Romeu spins on it six yards out and
must score but he can only stab it wide. For fuck sake. Foster takes this near miss as a chance to slow the game down and takes
three minutes to take the goal kick. Yet
again the referee fails to give the early booking that would cut all this shit
out straight away.
Virgil seems to be a bit more into it
today and I’ve had no cause to think he wasn’t giving a shite so far, possibly
because West Brom weren’t attacking at all.
The big man saunters forward and keeps going to about 35 yards out
before arrowing a shot just over the bar.
Good effort to be fair.
The hightlight of West Brom’s half was
to win a free kick as Gabbi brought down Krychowiak. A free kick in the opposition half is a major
thing for a Pulisball side as it gives them the opportunity to get all the huge
lads lumbering forward and then they can take so long to actually take the
fucking thing that the opposition defenders might have fallen asleep by the
time it comes in. Anyway, they fuck it
up and we break through Davo feeding Gabbi and he’s off down the left wing
showing decent pace to get to the edge of the box and play a superb ball into
Long but our non-scoring stiker can’t sort his feet out and can only prod the
ball at Foster.
Right on half time we have a corner
which Davo takes, Yoshida meets and heads too close to Foster who pushes it
wide. Bertie swings one over from the
other side and it bounces up again and Maya tries an overhead kick which lands
a couple of yards wide.
Half time and West Brom are fucking
shite. I mean really fucking shite. No attacking intent and time wasting from
minute 1. That’s all they’ve fucking got
and 10 men behind the ball at all times.
I’m more annoyed with them than I am with our inability to break them
down. Last year JWP scored a free kick
after five minutes and it was an easy game after that but no such luck this
year.
After 10 turgid minutes at the start of
the second half, Pulis gets all tactically innovative and takes off a midfielder
in Barry and brings on another centre back in McAulay and switches to
3-5-2. He’ll dress this up as an
attacking move but it really isn’t when everyone sits so deep. They do create a chance though with a huge
punt forward from Foster is headed on to Krychowiak and he lifts it over the
defence first time to J-Rod who is clear, coming in from the right but luckily,
this is J-Rod 2017, not J-Rod 2014 and his early shot is fucking dreadful and
is closer to the corner flag than the goal.
Gabbi tries to pick a spot from the edge
of the box but just finds Foster again and it really is looking unlikely and
Mauricio decides to bring on a sub and it’s Redmond ahead of Boufal with Romeu
being the man sacrificed. I guess it’s
good that he’s going for it but it’s bizarre to take the main midfield strength
off. Redmond gets booed as he comes onto
the pitch. I really wonder about the mentality
of some people who watch football matches.
Yes, paying your money does give you the right to have a voice but maybe
not the right to be a complete prick.
Redmond’s first contribution is to get
his head up and play a diagonal ball which gets all the way through to Tadic
who just has the keeper to beat. No
chance as Foster comes out and blocks well.
As the ball goes lose, Tadic falls to the ground like he’s been shot
which is beyond pathetic to be honest.
Redmond, who has made a positive impact, then runs at the defence and
curls a right footed shot just over before the next round of subs with 10
minutes to go with Tadic and Long going off for Boufal and Austin.
Then it happens. Firstly Lemina waves a tired leg at a ball
and plays a big airshot. As the ball
bounces down, he collides with Rondon but neither are making an attempt to play
the ball so the ref says play on. Boufal
picks it up about 10 years outside our penalty area and turns straight into
Nyom before spinning the other way and setting off. Chased by Nyom, Boufal goes past Livermore on
half way who can’t be arsed to put a tackle in and then he swerves past Dawson
who for good measure, is taken out by Nyom who just clatters into him. Boufal is thirty yards out now and a drop of the
shoulder and a step-over does for McAulay and he sidefoots it into the corner past Hegazi and
Foster. Pandemonium. It’s one of the great goals, It will be downplayed because he plays for Southampton
but it’s one of the great goals. He’s
picked it up on the edge of his own box, beaten half of the opposition team and
calmly passed it into the net. It’s
brilliant and you won’t see a better goal than that anywhere. Forget goal of the month and goal of the
season – no one will beat that.
We have the small matter of seeing out
the game now but it’s amazingly easy.
West Brom can’t even raise some forward momentum when 1-0 down with five
to go. They really are fucking dreadful. We play on the break and Boufal sets off
again in midfield and beats a couple before sliding a good ball in for Austin
but his first touch around the keeper takes him wide and he can only hit the
outside of the post. The End. 30 seconds of brilliance in amongst 94
minutes of shite but who cares.
What. A. Goal. It is actually, the
definition of genius of football pitch. It's Maradona against England in ‘86,
it's a goal that Messi or Ronaldo might score on the TV but it's been scored in
front of my eyes, by a Southampton player, running towards the goal that I was
sat behind. It really doesn't get any better than that. Boufal has been
excellent in his last two substitute appearances so we knew that he was on form
and confident but that was ridiculous. The funny thing was that as he got to
the edge of the penalty area I just knew he was going to score. After that
moment, he sent the last defender off-balance with a drop of the shoulder and
just rolled into the corner. I had complete confidence in his ability to finish
the job. I sometimes have confidence in Gabbiadini in that situation but no
other Saints player even comes close. A truly brilliant goal which deserved to
win any match. The rest of the game was
pretty shite to be honest but it really doesn’t matter because Sofiane Boufal
scored one of the greatest goals I’ll ever see and we won the game.
The other big bonus of course is that
Tony Pulis and West Brom lost. I have
sympathy for their fans however. Imagine
being a West Brom fan who travels to away games for a moment. You've paid for
your ticket and you've travelled down from the Midlands for a 5.30pm kick off. You could have stayed at home and watched it
on the TV but you’ve decided to pay your hard-earned and support your
team. You've probably got fucking soaked
and you are going to take ages to get home afterwards and your team produces
that. By that I mean ‘fuck all’. No
intent to attack, no passing of the ball.
Just wasting time from the first minute and playing for 0-0 and hoping
somehow that you’ll nick a goal from a set piece. Fuck off Tony – your fans deserve better you
fucking dinosaur. Couldn’t even muster a
token effort when the game plan went completely out of the window and you let a
goal in. If you’re a Baggies fan who
travelled today – I salute you.
Come to think of it, it's not just today
either as they do this on a regular basis. It's not solely for Tony Pulis thing
either as it seems to be the same every fucking time they come to St Mary's. They
were fucking rubbish – all game. I mean we are rubbish on occasions but at
least the players can pass the ball to each other – sure we go sideways and
backwards but at least the players want the ball and can pass it ten yards to
each other and control it. West Brom aren't even capable of that. A
lot of it is of course how Pulis set them up with a back four and three
defensive midfielders in Livermore, Barry and Krychowiak. He's an absolute fucking dinosaur and the
sooner managers of his type are gone from the Premier League, the better. I was quite envious when I saw that West Brom
had signed Krychowiak but I bet he has already joined a long line of players
have joined a Pulis side and wondered what the fucking hell they are doing there.
Pulis Sees One of his Midfielders go Over the Half Way Line
I always thought that J-Rod would be on
a hiding to nothing playing for Pulis.
He did manage to show that we were exactly right to sell him when we
did. Apart from the horrific miss which was only horrific because of how far he
missed by, there was a singlea passage of play that summed him up when a
straight ball got played into his feet and he had Ryan Bertrand behind him and
Bertie merely nudged him the slightest bit and just took the ball off him and
strolled off with it. It was so easy and that summed up post injury J-Rod in a
nutshell.
I can actually forgive us for not being great
in the main part today because of the attitude of the opposition that we were
playing against. We were not without our own problems though. We seemed to
start with Long on the right, Tadic on the left and I think the idea was for
the three forwards to rotate positions but it just ended up looking like a
complete mess and when we needed an out ball to the right wing for example, we
had two left wingers and a centre forward.
The bottom line was that we were causing West Brom very few problems and
not testing out Ben Foster in the West Brom goal. His biggest test was wasting
as much time as he possibly could over every goal kick without getting booked.
I think every fan should write to Ben Foster demanding 33% off the cost of
their ticket back as he wastes about 30 minutes of the 90.
Many expected Boufal to play from the
start today instead of Redmond but Pellegrino still has Redmand ahead of Boufal
in the pecking order which is why he was the first substitute used today. Some
of our more special friends decided to boo when Redmond came onto the pitch. I
don't have words strong enough really to describe people who boo a player
before he's even touched the ball. What next, booing a player in the car park
before the game? What are you actually trying to achieve you fucking idiots. For
the record, Redmond did okay when he came on.
Though I’m not his biggest fan any more,
I'll say that van Dijk had an excellent game with Yoshida and Bertrand also
being very solid. Lemina was once again, our best player and it’s good that
Boufal’s goal takes the spotlight off of just how good Lemina was. On the downside, Fraser looked shit scared of
everything again, Cedric didn't have his best of games and Romeu is still not
playing as well as he did last season but they did enough today. Shane Long and
Dusan Tadic are playing to exactly the same standard as they did last season
which is somewhere between piss poor and average. Tadic had a truly pathetic
moment when he missed a chance and then pulled out a horrific dive to try and
con a penalty out of the referee. Shane
was Shane and no more needs to be said.
Pellegrino changed the side today and
let Redmond out and though I wondered what the fuck he was doing when he took
Romeu off, you have to say that the attacking substitutions worked. The reason we won however was of course, down
to a bit of individual brilliance and hopefully the manager will now see that
he needs the element of unpredictability that Boufal brings to the party. Boufal’s best is better than Tadic’ best or
Redmond’s best so it surely is the managers job to get the best out of
Boufal. We need that and we need more
movement up front. Gabbiadini is the
only one making any runs ahead of the ball.
Long will chase it once it’s been played into a space but we need more
than that.
Match of the Day and the distilled
highlights made the game look not too bad. All of the focus was on the goal and
rightly so but they can't just talk about it being one of the best goals
ever. They have to talk about the
celebration which involved Boufal running to the bench and beating his chest in
front of the manager. According to that complete wanker Philip Neville, this is
a huge negative but I don't think your find a single Saints fan who will
complain about a player scoring a goal like that and then showing a bit of
passion whilst releasing frustration at not being picked on a regular basis. Imagine
being that talented and having to sit and watch week after week as we struggle
to do anything remotely entertaining.
Boufal was basically saying that this is what I can do. Nothing wrong with that.
Elsewhere the weekend was great. Everton got hammered 5-2 at home by Arsenal
which pushes Ronald Koeman closer to the exit door and Everton into the bottom
three. Can’t see Barcelona coming
calling any time soon you snake. It’s
absolutely delicious watching the arrogant fucker crumble and talking of
arrogant fuckers, overrated gurning cheerleader Jurgen Klopp saw his Liverpool
side smashed 4-1 by Spurs and the additional icing on that cake was Dejan Lovren
being complete shite, coughing up two goals and being substituted after half an
hour. I’ll repeat that I do feel a bit sorry
for Lovren – he was good or Saints because he had Schneiderlin and Wanyama in
front of him whilst at Liverpool he has Henderson and Can in front of him and
they’re both shite.
Anyway, enough of laughing at Merseyside,
4 points out of 6 in the little four game spell that we had to pick up points
in. Now we have Brighton away and
Burnley at home. Brighton picked up a
decent win at West Ham so they will be confident and Burnley are higher than us
in the league with a very good away record.
Not easy but it’s time to lay down a marker and we need to do that
before the fixtures start getting properly difficult.
Ronald Koeman with a Barcelona Badge:
He's Good at Photoshop
He's Good at Photoshop
Post Script.
Honest Ron got fired. What goes around comes around. On the plus side, it frees him up for the
Barcelona job and they won’t even have to pay compensation to anyone. I wonder what the top brass at Barcelona will
say when his CV lands on their desk the next time there is a vacancy. It’s hard not to laugh so I’m not going to
try.
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