FA Cup Semi Final - Chelsea 2 Southampton 0

FA Ticket Prices Meant There Were a Few Empty Seats

Semi-final day and a break from our dismal Premier League campaign. It’s a day when we can all dream that the 11 players in red and white will put in a performance and we throw all logic out of the window and actually win a game against a team who are much better than us.  After all, we were 2-0 up against Chelsea a week ago and let’s not dwell on the fact that 10 minutes later we were losing. I spent Sunday morning before we left thinking about how I felt before other showpiece games that we have had. In last years EFL cup final I felt that we were underdogs but that we had a decent chance. In the JPT final I knew we were going to win. Going back further, the final in 2003 against Arsenal, I knew we’d be tough to beat but we were severe underdogs and for the semi-final against Watford I knew that we were going to win. Today, I have to admit I don’t even have a sneaky suspicion that we might win. I basically think we’ve got no chance, so depressing has this season been so far.

Mark Hughes has got to balance being competitive and resting some players, or so he says. Personally, I think he will pick his strongest possible side as you would expect when you are a manager with only a five, or by some miracle, six games left on your contract. Besides, I don’t see that he really has any option unless he wants to play some of the players who clearly don’t give a shit like Boufal or Lemina.

The drive up is mercifully free of traffic jams and we are by the ground by 12:30 and a decent atmosphere is building. We sat down and did a bit of people watching. It is remarkable how many people you recognise who go wandering past. Into the ground and find the seat and we struck gold being directly behind the middle of the goal, 24 rows back. Perfect.... and so it should be for £65 fucking quid.

As an aside, I’m a bit skint at the moment having been made redundant before Christmas and struggling to find work since. I’m very fortunate that my dad offered to pay for me and my son to come to the game as when I saw the prices, I was seriously considering not going. So, thanks Dad. It actually amazes me that The FA are only charging a fiver for the program. Surely they can rip off a few more punters by charging a tenner.

Team news and two strikers with both Charlie and Shane in the starting lineup. The miracle is that Tadic has been dropped to the bench and bloody Lemina is starting alongside Hojbjerg and Romeu in what looks like a 5-3-2 formation. Not much creativity in that midfield but I assumed that the game plan is to dominate the midfield and get the ball out of the wingbacks who are both going to have to have huge games today and actually get forward and not just play in a flat back five. The headline news from Chelsea is that of course, they have picked Giroud so we are going to have to score at least once to take this to extra time.

With a game about to start I have a quick look around and there are plenty of empty seats in the top tiers which is a complete indictment of the shit season that we have been having but mainly, of FA prices. There are three empty seats directly in front of me but as the game kicks off, in come three lads who I just know from looking at the back of their heads, are going to be complete arseholes. The club have left a complimentary flag for everybody to wave was the teams come out and of course that has already been and gone but the three knob heads are all still waving their flags as the game kicks off, on their own. I’m already wondering how I’m going to get through 90 minutes without giving any of them the benefit of my opinion. The ringleader and the one directly in front of me looks like a 5 foot 3 ugly, shandy drinking version of Olivier Giroud so if any of them are getting it, it’s going to be him.

Away we go and Austin appears to be playing deeper than Long but it’s irrelevant for now as Chelsea have the ball and pin us back.  In the league game last week, Hazard was asleep in the first half and then he came alive and ran the game in the second.  The problem is that he looks up for it from the start today and looks very threatening.  He plays a 1-2 with Giroud before firing one just over the angle of post and bar.  I don’t think many appreciated how close it was.  It wasn’t as close as the next effort though.  We actually have an attack of sorts as Romeu carries it forward but he loses it just outside the Chelsea box and Hazard gets it and he’s gone with us trailing in his wake.  He eventually feeds Willian on the right who cuts inside Bertrand before shooting over McCarthy, off the bar and over.

We manage to establish some sort of holding pattern afterwards and I find myself watching the clock a bit.  We’ve made 20 minutes without conceding, now we’ve made 30 etc.  We are not doing a thing going forward.  When we get the ball and avoid the immediate attempts to win it back, we go sideways and whoever gets it is looking for a forward runner but no one is making any, especially Lemina who is playing on the right of the three in midfield but is not showing for Cedric to pass to at all and not getting ahead of him so the full back can play it down the line.  Hojbjerg is bossing players about in midfield, making sure that they hold their positions and trying to get Lemina to actually contribute anything.  Pierre is a bit like a proper captain.  He should be captain.  Bednarek has surprised me – he looks decent, calm on the ball and not afraid to get stuck into Giroud when the opportunity presents itself.

As the half goes on I begin to notice a problem and it’s Martin Atkinson.  Yellow cards start getting handed out and they’re all to us.  Kante can foul people at will and nothing is given whereas every tackle we make is a booking.  Mind you, Yoshida trashing through someone after the ball had long gone didn’t leave him with much option but every 50/50 is going their way.  Half time.

I’ll take that – 45 minutes and we’re not behind.  My hope for the game was that we would still be in it at half time and we are.  The game plan would have been to keep it tight and stay in the game and then try and nick something in the second half so so far so good.  It wasn’t the most entertaining but it’ll do.  The shandy boys have returned to eat their gourmet pizza which they missed 10 minutes of the first half to go and buy.  They spent some of the remaining time when they were actually in the ground turned round the wrong way taking selfies.  Arseholes.

Away we go for the start of the second half and a ball forward from Chelsea.  Hazard picks it out of the sky with superb control and find Giroud in the penalty area.  Lemina slides in, misses the tackle, Yoshida slides in, misses and Giroud twists past the flailing bodies of Cedric, Bednarek and McCarthy and pokes it into the net.  For fucks sake.  How the fuck did we allow him to do that?  Bastard!  Well, we did know that he was going to score at some point.

Giroud in 'Goal Against Southampton' Shocker!

Our need to be more expansive was of course going to bring problems and straight away, we lose it to Willian and he finds Hazard who curls one just wide of the far post.  He’s a wonderful footballer and you just have to admire it sometimes.  We are getting a foothold now and have a great chance as Hoedt pings in a good ball to Austin who steps over it and Shane just has Caballero to beat.  Guess what happens?  Instead of sidefooting it first time like 99% of strikers would have done, he tries to take a touch and go round the keeper and the touch goes straight out for a goal kick.  That was shit.  Real shit.  It’s like the Leicester ‘clowns feet’ incident.  The decision to try and do what he did was fucking ridiculous and only matched in it’s ridiculousness by the execution.

He’s put out of his misery soon after with Redmond and Tadic coming on for Shane and Hojbjerg.  Lemina has shown signs of life since half time but it doesn’t sit well with me that he’s still on and one of our best players is off.  The two who have come on can be decent but more often than not are maddeningly inconsistent but with only having half an hour, they both seem keen to have an impact.  We are pinning Chelsea back a bit now and Tadic picks it up on the left after decent move, finds Redmond who breaks a tackle and smashes it from the edge of the box and it moves all over the place and I’m up celebrating the goal and Caballero somehow and incredibly luckily, sits on it and it squirts off some part of his anatomy and goes wide.  Fuck off!!!  From the corner, Romeu heads it up in the air and it comes down on Caballero right on the goal line and with Austin in attendance he drops it over the line and claws it out.  It looks over the line and there’s barely been a challenge by Austin.  For a microsecond it looks like Atkinson has given the goal as he points to the centre but no – with his other hand he’s making exaggerated gestures that it’s a free kick to the keeper.

Charlie in Vicious Goalkeeper Assault

The main Shandy boy thinks it’s a good idea to pick up his flag and start waving it around.  As he’s older than 7 and everyone is pissed off it is not a good idea.  A voice from behind me asking if the flag can be put down is enough for me…”I didn’t come here to look through your fucking flag”.  What we get next is another of the Shandy boys making witty comments like “we can’t be enjoying ourselves, that would never do”.  So amusing… pricks!

Anyway, you just know that Chelsea are going to capitalize on the Austin escape and score and they have a go with McCarthy making a decent save from Hazard and then Hazard is at it again, firing over a cross which Cedric lashes at in the manner of a park player rather than a Euro winner and it smashes off Yoshida and out for a corner.  We’re too nice.  Everyone should have been in Cedric’s face giving him a bollocking for what was an appalling piece of play.

Gabbiadini is thrown on as Bednarek is sacrificed and Morata is on for Giroud and guess which sub has the greater impact?  Pedro, another sub, puts over a cross from our left and there’s Morata with a  free header at the back post to score a goal that we’ve seen many times.  Hoedt appears to be trying to lean on Morata to manoeuvre him out of the way to allow the ball to go past but he fucks it up and ends up doing nothing.

We are keeping playing despite being 2-0 down but some can’t be arsed.  Lemina is in full ‘walking football’ mode now and Cedric again, rather than make a tackle or get into a position where he might have to take a tackle, smashes it anywhere straight across the pitch and it luckily falls to Tadic.  On it goes to Bertrand and a decent low cross which is met by Austin beyond the back post and his first time shot across the goal pings off the post and out.  Not happening.

The game ends with all eyes on Eden Hazard as they should be.  Firstly he breaks and finds Morata who beats McCarthy only for Hoedt to get it off the line really well.  Then Hazard jinks in and fires in a low cross which Hoedt slices goalwards for McCarthy to smother.  The good news is that the Shandy boys have gone.

Game over and we stick around and clap the players who can be bothered to come over. My personal applause are for about half of them.  I’m not really disappointed as the result is more or less exactly what I expected and the game panned out in more or less exactly the way I expected it to as well. Tight first half, concede a goal, get some shit decisions off of the referee, concede another goal, lose. It was all a bit predictable.

Players who came out in credit today were McCarthy, Bednarek, Yoshida and Hoedt.   Hoedt will get some deserved stick for the Morata goal but overall I thought he was ok.  It’s a classic performance from a Saints centre half – play well for nearly all of the game but then a lapse… every game.  Romeu battled hard in midfield and Hojbjerg was very unlucky to be substituted. Austin tried hard and was our main goal threat as usual and Redmond was very good when he came on and was very unlucky not to score when Caballero found a new part of his body to save that shot with that he didn’t have a fucking clue about.

As for the others, well Cedric was fucking gash as he always is, frequently wellying the ball anywhere and shitting himself any time and opponent went anywhere near him. Let’s not forget that our European champion was up against a kid playing about his second game for Chelsea and he didn’t try and impose himself on him once. He is a fucking waste of time. Bertrand almost totally failed to provide any attacking impetus down the left hand side and looked like he was completely playing within himself. Jay-Z himself, Mario Lemina was a fucking disgrace. It actually makes me angry that this useless fucker was selected to represent Southampton at Wembley.  I was born in the city, I live here, this is the team representing me and we’ve got this guy representing me.  Why not select someone who it would actually mean something to like JWP or Sam McQueen. For the first 45 minutes, Mr Z just existed and did absolutely fuck all, didn’t make any runs and may as well not have been there. He obviously got a bit of a bollocking at half-time so for 20 minutes he tried but for the last 25 he just jogged about as if he was injured, only he wasn’t. He doesn’t give a fuck about you, me or anyone else who paid to go and watch him today. He doesn’t give a fuck about the club, the city or any of his team mates who do actually care. He only cares about himself and his Fanny and his brand and he’s a complete waster. Just to clarify, I like Jay-Z, the real one. He is brilliant at his day job and deserves everything he gets in life unlike the fucking arsehole wannabe playing for Southampton.

I bet Shane Long wishes that he had some of Lemina’s talent. If he had any of his talent along with his own work ethic then we would have a good striker on our hands. However, Shane was dreadful all day from the moment he started lashing balls over the bar during shooting practice in the warm-up until when he left the field of pay having been mercifully substituted.  If he can’t hit the target in the warm up with no defenders, why does anyone think he’ll be any different once the game starts?

I still think it was a good formation that was picked by Hughes which was to try and give us more attacking threat than when we have played 5-4-1 recently and the only thing that I would have changed would have been picking JWP ahead of that fucking arsehole Lemina. Despite making a solid midfield three, we didn’t get a foothold in the game to provide any basis for getting forward. This was mainly because there were only two of three who were prepared to put a shift in. With Bertrand basically playing like he’s got the World Cup in mind, it is down to Hojbjerg midfield to be the only one who was looking to organise the team. He is one who I would be genuinely disappointed to lose in the summer. Hughes sacrificed the creativity (I use that term loosely) of Tadic to get a second striker on the pitch and you could see the logic but it didn’t quite work because of individual failings and attitude.

Chelsea deserved to win the game. We rode our luck in the first half to keep them out when Willian hit the bar but the whole match was the Eden Hazard show. He was absolutely brilliant. I have a feeling that he probably wants to move on from Chelsea and onto one of the huge European clubs but the way he’s doing it is by playing as if his life depended on it, unlike our players who want to move who are basically just killing time until the summer when they feel they will get one by default. It probably makes it easier to secure move if your team is in the Championship so high why bother. We all knew that Giroud would score today but I feel that he got a bit lucky because he couldn’t possibly have known where all the challenges were coming from but to weave past four players in a goalkeeper and score in that tight a space looks brilliant and fair play to the guy.

We have to mention the referee Martin Atkinson and the mythical rub of the green which we never get against the big clubs. I thought Atkinson was dreadful in the first half, giving Chelsea every 50-50 decision and allowing Kante to foul people at will and get away with it. In the second half he took it to a new level, failing to book Giroud for exactly the same offence that Yoshida had committed earlier in the first half and then we had the controversy over the goal not given to Charlie Austin. Because of the way games are refereed, I am not remotely surprised that the goalkeeper got away with it but when you see the replay it is embarrassing that that can be given as a free-kick. He barely touched him, the ball was over the line and even though he had it available, Atkinson didn’t look at VAR. Even if he had though, he still would’ve given the foul so it’s a moot point really but at least we would have at some level felt like we got a fair trial and he at least had a look at it, whereas we come away again thinking that the referee is just given all the big decisions to the Big team. We were unlucky with Austin’s shot that hit the post and we were also unlucky with Caballero’s save from Redmond. To beat teams like Chelsea you need a lot of things to go your way and you need a strong performance from the referee and we didn’t have any of that.

Every time I go to Wembley I think the same thing. As someone who remembers the original ground and the Twin Towers and all the history that came with it, the walk up Wembley Way to the ground was fantastic and that is not there any more. The whole outside of the ground is quite unremarkable and it’s similar to any other huge football ground. To be honest, the Emirates at Arsenal looks better from the outside. I am really not fussed about the arch either. I know it’s the centrepiece of the ground but it just seems like something someone thought was a good idea at the time. Where Wembley wins is once you get in sight of the pitch but then you get the shandy drinking arseholes who are part of the reason why these big games can sometimes be a bit shit. People with no regard for other fans around them who think they are the funniest and most entertaining part of the day. 

Then we have the ticket prices. I sat in category B which was £65 for an adult ticket with the concession tickets that my son and my dad had being £55 each.  That is ridiculously expensive for semi-final but as we were waiting in the queue at Wembley Park tube, I was looking at Twitter and saw that the same ticket for the final will cost £115.  The FA are not fit for purpose. How dare they use the phrase “the magic of the FA Cup“ in any advertising that they do. They have totally killed what was once the most prestigious cup competition in the world. There is no magic aside from in the early rounds.  Once you’re past those there is just corporate greed and contrary to watch Gordon Gecko says, greed is not good. Greed will eventually kill everything. The FA have managed, for probably the first time in my football supporting life to actually have the thought that in some ways, I’m glad we fucking lost.

Also whilst in the queue, there was some gentle banter going on between Saints and Chelsea fans and a group of Chelsea lads decided to chant about us going down. It is hardly news lads. Of course we are going down. When we got to the platform, we were stood next to a family of Chelsea fans, mum and dad and four kids Aged from about 5 to 12. That’ll be about £600 if you want to go and watch the final.

On to the final four games of the season. Results went our way again this weekend with Stoke failing to win having led at home to Burnley and Swansea getting smashed by Manchester City. Bournemouth at St Mary‘s is next and this really is the point of no return. I can’t see us winning this game and I certainly can’t see us not losing to Swansea when it comes to a do or die relegation battle. We have too many players who just don’t give a fuck and I’m beginning to think that we will have a better chance if we just drew a line now under all the players who wouldn’t want to play for us in the Championship and didn’t pick any of them.

Onwards.