Saints Give Wolf of Wall Street a Run for It's Money
The Wolf of Wall Street has a 'Fuck' Count of 569 in 180 minutes - just over 3 a minute.
This blog will take about 5 minutes to read so it only needs 15 or 16. Easy.
After a couple of weeks off after the Wigan cup game due to
the international break, we rock up at another must win game at West Ham and
the Taxpayer Bowl. West Ham of course have been in complete crisis with fans
invading the pitch in protest at the Dildo Bros and Karren Brady ripping the
soul out of the club and bleeding the club dry. Also, they have been pretty
shite on the pitch, so shite in fact that they decided to employ David Moyes as
their new manager and so shite that they are only two points ahead of us and as
you know, we have been completely shite. So, the task for Saints today is to
win this game and put West Ham in the relegation zone instead of ourselves.
It’s yet another must win game.
There are some players will have been away on international duty, today represents a chance to see what our team is like now that Mark Hughes has got his feet under the table and had a chance to work with them for a couple of weeks. Hopefully, this will be unrecognisable from our last away game in the Premier League which was the utter abortion at Newcastle which ultimately did for Mauricio Pellegrino. The Wigan game had had some encouraging aspects, not least the attacking intent but we did look wide open at times.
When the 11 names were announced, it looked like quite a decent line-up with the regular back four, Lemina and Hojbjerg anchoring the midfield and a return for Charlie Austin upfront to replace the floundering Guido Carrillo. Nathan Redmond was picked on the wing in place of Boufal and bloody Tadic got yet another opportunity. Gabbiadini was also present, I assume to play in the number 10 role.
The game kicks off and we are absolutely playing 4-4-2 with Gabbiadini right up top alongside Austin. The trouble was straightaway, that we had no possession of the ball whatsoever and West Ham looks quicker into every challenge and to every second ball. Cedric has started like a drain and gives the ball away to Masuaku who feeds Antonio who hits it and sees it ping off of Hoedt and behind. Antonio is one who will doubtless give us problems but not today as he’s down and out and holding his hamstring and on comes Fernandes.
There are some players will have been away on international duty, today represents a chance to see what our team is like now that Mark Hughes has got his feet under the table and had a chance to work with them for a couple of weeks. Hopefully, this will be unrecognisable from our last away game in the Premier League which was the utter abortion at Newcastle which ultimately did for Mauricio Pellegrino. The Wigan game had had some encouraging aspects, not least the attacking intent but we did look wide open at times.
When the 11 names were announced, it looked like quite a decent line-up with the regular back four, Lemina and Hojbjerg anchoring the midfield and a return for Charlie Austin upfront to replace the floundering Guido Carrillo. Nathan Redmond was picked on the wing in place of Boufal and bloody Tadic got yet another opportunity. Gabbiadini was also present, I assume to play in the number 10 role.
The game kicks off and we are absolutely playing 4-4-2 with Gabbiadini right up top alongside Austin. The trouble was straightaway, that we had no possession of the ball whatsoever and West Ham looks quicker into every challenge and to every second ball. Cedric has started like a drain and gives the ball away to Masuaku who feeds Antonio who hits it and sees it ping off of Hoedt and behind. Antonio is one who will doubtless give us problems but not today as he’s down and out and holding his hamstring and on comes Fernandes.
Saints create their first opening but it falls to Tadic to
do his job and pick out a striker but his cross, under no pressure, balloons up
in the air and West Ham needlessly put it out for a corner. With no JWP it’s down to Tadic to take the
corner from the right and he plays a 1-2 with Austin before finding Lemina on
the edge of the box. No doubt, fresh
from his triumph in the Sure Pressure Challenge, Lemina had visions of spanking
one in the top corner but instead he pissed about with it, found himself under
pressure and lost it. One pass and
Fernandes is away up the right with all our defenders up front for the corner
that never arrived. He gallops to the
edge of the box before pulling it back to Joao Mario who is on the edge of the
box with no Saints player in the same fucking post code. He can even afford a shit bobbly touch before
lashing it past Hojbjerg’s lunge (at least he tried to get back) and screaming
past McCarthy for 1-0. Fuck sake.
Our response is to resolutely give the ball away and
Arnautovic cuts through the ring of steel that is Cedric and Stephens and
misses an absolute sitter, placing it wide of the far post with McCarthy sat on
the ground. You feel like it should be a
wake up call but you know it isn’t going to be.
We look as bad as the Newcastle game – absolute gutless wankers – and
we’ve only been playing 10 minutes.
As we try and work it out of defence, Hoedt gives Hojbjerg a hospital pass but instead of
lashing it out and bollocking him, Pierre tries to make something of it and
loses it. Fernandes again picks it up
and curls in a crosd from our left and Arnautovic is totally free as the cross
sails over Stephens head who should be marking him. Header, saved, toe poke, goal, 2-0, fuck
off. Hoedt and Hojbjerg have combined to
give it away, Cedric and Stephens have combined to let Arnautovic have a free
header and a rebound. Pathetic.
West Ham are now playing keep ball. Masuaku – he who has just come back from a
spitting ban – is looking like a world beater as Cedric and Tadic get close
enough to make him swerve round them but not close enough to actually put a
fucking tackle in. It’s an embarrassing
and shameful display from two international footballers who clearly don’t give
a fuck.
The rest of the half is shit and we create nothing and then Lemina
loses it again and Masuaku carries it this time, pings a ball over from the
left and there’s Arnautovic who has peeled off the back of Hoedt who has no
idea that he’s there and he rams it in for 3-0.
Game over – embarrassing.
I can only hope Mark Hughes turned the air blue at half
time. If it was down to me I’d make
three subs straight away and take off the three most useless twats. Cedric, Lemina and Tadic would win, just
ahead of stiff competition from Steohens, Hoedt, Gabbiadini, Bertrand and
Redmond. Gabbiadini has touched the ball
about 3 times at the most but has he dropped deep to try and get the ball? –
has he bollocks. In the event, it’s just
Gabbiadini who gets hauled off and Shane Long comes on. For some perverse reason it makes sense to
bring on the most technically ungifted player we’ve had for years.
The second half starts and it’s clear that West Ham know
they’ve won as they barely raise a leg.
Long is running about and wins a header to set up Tadic who is clean
through but of course he checks back, finds Austin whose shot is blocked and
over. Oh look there’s Joe Hart. Hart could be counting the flecks of dandruff
he’s got individually for all he has to do.
Long again tees up Austin and he plays a comical air shot
before finding his balance again and seeing his shot blocked once more. Look at those defenders actually
defending….unlike fucking Cedric who is miles out of position as his Poruguese
mate Joao Mario has all the time in the world to tee up Arnautovic who puts it
just wide.
Boufal is on for Redmond who has been fucking useless but
the useless quota is retained with Carrillo coming on for Austin who is blowing
out of his arse. The final action of the
game is Mario floating a free kick from the right to the edge of the box and
Cresswell acrobatically volleying against the bar and over. 4-0 would have been about right.
What annoys me most is that we’ve got these fancy players
who have some skills and have some presence but they don’t have any heart and
they don’t have any guts and they don’t have any collective will to win.
Take Mario Lemina for example. He is one of these wankers who is too concerned about his fucking brand to actually do the basics of being a central midfielder in the Premier league. Every team knows that you are quite vulnerable from your own corner if you don’t get it right and that’s twice in two league matches that he’s decided to be some sort of hero when we had everyone in front of him, lost the ball and we ended up conceding a goal. Fucking wanker. Still, his girlfriend looks nice on Instagram and his model photographs win him a legion of new fans every week.
Cedric. I’m sure there were some decent footballers called Cedric back in the 50s and they came from places like Yorkshire and were tough bastards. They didn’t ponce around on the football pitch or pose around on social media in spray tight shirts looking like a member of a fucking boy band. That guy has been fucking useless this season. He has all the physicality of a piece of wet fucking lettuce and he shits himself every time an opponent comes near him and just crashes the ball 3 miles up the pitch. There’s always one player in the team that wins a major trophy who is actually fucking shit and we’ve got him.
Wesley Hoedt. We signed him from Lazio, an Italian club with a really good European pedigree and what we’ve got. A 6 foot 4 string-bean sack of shit. Another one totally concerned with his personal brand putting out videos of him looking like he is some sort of ferocious monster centre back. He’s not, he’s a fucking wanker. He can’t do the basics, he can’t track a runner and in our league for some reason he can’t win a fucking header despite having about 95% aerial fucking duels win success in the Italian league. The Italian league must have a load of 5 foot 6 strikers. He can block you on fucking Twitter If you give him the slightest bit of criticism but he can’t block the run of the striker he is supposed to be marking. Ice skating giraffe. Partnering him with Jack Stephens is fucking hilarious. Stephens has to be the worst centre back in the air in Premier League history since Titus Bramble. As I’ve said many times before, it’s not Jack’s fault he’s playing in the Premier League, he just simply isn’t good enough. A fourth choice centre back at best. He would maybe okay in a three-man defence but as part of a centre back pairing, he is an absolute fucking nightmare.
Nathan Redmond gave quite good interview in the week and there was a bit of positivity from it. You would think he would feel quite good about himself going into the West Ham game but once he got on the pitch he was fucking garbage. When you play as the wide man in a 4-4-2 formation you have to be getting crosses into the box you cannot be fucking around trying to work the ball on to your good foot getting crowded out but that is what he did. He contributed absolutely fuck all. He tried but he was shit.
On the other wing of course, we had Dusan Tadic. It was put to me on social media the other day that the reason that Tadic doesn’t get a hard time from the fans it’s because he played well for the first two seasons. I think that if you dig into those first two seasons they were long periods of time were he didn’t actually do anything but I can say without fear of contradiction that he has done more or less fuck all for the last two seasons. He has about one decent moment something like every 15 games which for a Premier League footballer is simply not enough. Totally predictable for another game of pass by without him doing a fucking thing and he seems to have the cloak of invisibility when it comes to the manager standing there looking round for the worst player to substitute him. Absolutely stealing a fucking living for a long period of time. We moved him around today so he could be shit in more than just one position. He came out in the media after the game and said it wasn’t good enough. Fuck off. The main culprit in not giving a shit speaking out just means he’s trying to cover his arse to make it look like he cares. Tosser. And then there was that line that he came out with about it being impossible to win a game when you are two nil down. Maybe lost in translation a bit there but even so, just fuck off.
Gabbiadini did absolutely fuck all. He did his usual and made lots of runs and never got the ball but did he attempt to play with any brain at all and drop it to midfield to maybe help us get something going. He just ran around upfront, must’ve touched the ball about three times and got substituted. Does he really want to be here? I don’t think so. Is he the sort of player you want in the relegation battle? I don’t think so.
Pellegrino was painfully inept as we all know but he’s gone now so these wankers haven’t got anyone to hide behind they have to get out of the pitch and absolutely fucking do it because no one else is going to do it and no amount of branding on social media or to tight fucking shirts or model girlfriends is going to alter the fact that if today is the best you can do out on the pitch then we are going to get relegated and we have a wasted a stupid amount of money buying tickets to watch you useless bastards at Wembley in a couple of weeks. It’s a simple as that. The players probably don’t give a fuck as they know they’ll be moving on and the only good thing that will come of our inevitable relegation is getting rid of some of these fancy wankers.
What gets me is that it doesn’t take too much to forgive the twats. Cedric scores a goal at Wigan and for a while we think he’s half decent despite the logical side of your brain knowing full well that he is a fancy fucking wanker. Lemina scores a decent goal and we forget for a while that he is incredibly inconsistent. Tadic… actually no forget that one.
I think that ultimately, Mark Hughes got it wrong today with a 4-4-2 formation. When I saw the 11 I assumed that Gabbiadini would play deeper and drop into midfield when we didn’t have the ball. In the event he played right up with Austin so that puts pressure on the midfield 4 to cover the ground in the middle and on the wingers to get the ball in. All this is obvious and I’m sure the players knew but they were just fucking useless. The goals we let in we’re all preventable and down to individual players not doing their job properly. Lemina on the first goal, Hoedt, Hojbjerg and Stephens on the second, Cedric and Hoedt on the third. We play a formation which gives us two players in the box and how many shots do we have on target? Nil, none, nada, zip, fuck all. It is not as if the strikers missed chances. They never got the ball because of the inadequacies of the players behind them.
What can the manager do? Seriously? If we play any of the system is not rely on having one striker on his own upfront, we don’t have a striker who is suitable for that role. Carrillo it’s probably the most suitable but he just isn’t good enough. Austin doesn’t have the pace or the touch to play up on his own, Gabbiadini doesn’t have a physical presence and Shane Long doesn’t have the footballing ability. If we play a 4-4-2 formation then we don’t have the central midfielders to cover the ground and we have lightweight, fancy wingers who don’t offer enough defensively. If we are going to play a four in midfield and it really has to be McQueen, Romeu, Hojbjerg and JWP. Not very exciting and not very creative but those four you at least have a chance of not getting ripped apart. We could play with three centre backs but we haven’t really got even one centre back who is good enough to consistently play well at this level.
All of these shortcomings can be laid firmly at the door of Les Reed, The self-proclaimed King of Football at Southampton FC. The leaders that we had at the end of Ronald Koeman’s last season have all gone. Graziano Pelle was the main man in attack who could play upfront on his own. Victor Wanyama was the main man in midfield and at the back we had Jose Fonte and Virgil Van Dijk. We have had three goes at replacing Graziano in Austin, Gabbiadini and now Carrillo and none of them have done half the job. We have basically replaced Fonte with Hoedt and we haven’t replaced van Dijk, other than with Jan Bednarek who has never played a league game and probably never will... oh yes we’ve promoted Jack Stephens from squad player to first team regular and he can’t head the ball. We have a lot of money in the bank though after the January transfer window so everything is cool.
The only good news on a day like this is that everyone else lost so these gutless bunch of pathetic wankers are going to have another chance. The trouble is that now the chances come against Arsenal and against Chelsea in our next two league games. The “winnable” games are running out and ironically, it could well be a home game against Bournemouth that consigns us to the dustbin of Championship football where we deserve to be. Hughes said in his post match interview that he learned a lot about the players that he has and I think we can safely assume that Hughes will act on what he’s learned, unlike Pellegrino who said he learned and then did nothing. Flaky lightweight players like Boufal, Tadic and Redmond don’t keep you up, it’s players like Romeu, Hojbjerg, McQueen, JWP and Yoshida. It may not sound like much but these are the closest we have the likes of Francis Benali, Jason Dodd, Neil Maddison, Tommy Widdrington, David Hughes, Chris Marsden. None of them were great players but the sort of players you need in a relegation battle.
If you believe that sort of stuff, Easter was the time when someone rose from the dead. Saints could’ve made The first inroads at digging ourselves out of the grave but we’ve just taken the shovel and kept on digging down.
Take Mario Lemina for example. He is one of these wankers who is too concerned about his fucking brand to actually do the basics of being a central midfielder in the Premier league. Every team knows that you are quite vulnerable from your own corner if you don’t get it right and that’s twice in two league matches that he’s decided to be some sort of hero when we had everyone in front of him, lost the ball and we ended up conceding a goal. Fucking wanker. Still, his girlfriend looks nice on Instagram and his model photographs win him a legion of new fans every week.
Cedric. I’m sure there were some decent footballers called Cedric back in the 50s and they came from places like Yorkshire and were tough bastards. They didn’t ponce around on the football pitch or pose around on social media in spray tight shirts looking like a member of a fucking boy band. That guy has been fucking useless this season. He has all the physicality of a piece of wet fucking lettuce and he shits himself every time an opponent comes near him and just crashes the ball 3 miles up the pitch. There’s always one player in the team that wins a major trophy who is actually fucking shit and we’ve got him.
Wesley Hoedt. We signed him from Lazio, an Italian club with a really good European pedigree and what we’ve got. A 6 foot 4 string-bean sack of shit. Another one totally concerned with his personal brand putting out videos of him looking like he is some sort of ferocious monster centre back. He’s not, he’s a fucking wanker. He can’t do the basics, he can’t track a runner and in our league for some reason he can’t win a fucking header despite having about 95% aerial fucking duels win success in the Italian league. The Italian league must have a load of 5 foot 6 strikers. He can block you on fucking Twitter If you give him the slightest bit of criticism but he can’t block the run of the striker he is supposed to be marking. Ice skating giraffe. Partnering him with Jack Stephens is fucking hilarious. Stephens has to be the worst centre back in the air in Premier League history since Titus Bramble. As I’ve said many times before, it’s not Jack’s fault he’s playing in the Premier League, he just simply isn’t good enough. A fourth choice centre back at best. He would maybe okay in a three-man defence but as part of a centre back pairing, he is an absolute fucking nightmare.
Nathan Redmond gave quite good interview in the week and there was a bit of positivity from it. You would think he would feel quite good about himself going into the West Ham game but once he got on the pitch he was fucking garbage. When you play as the wide man in a 4-4-2 formation you have to be getting crosses into the box you cannot be fucking around trying to work the ball on to your good foot getting crowded out but that is what he did. He contributed absolutely fuck all. He tried but he was shit.
On the other wing of course, we had Dusan Tadic. It was put to me on social media the other day that the reason that Tadic doesn’t get a hard time from the fans it’s because he played well for the first two seasons. I think that if you dig into those first two seasons they were long periods of time were he didn’t actually do anything but I can say without fear of contradiction that he has done more or less fuck all for the last two seasons. He has about one decent moment something like every 15 games which for a Premier League footballer is simply not enough. Totally predictable for another game of pass by without him doing a fucking thing and he seems to have the cloak of invisibility when it comes to the manager standing there looking round for the worst player to substitute him. Absolutely stealing a fucking living for a long period of time. We moved him around today so he could be shit in more than just one position. He came out in the media after the game and said it wasn’t good enough. Fuck off. The main culprit in not giving a shit speaking out just means he’s trying to cover his arse to make it look like he cares. Tosser. And then there was that line that he came out with about it being impossible to win a game when you are two nil down. Maybe lost in translation a bit there but even so, just fuck off.
Gabbiadini did absolutely fuck all. He did his usual and made lots of runs and never got the ball but did he attempt to play with any brain at all and drop it to midfield to maybe help us get something going. He just ran around upfront, must’ve touched the ball about three times and got substituted. Does he really want to be here? I don’t think so. Is he the sort of player you want in the relegation battle? I don’t think so.
Pellegrino was painfully inept as we all know but he’s gone now so these wankers haven’t got anyone to hide behind they have to get out of the pitch and absolutely fucking do it because no one else is going to do it and no amount of branding on social media or to tight fucking shirts or model girlfriends is going to alter the fact that if today is the best you can do out on the pitch then we are going to get relegated and we have a wasted a stupid amount of money buying tickets to watch you useless bastards at Wembley in a couple of weeks. It’s a simple as that. The players probably don’t give a fuck as they know they’ll be moving on and the only good thing that will come of our inevitable relegation is getting rid of some of these fancy wankers.
What gets me is that it doesn’t take too much to forgive the twats. Cedric scores a goal at Wigan and for a while we think he’s half decent despite the logical side of your brain knowing full well that he is a fancy fucking wanker. Lemina scores a decent goal and we forget for a while that he is incredibly inconsistent. Tadic… actually no forget that one.
I think that ultimately, Mark Hughes got it wrong today with a 4-4-2 formation. When I saw the 11 I assumed that Gabbiadini would play deeper and drop into midfield when we didn’t have the ball. In the event he played right up with Austin so that puts pressure on the midfield 4 to cover the ground in the middle and on the wingers to get the ball in. All this is obvious and I’m sure the players knew but they were just fucking useless. The goals we let in we’re all preventable and down to individual players not doing their job properly. Lemina on the first goal, Hoedt, Hojbjerg and Stephens on the second, Cedric and Hoedt on the third. We play a formation which gives us two players in the box and how many shots do we have on target? Nil, none, nada, zip, fuck all. It is not as if the strikers missed chances. They never got the ball because of the inadequacies of the players behind them.
What can the manager do? Seriously? If we play any of the system is not rely on having one striker on his own upfront, we don’t have a striker who is suitable for that role. Carrillo it’s probably the most suitable but he just isn’t good enough. Austin doesn’t have the pace or the touch to play up on his own, Gabbiadini doesn’t have a physical presence and Shane Long doesn’t have the footballing ability. If we play a 4-4-2 formation then we don’t have the central midfielders to cover the ground and we have lightweight, fancy wingers who don’t offer enough defensively. If we are going to play a four in midfield and it really has to be McQueen, Romeu, Hojbjerg and JWP. Not very exciting and not very creative but those four you at least have a chance of not getting ripped apart. We could play with three centre backs but we haven’t really got even one centre back who is good enough to consistently play well at this level.
All of these shortcomings can be laid firmly at the door of Les Reed, The self-proclaimed King of Football at Southampton FC. The leaders that we had at the end of Ronald Koeman’s last season have all gone. Graziano Pelle was the main man in attack who could play upfront on his own. Victor Wanyama was the main man in midfield and at the back we had Jose Fonte and Virgil Van Dijk. We have had three goes at replacing Graziano in Austin, Gabbiadini and now Carrillo and none of them have done half the job. We have basically replaced Fonte with Hoedt and we haven’t replaced van Dijk, other than with Jan Bednarek who has never played a league game and probably never will... oh yes we’ve promoted Jack Stephens from squad player to first team regular and he can’t head the ball. We have a lot of money in the bank though after the January transfer window so everything is cool.
The only good news on a day like this is that everyone else lost so these gutless bunch of pathetic wankers are going to have another chance. The trouble is that now the chances come against Arsenal and against Chelsea in our next two league games. The “winnable” games are running out and ironically, it could well be a home game against Bournemouth that consigns us to the dustbin of Championship football where we deserve to be. Hughes said in his post match interview that he learned a lot about the players that he has and I think we can safely assume that Hughes will act on what he’s learned, unlike Pellegrino who said he learned and then did nothing. Flaky lightweight players like Boufal, Tadic and Redmond don’t keep you up, it’s players like Romeu, Hojbjerg, McQueen, JWP and Yoshida. It may not sound like much but these are the closest we have the likes of Francis Benali, Jason Dodd, Neil Maddison, Tommy Widdrington, David Hughes, Chris Marsden. None of them were great players but the sort of players you need in a relegation battle.
If you believe that sort of stuff, Easter was the time when someone rose from the dead. Saints could’ve made The first inroads at digging ourselves out of the grave but we’ve just taken the shovel and kept on digging down.
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