Do Look Back in Anger - Season Summary Part 2 - January - May

Do Look Back in Anger - Season Summary Part 2 - January - May 2018

A few paragraphs from the blogs on every game we played this season.

Spoiler: Most of it was shit.

If you got through Part 1 without feeling the need to lie down, .....  Part 2

JANUARY 2018

Southampton 1 Crystal Palace 2

If Claude sacking was based on a feeling then I do wonder how he (Ralph) cannot have a feeling that Mauricio Pellegrino is totally out of his depth and/or a fucking idiot.

For the rest of the half we don’t do much.  Palace are fucking woeful but we seem content to just sit there and let the half play out.  You know because of this manager that this is exactly what he wants us to do.  Just sit back, be passive and try and win 1-0… against a very average side at home.

With us struggling to get anything going forward, and losing the midfield battle and losing in the physicality stakes, Pellegrino decides to match up Palace with 4-4-2, even though we don’t have the players to do this, especially when you take Hojbjerg off who a) has been our best midfielder by a mile and b) is one of the physical players

When it was 1-1, there was only one team that was going to go in front and they weren’t playing in red and white and once Palace went in front, there was no way on Gods green Earth that we were going to score. The managers part in this was to ensure that it happened, firstly by a lack of activity before the Palace equaliser and then some absolutely brainless shit once they scored.

Subsequently, we end up playing 4-4-2 with Redmond on to eventually put Tadic out of his misery and it’s the same four midfielders, Redmond, Romeu, Davis and Boufal that played when we went 4-4-2 against Burnley and Pellegrino said afterwards, that it doesn’t work with those four players because three of them are too small. Why not try it again then you fucking idiot.

Ralph can put as much Shiny Happy Motivational Bollockspeak as he likes around that and it won’t change a thing and nor will Virgil not being here any more.  Over to you Les – you have £75 million to spend and I suggest you do it quickly.  The only job to do before that is to get rid of the useless manager.

FA Cup 3rd Round - Fulham 0 Southampton 1

After several attempts, it appears the Pellegrino finally got what he wanted which was to score a goal in the first half and then defend and keep a clean sheet in the second half. It’s a shame we had to play against the Championship side in order to do it.

The negative from this game for me is that we decided to sit back again after an hour and spent the last half an hour just containing a very limited Fulham side and quite often, banging the ball forward to nobody

Watford 2 Southampton 2

We appear to be after a striker called Guido Carrillo who has played for Pellegrino before.  Carrillo might be a good player but the most worrying thing about this is that this implies Pellegrino is here to stay.

Shane puts on the burners and is gone, squaring to Tadic in the middle who superbly tees up the arriving JWP and our main goalscoring threat buries it under Gomes to put us 2-0 up.  What the fuck is happening here?

McCarthy has left the ball because Doucoure isn’t getting it and then the Watford man punches it into the net.  Well spotted Roger East and linesman. 2-2 and nail in the coffin and another Pellegrino master class.

I’m almost feeling completely numb about the whole thing.

I kind of just shrugged my shoulders because everyone could see it coming and you knew it was going to come. From the start of the second half, Saints just went further and further back with the manager not reacting to Watford’s change of shape and let’s be honest, it is not rocket science and once again, and opposition manager didn’t have to do anything particularly scientific to baffle our team and manager.

In no way should the VAR chat detract away from the fact that Pellegrino is fucking useless.  What other manager in the history of football makes two game changing substitutions in the 92nd minute. By game changing, I mean substitutes that are not designed to just waste time.

Southampton 1 Tottenham Hotspur 1

There has been some acknowledgement that our position in the table may actually be putting off players from joining us. No shit Sherlock. It hasn’t been mentioned in the media but the fact that our manager is fucking useless may have something to do with it as well.

Overall, we played pretty well and made a very good Spurs side look pretty average. 

Kane simply outmuscled his marker, who was of course Jack Stephens and scored easily. For all his strength as a ball-playing defender, Jack Stephens is a fucking nightmare. You have to go back to the Hindenburg disaster to find something worse in the air than he is. 

We 100% percent need another centre half before the transfer window closes.

Today we had to bring on Michael Obafemi up front because we had no one else because Charlie Austin and Shane Long are injured and ill respectively and our next two strikers off the rank, Sam Gallagher and Ryan Seager are out on loan and Gallagher at least has no recall option.

We are now no wins in 11 and one win in 15 so it is still quite remarkable that Pellegrino still has a job.

FA Cup 4th Round - Southampton 1 Watford 0

Transfer window klaxon and Saints have actually signed someone with Guido Carrillo coming in from Monaco for £19.1 million.

When I say that we made it difficult for ourselves, I of course mean Pellegrino made it difficult for ourselves.

The substitution on the hour mark when you choose to take Boufal off and replace him with Yoshida was the most negative, pointless and nonsensical substitution from what is admittedly a pretty big catalogue of questionable substitutions that he has made since he’s been our manager. 

Nigel Adkins always used to say that it was best not to get too high when you win or to get to low when you lose. We have won today but because of Pellegrino, his substitutions and game management; there is absolutely no danger of getting too carried away with it.

FEBRUARY 2018

Southampton 1 Brighton 1

Anyway, it doesn’t really matter why but it has not happened so our transfer window can be summed up like this. We have made about £50 million in profit on transfer fees, we have signed a striker that we needed four months ago, the wage bill has gone down and we didn’t replace the centre half who we probably knew we were going to sell from about the 1st of December.

(Against Brighton) you need a striker with a clever movement off the ball. If you want to have a fucking nightmare and achieve absolutely fucking nothing then you need Shane Long upfront and that’s what we got. Not only that, he picked an attacking midfield three of JWP, Steve Davis and Tadic. For fuck‘s sake.

The bench is like a Who’s Who of Southampton’s most expensive footballers. Mario Lemina, Guido Carrillo, Manolo Gabbiadini, Sofiane Boufal.

What a load of fucking shit. I really can’t be bothered to write much more. It has all been said before and it will all be set again unless Les does the one thing in his power that is not governed by a transfer window and sacks this useless pillock we have as a manager right now.

His team selections are crap, his substitutions are crap, his game management is crap, his ability to learn from his mistakes is crap and how many times do we have to hear that it’s a results business when we have only won 4 games out of 25 and this bloke who is completely out of his depth is still in charge.

Again, Pellegrino has gone 4-4-2 with Davo as one of the central midfielders.  It doesn’t work, it never has, it never will.

Pellegrino spends the whole game still in the technical area flapping his arms around. All we need is a branch of a tree in a mini to hit and he’d look like Basil Fawlty in a tracksuit. Fuck off Basil.

West Brom 2 Southampton 3

Get in there, we have finally won a fucking game and Pellegrino didn’t mess it up. It wasn’t a perfect game by any stretch of the imagination but it is all about the positives today. We have actually won a ‘must win’ game, we have won a six pointer away from home, scored three goals and moved four places at the league. You cannot moan about any of that

The only thing I will say is that one win against West Brom side that had a lots of injuries and have their manager making some really fucking strange decisions does not mean that everything is wonderful in our account. One game in isolation never means anything until it becomes the norm. In other words, we had little two game spells before where we have looked ‘not shit’, only to revert to being shit again.

Mario Lemina put in one of those performances where he looks like the best midfielder on the planet.

It is up to you Mr Pellegrino, stay on the front foot and you never know, good things might happen.

Southampton 0 Liverpool 2

I fucking hate Jurgen Klopp

With all the results going against this at the weekend and us being in the bottom three as we kicked off, I expected some fight today and a performance. We got none of that. Instead we got a team and manager that was happy to settle for 2-0 defeat from 45 minutes onwards.

Rule Number 1 for today should’ve been that the first player gets a chance fucking clatters Van Dijk. That would’ve got the fans fired up, the players fired up, shown we meant business and we may have got a performance. Unfortunately, no one could be bothered.

With two weeks to go before the next league game, it is of course another great opportunity to sack the useless fucker which of course, we won’t take though there has been a picture published of Chairman Gao, Katharina Liebherr and Ralph Krueger all out in China so you never know.

FA Cup 5th Round - West Brom 1 Southampton 2

Saints week has been pretty quiet with the only real talking point coming from Pellegrino Press conferences. He spoke of usual bollocks about learning opportunities, growth and acknowledged that winning was fundamental to staying up.

Carrillo to Redmond, back to Carillo and he hoiks a cross into the middle with the outside of his right boot and Tadic brings it down past the airshot of Krychowiak and then chips is superbly over Foster and into the net.

Stop press. Wigan 1 Manchester City 0. Ha ha ha, fucking hilarious. So, the FA went to all that trouble to warm some balls up and freeze some of the balls it was all for nothing as Manchester City got beat by Wigan.  Hilarious and well done Wigan.

Burnley 1 Southampton 1

I can probably sum up the first half in either one paragraph, one sentence or one word beginning with ‘S’ 

The formation has gone to shit and no one really knows what’s going on, including Pellegrino I suspect.

Westwood who turns and runs straight into what looks like a pitch invader but it’s in fact, Bobby Madley who is in the way. 

Carrillo headed it down and Gabbiadini smashed in the net. We actually had players in the box and we had probably our most natural goalscorer on the pitch and in a forward position, with support from a bigger stronger strike partner.

MARCH 2018

Southampton 0 Stoke 0

Once more, only one sentence is probably needed to sum up the first half of this must win game from a Southampton point of view – it was shit.  We simply didn’t do anything.

Redmond digs out a great cross which picks out Boufal about 6 yards out and he thumps his header down and fucking wide.  For fucking bollocks sake.

Pellegrino’s post match talk of ‘learning’ is the biggest pile of insulting shite that he could possibly come out with. There is no point in learning if you do not take whatever you have learnt into the next game and we never do.

This manager has no idea about how to send a team out to actually win a game. We don’t go out to win games. We go out not to lose them and that is why we have so many fucking draws - 13 of the fucking things.

He has the cluelessness and riddled communication of Poortvliet, the stubbornness of  Branfoot , the totally out of his depth air of Steve Wigley, the risk averse scared to death approach of Claude Puel and the bewildering team selection of George Burley.

Newcastle 3 Southampton 0

Does he feel like he can’t risk his best defensive midfielder in a must win league game and would rather have him available for a cup tie against a League 1 side. Doesn’t the fucking idiot realise that if we lose today, Wigan versus Southampton is likely to be a Championship fixture next season.

So, away we go on our latest fear and caution driven epic. 63 seconds, 1-0 down, game plan fucked.  Useless sacks of shit.

Just when you think you’ve seen it all this season. Just when you think you’ve seen every catastrophic low there can possibly be, then along comes Pellegrino and the team and gives us a new benchmark by which to judge low points. 

I don’t care if Marco Silva manages the team to safety and then fucks off to Everton next season. Saints are all about thinking about the long-term but the long-term can wait for the next few weeks because the long-term will collapse in a big fucking heap if we don’t sort out the short-term.

As I see it, the main advantage of being relegated to the Championship is that we will get rid of some of the useless fuckers who got us there.

FA Cup 6th Round – Wigan 0 Southampton 2

No sooner had Mauricio Pellegrino and his faceless, nameless coaching staff exited the building, then the rumours that Mark Hughes was taking over started. It took a  couple of days but then the man who had a brilliant career as a player and a decent but not spectacular career as a manager took over.

What the fuck is Cedric doing there?  He nods it past the least defender and goes straight for goal, drawing the keeper and then calm as fuck, slotting it into the far corner.  2-0, game over.

So well done Saints and well done Mark Hughes, Mark Bowen and Eddie Niedzwiecki.  Brilliant start. In just one game and in a couple of days, you’ve given us a day out at Wembley to look forward to and more important than that, it’s given us hope for decent end of the season.

West Ham 3 Southampton 0

Lemina had visions of spanking one in the top corner but instead he pissed about with it, found himself under pressure and lost it.

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. Game over – embarrassing.

Fucking wanker. Still, his girlfriend looks nice on Instagram and his model photographs win him a legion of new fans every week.

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.

All of these squad shortcomings can be laid firmly at the door of Les Reed, The self-proclaimed King of Football at Southampton FC. The on pitch leaders that we had at the end of Ronald Koeman’s last season have all gone.

APRIL 2018

Arsenal 3 Southampton 2

There was certainly a few changes with those of decent character coming back into the fray. Yoshida, JWP, Romeu and Long were all chosen to start.

Long darts in front of then both and deflects it past the keeper and into the net for only his second goal since man landed on the moon.  Fucking hell, we’re winning…. 

Superb from Cedric and I hope he buys himself a really really tight shirt to celebrate his second assist and it's a deserved equaliser

Iwobi avoids Tadic’ pathetic efforts to stop the cross, chips it into the Stephens/Cedric Corridor of Uncertainty and Welbeck has an easy header into the net for 3-2.  Fuck off.

Wilshere even got involved in that, acting like the big peacemaker. All a big act to hide that a) he gave the ball away horribly and b) he’s an odious little twat.  The media love Jack Wilshere though. Fuck knows why as he has done next to nothing for the last three years.

Southampton 2 Chelsea 3

Brilliant goal, brilliant move and an outstanding run by the skipper and once more, we look like a proper team.

Marcos Alonso takes an opportunity to steam in and stamp down on his calf.  Mike Dean doesn’t give anything and despite the stricken player, Fabregas true to form, doesn’t put the ball out and Chelsea attack.

2-0 against Chelsea and a goal from Bednarek – it’s written in the stars.

Hazard, who I may have mentioned its one of the World’s best players is standing where Cedric should be and his cross is half cleared and lands at the feet of Giroud and the Suave Good Looking Bastard smashes it into the net. 8 minutes, 3 goals, fucked.

We were not helped of course, by the Mike Dean factor.  I kind of stop short of calling him a referee because he isn’t really.  A strutting peacock perhaps. This guy is fucking useless.

Basically, we need seven points as West Brom and Stoke will finish below us and Brighton, who are seven points ahead of us have a horrendous run of fixtures against the real top boys and are going to be fortunate to get another point. 

I have to say that I have been impressed with Hughes and I hope he is the Manager next season, regardless of what division we are in. The improvements he has made make it even more staggering that we persevered with the dreadful Pellegrino for as long as we did whilst the King of Football sat on his hands and twiddled his thumbs. Everyone could see it, apart from him.

Leicester 0 Southampton 0

He should hit it with his left foot but instead tries to square it to Tadic by using his right foot instead of his left and but he resembles a clown in size 20 shoes as he totally fucks it up and just knocks it to the keeper

I think Hughes is terrified of going 4 at the back and so he’s hoping to nick it rather than really going for it. 

To be honest I don’t really know what to make of that. Actually, come to think about it, yes I do - it was a load of boring bollocks. If Pellegrino had still been on charge and we played like that and drawn 0-0 then I would be spitting feathers. I am reluctant to criticise Mark Hughes too much because I feel he has been handed an impossible job with everything that has gone on but you have to question the fact that we appeared to play for a draw tonight.

FA Cup Semi Final - Chelsea 2 Southampton 0

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.

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 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.

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.

We have to mention the referee Martin Atkinson and the mythical rub of the green which we never get against the big clubs.

Southampton 2 Bournemouth 1

It’s a situation from which both Newcastle and West Ham have scored against us recently and I’m expecting us to fuck it up but Lemina draws the one defender and plays it right to Tadic at the perfect time, keeper to beat, easy, 1-0.  He never ever looked like he was going to miss

King at the back post for a simple finish and we’ve undone all the good work with ball watching.

All Cook does it present it to Tadic in midfield and with Austin and Redmond in support, Tadic advances and or once in his life, decides to shoot and with what almost looks like a left footed toe poke, fires it past Begovic and into the far corner.  Brilliant finish.  Scenes.  Who is this Tadic and where has he been?

Here they come again, long balls, headers, cleared.  Finally it’s over.  Everyone with a Southampton allegiance in the vicinity goes mental.  Get in.

I don’t know what the stats are but I’m willing to bet that the average bookings per game has gone through the roof since Pellegrino left and Hughes came in

It was good to see a majority of the players flat on their arses at the end of the game with absolutely nothing left to give. That is what it should be like every game and it certainly is what it should be like in the remaining games this season.

MAY 2018

Everton 1 Southampton 1

Cedric crosses brilliantly on the run and there’s Redmond of all people at the back stick to head it down and past Pickford and into the net for his first goal of the season.  Get in.  Redmond scoring was less surprising than Cedric keeping a cross on the pitch but well played both

Big boot forward, no one wins it cleanly and Niasse toes it past Yoshida who launches him into space.  Fuck.  Guess what Fat Jon is gonna do? Yellow, Red…fuck!

Redmond does brilliantly to knock it past Funes Mori and it in on goal.  Fat Cunt Moss decides that he’d fouled the Everton player and gives a free kick for fuck all and then allows them to pinch 10 yards and take it.

1-1.  We get to the middle, kick off and the Fat Cunt blows his whistle.

Just. Fuck. Off.

As every week goes by, you see the difference that Mark Hughes has made and yet again, I’m pondering that even with an extra month of Hughes, instead of that arseclown Pellegrino and we would being completely safe by now.

Alex McCarthy shouldn’t just be on the plane for England in the World Cup, he should be first choice.

Swansea 0 Southampton 1

If we win this game today away at Swansea then we are 99% certain to be safe

He jinks across past Bednarek and curls one for the top corner but no danger, McCarthy takes off and superbly tips it over the bar.

Austin volley, straight at the keeper yet again but it bounces out and there’s Gabbiadini who hits it goalwards from about 5 yards, deflecting off a defender and in. 1-0, mental.  You can see in the eyes of the Swansea players – they know they’re toast.  They know they can’t buy a goal.

6 minutes extra have gone and one last punt forwards towards Abraham but Hoedt wins it and Bertrand whacks it.  Full time.  Mental.

After the hotel fiasco, the lack of police escort through the rush hour and the coach parking issue, whoever was responsible deserves for their team to get relegated

With the modern day Premier league player, you need to be a bit tough, you need to have had a playing career they will respect.  He has earned the right to stay on and barring a total shocking calamity on Sunday, be a Premier League manager with Southampton next season.

Southampton 0 Manchester City 1

Surely we can’t fuck this up.

This superbly weighted pass was brilliantly controlled on the run first time by Gabriel Jesus and he simply lobs it over Alex McCarthy and into the net to win the game, give City 100 points and spark mental over the top celebrations from the champions. Meanwhile, Southampton supporters as a whole kind of shrugged.

Swansea actually lost at home to Stoke so in the end, we stayed up with a rather pathetic 36 points and we could have lost by ten after all.

Will next year be any different? It rather depends if lessons have been learned. Step number one has to be to give the hero of the hour, Mark Hughes, a three-year contract and give him time.

Season 2017/18 has been fucking dreadful