Earth Calling Planet Gao - Your Club is a Shambles

Excuse me Motivational Hockey Guy, Where's My Booster Seat?

I’ve got something to get off my chest.

When the Leicester owner died in the helicopter crash a week or so ago, the work he’d done for Leicester both for the football club and the city became even more apparent. Not only has he financed the team that won the Premier League, he also funded hospitals and schools and numerous other initiatives around the city. Compare and contrast with Chairman Gao who has not even made a statement to Southampton supporters, let alone make a mark on the city outside of the football club. We've seen his daughter at the Saints Exhibition in the Civic Centre but that's it.  He's turned up to one game I think and didn't say anything public then.  Oh how we laughed at our neighbours down the M27 when it turned out one of their owners didn’t exist.  Is this really much different?  

Gao leaves the day-to-day running of the club to the football board which mainly consists of Les Reed as King of all Football Matters and Ross Wilson as Head of Recruitment. This is of course the recruitment of managers and recruitment of players which since D-day, Summer 2016 has been pretty much, a complete disaster.  I wonder what Katharina Liebherr makes of it all when she considers her fathers legacy.

Where we had Fonte, Van Dijk, Wanyama, Pelle, Mane and Koeman, we now have Hoedt, Vestergaard, Lemina, Austin, Boufal and Puel/Pellegrino/Hughes. It almost makes you cry looking at those six names that we had as recently as two and a bit years ago. All big personality, big character leaders and bloody good at what they did, making the more average around them raise their levels. Now look at what we’ve replaced them with. None of the names on the second list can hold a candle to any of the names on the first list. None of the second list would’ve been any more than squad players or assistants if they had been around at the time that those on the first list were around. Some of the second list may yet come good and some have made fleeting decent contributions but it’s not the same, not by a long chalk.

At the same time in this huge decline in what matters, the manager and the team on the pitch, the marketing side of the club has upped their game and merely succeeded in pissing everybody off. Season-Ticket Plus – is that Plus goals or Plus Entertainment or Plus Players that Care.  Nope, the Plus is in the cost.  This is a scheme to charge you more for your already ridiculously expensive season ticket and give you the opportunity to spend more money on some peripheral stuff that (I’m guessing) most people don’t care about.

I don’t pretend to speak for everybody but I am a relatively long in the tooth football supporter.  I hit 50 in a few weeks and I can remember life before 1992, before the Premier League brand and despite all the crap that comes with Premier League football these days, I still maintain the same values which hopefully I’ve passed on to my kids. We want to turn up 15 minutes before a game, watch the game, see 90 minutes of players in red and white shirts giving 100%. When the final whistle blows we want to clap the players off and then we want to go home. That’s it.  Which part of that don’t you understand?  The message is that it’s the football that’s important.  Everything else doesn’t matter.

The list of things I don’t want includes the opportunity to buy ludicrously expensive Artisan burger and I don’t even have a desire to know what an Artisan burger is. I don’t want ridiculously loud nightclub style music right up to kick off and as soon as the game ends. Once the game ends I want to actually talk to the people around me as we are filing out of the ground. After another mind and spirit-crushing 0-0 draw against a team at the bottom of the league, I do not want to hear Paul Weller screaming “Shout to the Top” at 2000 dB. I had to mime that “I am going for a piss and don’t leave without me” to the other people I was with.  I guess the club don’t want supporters discussing the garbage we’ve just seen until they’ve put some sort of positive spin on it on a website. I don’t want plastic clackers and I don’t want the mascot dog with the drum.  I don’t want flame-throwers that don’t work when it’s windy and I care not for fireworks.  Give us something decent on the pitch and we won’t need all this atmosphere enhancing bullshit.

Now back to Les Reed’s department - I don’t want to see more squad filler experienced pathway-blocker pros who are absolutely no better than the youngsters are we loaned out the Championship clubs. The double bonus of this is that you don’t then have to loan out the experienced pro to another club because no one want to buy them because we are paying them too much money (Boufal, Clasie, Carrillo). I don’t want our highest wage earner to be our 4th choice goalkeeper and the way that you avoid this is to not give him an extended contract when he still has four years of his existing contract to run and he is already in terminal decline.

Jake Hesketh or Stuart Armstrong?  Josh Sims or Mohammed Elyounoussi?  Harrison Reed or Jordy Clasie - you might not think Jordy Clasie is relevant any more (and we did sign him in Summer 15) but we are still paying the lightweight nonentity to be out on loan somewhere.  Sam Gallagher could not possibly be worse than Guido Carrillo and Guido Carrillo himself could not possibly be worse than Shane Long and Charlie Austin.  Why do we still have Steve Davis when we have James Ward-Prowse and neither are regulars in the team? Why do we somehow have five average centre backs on our books, none of whom are any better than any of the others? You could pick any two of them out of a hat and it would make absolutely no difference whatsoever.  So, we have too many central defenders and yet we only have one right back. We have a manager who I assume wanted to sign the centre backs because he was going to play with three on the pitch and then he on a whim, changes to a formation the only requires two of them. If he was going to play 4-4-2 then maybe the list of summer targets would have been different.  Maybe we could’ve done with more wingers, or keeping Josh Sims, or actually having a central striker who could hold the ball up.  We could offer mega wages to a decent striker if we weren’t paying Carrillo, Clasie, Boufal, Forster, Davis, Austin, Long… none of whom would be missed.  Everyone makes mistakes but come on…

Who remembers Reed saying he wanted all the teams of the club to play the same formation which would’ve aided both in continuity of moving between the teams (the pathway) but also with recruitment because we would’ve known we were recruiting for specific positions instead of what the plan appears to be now, which is sign any desperado who is willing to join us.  This 'same formation and style' thing was shown to be rubbish when Puel was allowed to change the formation to a diamond midfield as soon as he arrived with no time to prepare for it.

We used to be the club that foreign pros came to enhance their career.  There was problems with this when they wanted to move on but now we have a club that they come to because we pay more than most foreign clubs and you get a nice four or five year contract and if it doesn’t work out, hey… doesn’t matter, you’ve got five years worth of big wedge coming and Saints will loan you out somewhere.  Remember when we used to talk about the black box and how are used to look at a players character and aren’t we so clever… and yet we still sign Sofiane Boufal when his character was clearly lacking somewhat.   

We just love wasting money - why did we sign Angus Gunn? Now, he looks like a very good goalkeeper but as I said before we have an England international goalkeeper on big wages a week, currently as our fourth choice. It seems like the more money we get in from the Premier League, the less careful we are and the more we completely cock things up. When Southampton was careful with the money (pre-Premier League) they would never have had this situation develop. Did we think that one of the Premier League big boys was going to come in for Forster?  Is that why we gave him an extra contract, which is why we signed Gunn as his replacement. Something went severely wrong there didn’t it?

Mark Hughes is coming under fire with loads saying we should sack the manager and all that sort of stuff.   Do you trust Les and Ross to find someone better?  Hughes has questions to answer though.  I can’t understand the formation change when we signed a lot of players that looks suitable for the three at the back formation. I also can’t understand the persistence with Shane Long and Charlie Austin, nor that ridiculous back four with two of the tallest slowest centre backs you could possibly imagine. That would have even been a disaster in a Football Manager game, let alone in the real Premier League.  Les Reed should be asking Hughes why this has happened?  Maybe he is?  If he isn’t then he isn’t doing his job.  Hughes got the job because he kept us up last season and he deserved it in all truth.  However, he also got it because Reed and Wilson have got the last two managerial appointments horribly wrong so they were not about to give anyone a stick to hit them with by not appointing Hughes and taking another punt.

Where do we go from here? We probably won’t go down this year because there are 5 other teams who are as terrible as we are but it'll be this year or the next if nothing changes from the top.  As it stands, everything is screwed and the Southampton Way is dead.  Les and Ross need to go – that much is obvious.  We no longer attract the best untapped talent from abroad. We no longer promote youth players and give them a chance to prove that they can be a genuine Premier league performer.  There is no pathway.  We no longer are ahead of the game in any area and we no longer have an owner who gives a toss.

Welcome to Southampton 2018.