Premier League Match 32 - Southampton 1 Liverpool 3

5 Letters - Starts With C, Ends in S.

I’m sure we’ve had a home game on a Friday night before but I can’t remember when it was. It’s a stupid time to play football but this is where we are these days. The only thing that is apprising about this is that we are at home as usually it’s not the big club’s who have to travel when the traffic is at its most horrendous.

After the fabulous win at Brighton at the weekend, it has been relatively quiet but today we have to solve the conundrum of what to do without Danny Ings who of course it’s technically on loan from Liverpool so he will not be able to play tonight. When I say technically - that is all it is. When he got injured last time they seem to be a narrative that we had some sort of get-out clause but I’m pretty sure the loan was just an accounting trick. I do wonder what has happened with Mario Lemina. I did expect him to play some sort of role against Brighton and it wouldn’t be a surprise to me if he re-emerged for this game as it’s another shop-window game against a huge club with the game being on the telly. To be fair, he had been playing pretty well this season until the injury which has restricted him to 15 Instagram posts per day.

Oh Liverpool. The history, the fans, the fast paced beautiful football. What a bunch of wankers you are. It is quite something that usually you would want the team that had won the league for 30 years to win it and break the status quo but this is Liverpool. Normally, you wouldn’t want Manchester City, a club funded by a country, to be winning everything but I’d honestly take Manchester City to win absolutely everything rather than Liverpool win anything at all. Can’t stand them. Part of it is growing up in the 70s and 80s when they won everything but that was all a very long time ago. Now it’s down to the way the club behaves, the manager, the fans and their superiority complex but mainly, in the media saturation age that we live in, it’s their over-presence in said media.  Everything has to be about them in some way.  Ralph Hasenhuttl– The Alpine Klopp…. Fuck off!

As recently as last Sunday, Sky put Jamie Carragher the most dyed in the wool Liverpool fan you could ever find, as co-commentator for their game against Tottenham. It’s not Jamie‘s fault but it seems to be lost on the powers that be that not everyone wants Liverpool to win. When it was Leicester chasing the title then fair enough, 99% of the country was behind them but this is very different. Needless to say, Jamie nearly shat himself with excitement when Liverpool scored the winner.  This game is on Sky tonight, Carragher is on commentary and I’m glad I’m in the ground so I don’t have to listen to him.

Again we have to talk about our former players with Virgil Van Dijk returning. Virgil has of course become the best defender in the world since he left Southampton for a world record fee for a defender. Sadio Mané is the guy scoring the vast majority of their goals at the moment but it is nice to be able to look at the spectacular failure of Adam Lallana and Dejan Lovren in their attempts to get anywhere near the first team at Anfield.  There seems to be some confusion amongst Liverpool fans as to why we boo ‘all’ our ex-players when they rewarded us some handsomely when they bought them.  It’s this simple – Lovren, Lallana, Van Dijk went on strike, Lambert, Clyne and Mané didn’t.  The first group get booed, the second never did.

If I look at Liverpool generally then they have a very good defence and goalkeeper, a very dangerous attack and a very iffy midfield. Midfield of course is our strong area and if we are going to get anything out of this game then this is where we need to make it count. I’m fully expecting Ralph to play a variation of the 5-3-2 formation with Armstrong and Redmond the furthest forward and not do what Hughes did at Anfield which was to pathetically play Vestergaard and Hoedt 1v1 against Salah and Mane with crushingly predictable results. The last few games against Liverpool have been a shambles from Southampton point of view in that we have been out of the game after about 20 minutes so pretty much anything will be an improvement on that.

Shane Long is starting.  OK.  Vestergaard is back with Armstrong being unlucky to miss out and Ings has been replaced with Shane Long.  Did I say that Shane Long was starting?  Shane... starting.  OK.  Liverpool look ridiculously strong and even their midfield looks decent with Fabinho in with Wijnaldum and Keita.  Lovren is on the bench and Lallana is nowhere to be seen.  Is he injured or has he bottled it again? They are dressed in purple.

After five minutes of chasing the ball around as the purple helmets kept to themselves, we finally get hold of it and Vestergaard finds himself in midfield. He passes to Ryan Bertrand who chips it across and Hojbjberg has run untracked from midfield. He flicks it on with his head and a Saints player takes it down with one touch and buries it. Fucking hell, SHAAAAAAAAANE. St Mary’s absolutely erupts with a mixture of jubilation and possibly laughter. Six minutes gone, 1-0 up and probably 89 minutes to hang on.

It appears that we have them slightly rattled. The next big chance is ours as Trent Alexander Arnold has his clearance blocked by Redmond. Redmond sends Bertrand away down the wing and he fires over a low first time cross. It is perfect for Long and all he has to do is connect but we get an air shot. It was really too much to ask. If there was a football God or if karma was a thing, then van Dijk would’ve sliced his subsequent clearance into his own net instead of narrowly over the bar.

Half an hour gone and Liverpool and Liverpool haven't looks like scoring and they get a linesman assisted equaliser which seems to have happened a hell of a lot this season. The original ball to the right hand side to Salah finds the Egyptian looking absolutely miles offside but the fat twat with the flag doesn’t raise it. Salah crosses, we half clear it, and it comes from the other side and Salah tries to win a penalty with a horrendous dive. When he realizes that he is not going to get a penalty he is up again. The cross comes back in from Alexander Arnold and it looks like Bednarek is going to head it clear that he does what can only be described as a Stephens and gets under it and Keita, all 5 foot nothing of him scores with a header at the back post which Gunn really should’ve kept out. Bollocks. Yes the move should’ve been stopped at source by linesman’s flag but we have got to defend better than that.

The rest of the half is like the start of the game with Liverpool having possession and us dropping deep and soaking it up.  We are relatively comfortable and reach the break level and the opening 10 of the second half is fairly even but you can see that Liverpool’s pressure is beginning to tell and we start looking a bit tired all of a sudden.  With Liverpool ramping up the pressure, Yoshida goes from one of those horrible slide tackles where he is nowhere near the ball and over goes Mané. The referee has decided rightly or wrongly that Mané has dived but then doesn’t book him? What the fuck is that all about?  For what it’s worth, I’ve seen it about 4 times and if you watch it thinking ‘dive’ then it looks like a dive.  If you watch it thinking ‘foul’ then it looks like a clear foul.  Two things are undeniable, we got a bit lucky and the referee is shit.

The hour mark sees the clearly tiring Long replaced with Sims which is a bit of a surprise and Liverpool bring on Henderson and Milner for Alexander-Arnold and Wijnaldum.  There is more fucking bizarre officiating from the fat twat lino and Paul Tierney when van Dijk mistimes a header and falls over JWP.  The linesman flagged for a foul (by one or the other) and the ref waved play on, thus indicating that it wasn’t a foul by either.  The flag goes down and the ball goes to Sims and van Dijk is pretending to be injured so the lino flags again and Tierney stops the game and gives Liverpool a free kick.  This isn’t a situation where he’s stopped it for an injury and Liverpool are to give us the ball back.  He’s just given them a free kick.  Why?... because he’s a clueless fucker.  Surprisingly, van Dijk is ok.  5 letter word, starts with C, ends in S.

Saints have gone into shithouse mode and are wasting time at every opportunity.  Ryan Bertrand is chief shithouse but even with all this – time is passing very slowly.  I look up, hoping for it to be 89 minutes but it’s on 79 but Saints have a corner after Redmond has a dart at Matip so you never know.  In it comes – another corner the other side.  In it comes, Sims on the edge of the box helps it on and it’s cleared as Henderson finds Salah.  Oh fuck.  He’s still got about 60 yards to go but we’ve over committed and only got one back.  Bertrand is backing off and you know that Salah is not going to pass it. If you try and tackle him he’s either going to skip past you or dive and get you sent off. On he goes – take him out for fucks sake!!! – bang, goal, fuck off!  Cue Liverpool fans to sing for three minutes and all the Plastic Scousers in the home ares to give themselves away. 5 letter word, starts with C, ends in S.

Ralph chucks on a couple more subs in desperation with Austin and Armstrong coming on for Vestergaard and Romeu. This gives us nothing going forward and just leaves us open at the back and the excellent Firmino (by far Liverpool’s best player today) does brilliantly down the right hand side before crossing into the middle where Henderson arrives and puts the game beyond any doubt at all. Bollocks.  Look they’ve brought a flare. 5 letter word, starts with C, ends in S.  Talking of that, there is time for some top trolling by Klopp when he brings on Lovren for the last few minutes.  It’s nearly gardening season again Dejan.

Bollocks. Disappointing but at the end of the day, head held high. We did alright. We competed really well for 80 minutes but the bottom line is that they are on a completely different level to us and anyone who thinks otherwise is deluded. This is a very good Liverpool side and to be honest, the fact that they are anywhere near Manchester City tells you all you need to know on that score.  They didn’t need any help from the officials but they got it anyway - with the offside in the build up to the equaliser and as with the game at Manchester United, it’s all the little decisions they get that either stop your attacks or enable them to pour forward with the bizarre van Dijk, JWP incident illustrating this perfectly.   Paul Tierney was ably supported by the fat useless linesman who failed to flag Salah offside in the build-up to the 1^st goal.  An interesting thing that emerged afterwards was that even though it was offside, VAR would still have given the goal as the offside was too far back in the play and we had chances to clear it.  OK, I get that you can’t go back too far but it was the same attack.  We got one touch on the ball after the offside and that was a half header by Valery.  Are they saying that if Valery had nodded it out for a corner we would then have got the offside decision?  Utter bullshit.

It’s funny, I was quite disappointed when I left the ground and I kind of thought at the time that we hadn’t done particularly well but I think I was projecting my disappointment at the fact that we did not put a dent in their title challenge. They are fucking wankers and it would’ve been beautiful but never mind, it was always a long shot. Being hyper-critical, some players that have been playing well recently, didn’t really do it today with Bednarek in particular having a game he will want to forget. Many a defender will have my nightmares against Sadio Mané and Bednarek is just the latest of a long line. He will feel that he could’ve done better on the first goal and from then on looked fairly awkward but he will come again I’m sure. Hojbjerg and Romeu were brilliant in the first half but in the second, they got over run a bit despite digging in strongly. JWP wasn’t great today and Redmond had a game where he looked good in flashes but flattered to deceive a bit. Long had a good first half but faded badly in the second until substituted. Sims didn’t do much when he came on and maybe in hindsight, Austin or Gallagher would have been a better bet though Austin was crap when he came on. I thought this the last time we played Liverpool that van Dijk is superb and he just strolls through the game but we just let him.  We never really put him under any pressure. Why don’t we have a try knocking him about a bit. Austin had a couple of opportunities late in the game but just didn’t do it. At least if Gallagher would come on then he would’ve actually had to compete against someone in the air.

The defending wasn’t great today on the first two goals though Vestergaard and Yoshida in particular had good games.  As I’ve said before, the first goal should’ve been stopped at source by the lino’s flag but we had chances to clear it and didn’t manage it and ended with Bednarek getting out jumped by a midget. The second goal is a goal that we have let in too many times where we have an attack or a corner it gets cleared and the other team go straight up our end of the pitch and score. It happened in the last home game against Tottenham and it happened again today. The third goal was irrelevant because we had taken a defender off at this point and will chasing the game and a good sides more often than not, will punish you.

Some good context was given after the game by Ryan Bertrand who basically pointed out that Southampton are now a team and give anybody a game and feel like they have a chance in every game. This is a seismic shift to what we have seen pre-Ralph and certainly a change from the last few games against Liverpool where we’ve been dead after 20 minutes.

Now we’re back in 5 letter word territory - the amount of away fans in the home areas does my fucking head in. About ten rows down from where I was sitting, in the Family section, was a kid of about 15 or 16 who actually had his Liverpool shirt held above his head when the third goal went in. I’m kind of glad that he wasn’t directly in front of me. The stewarding in the main is pretty hopeless. They rely on the fact that Saints fans know but if they kick off and slap a couple of Plastic Scousers, then they are probably going to get banned from the ground. Nothing winds up football supporters more than away fans being in the home end. Everybody has done it on occasions, I even did it at Fratton Park once but you don’t wear your colours and you don’t make any fucking noise.  I guess the problem is that the stewards are not trained and they probably get paid very little so they are probably thinking why the fuck should I pile in there and potentially get a slap myself. With the money in football these days at Premier League level, this shouldn’t happen.  Also – any Saints fan who has enabled an away fan to get in the home end should have their season ticket withdrawn for a few games or something.

On the walk back to the car I had to listen to a lot of Liverpool fans with southern accents, tunelessly singing “Mo Salah flying down the wing”. It just reinforced my attitude that I want anyone other than Liverpool to win the league.  Five letter word, starts with C, ends with S.