Sunday, May 19, 2019

Season Review 2018/2019 - The Shite Part



Give Me Time and I'll Be Just as Shite as You Were

AUGUST 2018
Southampton 0 Burnley 0
I’ve had enough, Hughes has had enough, fuck this.

And so the game ended in a draw. If I had been offered a 0-0 draw at the start the game then I wouldn’t have been particularly impressed with it but as it happens, it was actually quite good and a quite enjoyable game – well an enjoyable 2nd half anyway.

Charlie Austin was fucking terrible and barely moved. I would say that Hughes got the selection of Austin wrong because with both Cedric and Austin in the starting 11, that is two of your substitutions predetermined as neither were going to last 90 minutes.

SEPTEMBER 2018
Everton 2 Southampton 1
So – it looks like 4-4-2 with Stephens and Hoedt as the centre backs.  Oh sweet fucking Lord.

… another ‘soft as fuck’ goal at the other end.  Build up down our left, Coleman reverses the ball to Walcott who has not been tracked and he’s got all the time in the world to cross it and returning from last season we have the Stephens/Cedric Corridor of Uncertainty.  The cross sails over Stephens and Richarlison gets above Cedric and heads in easily.

Stephens and Hoedt proved last season that they are not good enough as a pair and you need a third centre back or else you’re going to be shit

Eventually, my money is on Hoedt and Stephens being back ups to Yoshida and Vestergaard and on Austin being the striker that we bring in when we need a goal with 20 to go. I also see the more reliable Hojbjerg coming into the team ahead of Lemina who once again was as flaky as you like.

Southampton 1 Leicester 2
Well fuck it. Another kick in the bollocks. It seems that any event, good or bad in the game just sees us go to shit. We score a goal, we panic and go to shit. We concede a goal, we then panic some more and go to shit some more. Someone gets sent off, we completely go to shit

Having played reasonably well in the first half, we finally took the lead the great strike from Ryan Bertrand then pissed it away within three minutes thanks to a horrific bit of defending by Cedric

Following Pierre’s red card for being a fucking dick (no more really needs to be said on that), we of course let in the tunnelball 94th minute winner.

Nathan Redmond had another very good game on the wing and seems to have rediscovered his love of running at players.

Crystal Palace 0 Southampton 2
Shane who misses it but the ball is misjudged by Kelly and Ings is in, toe poke, goal.  Get in.

Cedric down the wing and a deflected cross which Austin scuffs goalwards and Wan-Bissaka strangely sticks a hand out to stop a shot that was barely going to reach the goal.  Penalty.  Austin of course grabs the ball and dribbles a horrific piece of shit down the middle of the goal and Hennessey, despite diving, easily kicks it away.  Fucks sake.

I’ve no fucking idea what Hennessey was doing out there and Pierre rolled it past him from the edge of the box.  Get the fuck in!  We’re actually going to win.

Southampton 2 Brighton 2
It’s headed out to Hojbjerg who takes a touch and smashes it.  Remarkably, it absolutely arrows into the bottom corner with a little bit of late swing on it.  Brilliant strike.  

We can certainly have grievance with the referee and the more I see of Duffy’s fall in the box, the worse it gets – he’s a fucking cheat basically and Montoya’s fall for the free kick for the first goal is soft as well.

Ref aside, Saints only have themselves to blame yet again for not closing out the lead against a very average team. Yet again we proved that we can’t handle game changing incidents. After Ings scored his penalty, All we need to do was 10 minutes of controlled football but what do we do? Leave a 6 foot 5 centre half with a free header from 5 yards about 30 seconds after the restart.

Liverpool 3 Southampton 0
Well that was shit.  Exactly the same as last season where the game was over after 5 minutes and the rest of the game was damage limitation and a waste of everyone’s time and money.  Most Saints fans are realistic and know that we’re not going to go toe to toe with Liverpool at Anfield but we did nothing, turned up, lost, fucked off home.

I think Hughes got more or less everything wrong today.  The initial formation was wrong, the Targett on the wing thing was wrong, leaving Lemina on was wrong.  Having chosen to play 4 at the back, one of Hoedt or Vestergaard should have been left out for Bednarek or Yoshida.

Liverpool?  They’re a really good side and as long as van Dijk and their first choice strikers stay fit, the will run City very close this season.  They certainly won’t have an easier three points then they had today.

OCTOBER 2018

Wolves 2 Southampton 0
Lemina has had a good game and then he goes ‘Full Waster’.  He gets tackled and his boot comes off.  His boot is pink which is an issue but not the main issue here – it takes about 10 minutes for him to put the fucker back on.  Even an 8 year old can change a boot quicker than that.

1-0.  Fucking hell.  That’d be the 6th preventable goal in a row that we’ve let in.

Our big finish to try and get a point involves standing off and letting Wolves pass the ball about.  It’s fucking criminal.

We actually won the midfield battle with Hojbjerg and Lemina (when he wasn’t doing up his fucking boots) having the better of Moutinho and Neves. How can you win the battle of the all-important midfield and still lose the fucking game 2-0?  

Charlie Austin wrote “fuck off” on his Facebook page

Southampton 0 Chelsea 3
At risk of sounding like Mike Bassett… fucking get into them.

Well the only surprise there is that Giroud didn’t score.

Comprehensively outplayed-check,
Goal from Hazard-check,
Gifted them at least 1 goal-check
Didn’t lay a glove on them in midfield-check,
Basically just turned up and lost-check,
Let in a goal in the last five minutes-check.

Totally predictable and so fucking boring.

I really want to know what the thinking was behind bringing on a striker who has two goals in 60 games when we need two goals with 20 minutes to go

Bournemouth 0 Southampton 0
Eddie Howe has settled for a draw and brings on Gosling in midfield and takes a striker off but then the key moment.  Redmond on the the right hand side pulls out one of the best crosses you could ever wish to see.  Over it comes, taking out the keeper who misses it and straight onto the head of Gabbiadini behind him.  All he has to do is cushion it into the empty net….  Onto the roof of the net.  Fuck.  

Southampton 0 Newcastle 0
Lemina wins the ball and feeds Gabbi who produces a superb turn and finds Cedric overlapping – a good pull back along the top of the box … Shane with a free shot from 15 yards, 25,000 people including other Saints players with head in hands.

It takes a turn for the farcical as Gabbiadini, with three options to pass to, tries a shot from Bitterne Park which flies into orbit.  Another 0-0.  Fuck sake.

A lot of Saints fans seem to have it in for JWP. If you can’t see that we looked much more likely to score in the 15 minutes that he was on that every other 75 then you really don’t know much about football and I question both your eyesight and your sanity. We have to find a place for him in the starting 11

There is no way that the board will be wanting to fire another manager and admitting that they have fucked up for the third time in a row - not yet anyway.  There is an apathy and disinterest in the fan base. Personally, I’m kind of in the ‘shrug your shoulders’ camp. I watch the games and they are in the main fucking boring with nothing to get you excited and I look at the clock sometimes and it says 35 minutes of gone and I can’t remember anything of note that happened in the previous 25 minutes. It’s like I’ve been asleep

NOVEMBER 2018

Manchester City 6 Southampton 1
Aguero picks it up, feeds David Silva who slots Sane in and his cross is smashed into the net by Wesley Hoedt and all the people who had Hoedt as ‘First Own Goal Scorer’ at odds of 1-50, celebrated wildly.  A bit unfortunate for him as he had to do something with Sterling right behind him but smashing it into the roof of your own net isn’t a great option.

And so much for that bollocks from the last two games about our improved defence. Two clean sheet against two teams that didn’t muster a single attack between them is not quite the same as Manchester City going in dry. Jack Hindenburg-Stephens not even getting off the ground and getting beaten in the air by Sane which lead directly to David Silva’s goal. There was some classic schoolboy from Cedric getting tackled whilst trying to shield the ball out of play. Not that we would’ve got anything out of the game but we had just scored and 3-1 down going into half time when he fucked that up

Earth Calling Planet Gao
“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.”



What!... that door over there?

No More No Les
He had to go, he really did. It doesn’t matter how well anyone does in their first 5 1/2 years in any particular job - if you are underperforming/very poor for 2 1/2 successive years then you are really up against it. You could argue that it’s the players or its the managers or it’s any number of circumstances that have conspired but the fact of the matter is that Les Reed was the senior board member responsible for the football side of the club which is the core business. It is failing so he is failing and we have reached the point where under his stewardship, it was clearly not going to turn around.”


Southampton 1 Watford 1
To make up for his incompetence, Hooper delivers an evening-up coup de grace as Redmond brilliantly bursts in between two Watford players on the right and picks out Austin with his low cross and the Fat Beered-Up Kebab Munching Pub Player somehow mis-hits it and sends it bobbling over Foster for 2-0… or so we thought.  Celebrations have happened, time has stood still, civilizations and empires have risen and fallen… and then it gets disallowed for an imagined offside.  Fuck off.  Two wrongs don’t make a right.  Two wrongs make a shit referee

It breaks to left back Holebas who hits it and Cedric is being a wet-lettuce wanker, closing him down sort of, with his back turned and it flicks off him and past Macca for 1-1.

It was nice to see Charlie Austin and his interview on Match of the Day where he was basically having a bit of a rant about how we should have VAR to help the officials. I totally agree with everything he says and he has gone up a bit in my estimation but still not enough to make up for the fact that he still looks completely unfit. Whoever said the interview to the tune of Parklife deserves a medal as well.

Fulham 3 Southampton 2
They work it out left to the full back and Cedric is ballwatching from the middle and Le Marchon’s stands up a cross and there’s Mitrovic, stading in a circle of 5 Southampton defenders, like some sort of training drill.  He jabs his head at the ball and the Southampton 5, who are all 4 defenders and Lemina, admire it as the ball goes past McCarthy.  Fucking useless sacks of shite

Wesley will surely just smash this up the park… nope.  Wesley will surely smash it off Schurrle and win a throw… nope.  Wesley will surely not fuck about and give the ball away…. Yes he fucking will.  Fulham work it into a crossing position, over it comes, Dwarf Sessegnon beats Yoshida in the air and flicks it on to Mitrovic, unmarked, goal. F.U.C.K.!!!

Time for a substitution and time to play with 11 and off goes Charlie the Hologram

So, we’ve just lost to one of the worst teams in the Premier League so what the hell does that make us?  Today is the day where the tide turned for me. Hughes, like Puel and Pellegrino seem absolutely incapable of getting a tune of these players and that’s his job.

DECEMBER 2018

Southampton 2 Manchester United 2
Ok, we’ve tossed away a lead again but we’ve actually played quite well.  For once we have some proper positives to talk about. In the main the performance was very very good, just that five minutes spell where we appeared terrified to out a challenge in at the back. The formation worked, the midfield three were absolutely excellent, Redmond behind the striker but very very dangerous and much more effective than when he plays out wide.  He just need a goal and the boy will be flying.

The highlight of Valery’s performance for me was when Paul Pogba, who, lest we forget, is a World Cup winner for Yan’s native country France, a £90 million superstar player that’s at one of the biggest clubs in the world, tried to intimidate him. Yan took no shit whatsoever when Pogba tried to hold him at a throw-in and Yan basically just threw him away. What’s “get out of my fucking face” in French? Brilliant stuff.

Spark Out
“So farewell to Mark Hughes. His managerial career was somewhat similar to his playing career at Saints. He joined late in his career and there was the odd moment where it looked like it was going to work out but ultimately it will be regarded as a bit of a failure with him leaving with the lowest win percentage of any manager we’ve ever had”

“So who’s next. As revealed by club pet national journalist Jeremy Wilson, the name in the frame is Ralph Hasenhüttl who was manager of RB Leipzig last season.   In his last two seasons he has taken them to 2nd and 6th in the Bundesliga.  He has the reputation in the media of being the “Austrian Klopp” (cringe) and whilst we all admire the Klopp style of football, if Hasenhüttl joins us, we can only hope that he is not a monumental bell-end like the Liverpool manager.”

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