Tuesday, June 18, 2019

League 1 Minus 10 is 10




So Much For the 5 Year Plan…. Twice!

Southampton Football Club’s media arm has recognized that it’s 10 years since Markus Liebherr bought the club out of administration… but in amongst all the highlights of all the matches and general glorifying and how far the club has come in the last 10 years, they have missed one important thing. Yes, that’s right kids, it’s 10 years since yours truly started typing up stupid match reports and League 1 Minus 10 was born.

After 10 years, the coolest thing about it is still the name which was chosen in a rare moment of inspiration because I felt at the time that this was that the nadir for Saints. We were in the third tier of English football and even before a ball had been kicked in the 2009/2010 season, we were 10 points behind everybody else – a legacy of the shambles that had been all over Saints since the day in May 2005 when we got relegated from the Premier League.

Between May 2005 when we were relegated from the Premier League and August 2009, it had been pretty much impossible to read about Southampton football Club and see anything about actual football. It was all about the boardroom and Rupert Lowe, Michael Wilde, Leon Crouch and whole cast of other faceless Ken Dulieu’s and Keith Wiseman’s. There was nothing about the actual football on the pitch so I wanted to do was write something that was about the actual football on the pitch, be it good bad or indifferent. I became a football fan because of what was on the grass, not because of what was going on in the boardroom. 

I was bored and I was drunk and I was working in Dublin at the time and spending far too much time in the pub so one evening, when I got back to the bed and breakfast, a few Guinnesses too full, I created a blog and away I went. 10 years later and I have absolutely no idea how it has become the monster it has become. There have been plenty of times when I have felt like stopping with the Claude Puel and Manuel Pellegrino seasons being the toughest. I finally got to realise what musicians were talking about when they said they didn’t just want to remake the same album over and over again and that’s what I felt I was doing when so many matches that were exactly the same with just a different title on the top.

The original plan was to do it for five years because when they arrived, Nicola Cortese and Markus Liebherr spoke of having a five year plan to get us to the Premier League.  I thought that it would be a cool thing to document those five years and see where we actually ended up.  In the event, we got to the Premier League in three years and after five, we had just finished eighth under Mauricio Pochettino and had over-achieved by a huge amount. About four games into Ronald Koeman’s first season I suddenly remembered that I was going to stop by then, it was kind of too late.

When I look back now, I noticed that there is a lot more comedy in the blogs from the early days and that’s simply because we had many more comedy players. It’s impossible not to be entertaining when you are writing about Paul Wotton or Neal Trotman, Dan Seabourne or Jonathan Forte. Also back in those days, you could call it how it was a bit more before without being buried under an avalanche of snowflakes. I still have my moments however.

The ten years have seen eight permanent managers as we’ve gone from Pardew to Adkins to Pochettino to Koeman to Puel to Pellegrino to Hughes and now to Ralph Hasenhuttl.  Players have come and gone and I have my favourites, some for just being great players and some for being vitally important at various times – some on this list may surprise you (in no particular order)…

Jose Fonte, Victor Wanyama, (gritted teeth) Virgil van Dijk, Ryan Bertrand, Dean Hammond, Graziano PellĂ©, Artur Boruc, Steven Davis, Pierre Emile Hojbjerg and old whatsisname… oh yes, Sir Rickie Lambert.  There have of course been several others who I’ve been a huge fan of as well and maybe more on that in a separate blog.



What else has changed – oh yes - in 2009 the word was spread via www.saintsweb.co.uk and that’s still going but now, in addition, Twitter has taken off in a huge way and Facebook has been present throughout.

I’m not gonna do much here aside from say thanks to anyone who’s ever read it, re-tweeted it, liked it or verbally passed it on to their friends. I’d like to let you all know that I haven’t made a single fucking penny out of it and to be honest, I’d rather keep it that way and at least have the opportunity to be unfiltered when I want to be. However, if anyone knows anything about book publishing then get in touch.  This time next year I want to be a millionaire.  I’ve met and chatted to quite a few Saints fans because of it and I have also been called very rude words by West Ham fans in particular.  Apparently I’m biased…. well, who knew?

So what I’m going to do is publish links here to my personal favourite top 20 blogs from down the years (I can’t do it in 10). This might not necessarily be the best or most significant matches that a few of those will of course be in there. There have been some comment pieces about managers leaving etc which I was pleased with.  One problem with having a record of all your rantings over the past 10 years is that you can see when you’ve been horribly wrong and/or overreacted and/or been a bit of a tit.  In researching this I've found some stuff I've written that is a bit of a cringe but it is what it is. You can't write for 10 years without at least some of it being bollocks.

Aside from Saints, I have also covered some international tournaments and I still find it amusing that one of my most viewed blog entries of all time was one that had a picture of a Brazilian fan with her boobs out. It goes to show that there is still a place for shallowness.

Anyway, here are the 20 blogs of the decade regarding the mighty Saints FC.

1 The Very First One and the First Game – August 2009


2 Johnstone Paints Trophy – You’ll Never Win That! – March 2010


3 The One at The Withdean – April 2011


4 Deano F-Bomb’s on National TV and Saints go up again – April 2012

5 The One about Nigel Adkins getting sacked – January 2013

6 When we realised Poch was the real deal – March 2013

7 Poch Leaves and I predict He Will Fail at Spurs and Get Sacked.  This has actually been read twice as much as any other blog – 12900 and counting – May 2014

8 Sir Rickie leaves – June 2014


9 Nice Quiet Pre-Season – July 2014

10 8-0 – October 2014

11 Qualifying for Europe Again – May 2016

12 Exit Ronald – June 2016


13 When Claude Was a Better Manager than Klopp – January 2017

14 The One About the League Cup Final – February 2017

15 Claude to Stay?  The Case For and Against – May 2017

16 Pellegrino – The End of an Error – March 2018

17 The One with Welsh Shithouse Tactics – May 2018


18 The Time I Lost My Rag (one of the times…) – November 2018

19 Spark Out – December 2018


20 This New Bloke Has Something About Him – December 2018

Not an exhaustive list but enough to give a flavour of Southampton FC over the past 10 years.  I like the fact that it's all there and it's nice getting messages from people were too young at the time who have used it to catch up with what went on back in the League 1 days.  The map of the world which shows me where people are reading it is mind-blowing at times as a country I have never heard of pops up.

So - thanks again and keep on reading... and you never know, I might do some more.