Cautious Optimism - Here Comes the Summer - Part 2

#TonicLikeAMassiveBellEnd

The first pre-season trip was to Austria and of course, eyes were in who made the trip and who didn’t. The surprise inclusions were Klarer, Vokins and N’Lundulu from the Academy and promising youngsters Cedric and Hoedt. Yes.... Hoedt.  Let that sink in... Hoedt. Let’s face it... he’s better than Stephens.

The high profile absentees were Slattery, Austin, Gallagher, Clasie, Reed and Lemina. I put Slattery first on that list because he’s different to the others in that he’s not up for sale.... rumour has it that he came back overweight. Not good. Of the others, Lemina caused the biggest reaction at the time because somehow, Arsenal and Man United appeared to be interested.  Was that real interest or agent bollocks.

Lemina signed for us when we had just finished eighth and got to a cup final under Claude Puel. He clearly didn’t look too far beneath the surface because if he had he would’ve realised he was joining a team that was in decline. It soon became apparent that this was not what Mario had signed up for and it soon became apparent why Juventus let him go.  It seems clear to me that he bought into the Sadio Mane approach in that he thought he would look decent for a couple of seasons for us and then sign for a Champions League club, in much the same way that Sadio and many others had done before over the past few seasons. He’s since admitted he only ever saw Saints as a 2 year thing and now he was only interest in playing for the biggest clubs.  Fucking waster.

The part of the deal that Mario forgot of course, was that you had to play consistently well. For a while, when it looked like he was going to get the Man United move, it seemed that you don’t necessarily have to, it appeared that you only have to do well in flashes and you will still get the move that you wanted from the start. His flashes of brilliance were spliced together by an enthusiastic Man United fan and retweeted by Mario himself as a very sad “this is what I do”. It’s a classic ‘de Ridder’ style video in that it shows hundreds of tricks and flicks and beating players but always goes onto the next clip before you see any end product or more often than not, the losing of the ball. This video is particular good because it is at 1.25x speed to make him look faster and one of the clips is Nathan Redmond.

So, having put himself in the shop window and made it obvious that he never intended to stay here very long anyway, it turned out to be a bit of premature bridge burning. Noise about Manchester United and Arsenal has now become noise about Everton and West Ham and Wolves and if the speculation/agent bollocks goes down another level then he won’t be moving to anyone that has any more money or is any better than where he is at the moment. I wonder why. Maybe it’s all the #TonicLikeLeminade #FuckingCringeBollocks. If you're a fan of Mario's Instagram like I am, you'll have noticed that his partner, the lovely Fanny, seems to have got fed up with him as well.

Somewhere along the line in the pub, Charlie Austin was clearly told that he was not going to be in the first team squad this season and massively threw his toys out the pram which resulted in the deletion of his Twitter account. This wasn’t before he posted some more fan baiting pictures of him in a Liverpool shirt. Strikes me as a guy who likes to give it out but can’t really take it. Apparently a fee was agreed between Saints and West Brom for him to move but he turned the deal down and there have been some whispers the new Newcastle manager Steve Bruce, wanted him at up there..... until Newcastle surprised everyone and spent 40 million on a striker that no one has heard of. If memory serves, Austin was linked with them when he left QPR so let’s hope that someone at Newcastle still thinks that he was the same player as he was at QPR and not the fat mess he is now.

All that Charlie and Mario need to know is that Ralph saw more value in Wesley Hoedt being in the squad than either of them.

Whilst this was all going on, we had a friendly on the Austria tour which ended up with a 1-1 against Altach with Austin‘s replacement, Che Adams, scoring after one minute. The first team friendlies continued when the players got home with a behind close doors 3-0 win against Brentford and a 3-1 win away at Preston which brought two goals the Danny Ings and one for Jake Vokins.  Ings’ first goal was a thing of beauty as the Preston goalkeeper drove the ball straight at him and it flew in over the keeper off of Danny‘s thigh. How often does it happen that a player who is struggling for goals gets a freak one like that and it sets them up for a nice run of goals . In this case, it will hopefully carry on at the start of the season. The Preston friendly also saw the Wesley Hoedt and Jack Stephens Dream Team combination reunited as two thirds of a three-man defence and these two even managed in a pre-season friendly to show no actual desire to defend and keep the ball out of our net with Preston’s goal seeing a player nutmeg Hoedt on the edge of the box and instead of being straight in with the tackle like he should’ve been, Stephens just stood off and allow the Preston player to walk into a dangerous area and smash it in the net. I can’t make up my mind which age group of schoolboy defending this counts as. I’m going to go for Under 11’s.

PR Trip - Completed It Mate.

Some of the youngsters with a smattering of senior players jetted off to Macau to play against Chinese super league side, Guangzhou and the game ended in a 4-0 win with goals from Adams, Long, Valery and Christophe Klarer.  Both Adams’ and Long’s goals where the result of horrific goalkeeping howlers, in keeping with the Ings goal at Preston.

We did manage to shift some of the squad excess and Jordy Clasie finally completed a permanent move away from Southampton when we cancelled the last year of his contract, enabling him to move to AZ Alkmaar on a free. There does seem to have been a certain amount of history revision regarding Clasie. From my point of view, he was not physically strong enough to make up for his lack of physical stature. There was obviously a player in there but I just don’t think he was ever suitable for the English game. If you comparing with our current first choice three midfielders then you would say he was not physically strong enough to play where Romeu does, not gifted enough on the ball to challenge JWP and not possessing of a big enough engine to challenge Pierre. This seems to have been an undertone on his part to blame Southampton for his situation but for me, the bottom line is that he has spent a year in Belgium with Club Brugge and a year in Holland with Feyenoord and neither have wanted to sign him at the end of the year despite him being available for not very much money by today’s standards.

Also, Sam Gallagher completed a move away to Blackburn Rovers, where he was on loan the season before last. For the past few years I have wanted Sam to be the replacement for Graziano but for one reason or another it never really worked out for him and he never really got given a chance. I was always really wanting him to do well whenever he got on the pitch but it never really happened, with him always taking a split secomd to long to do whatever it was he was attempting to do, be it jump for a header or shoot or release the ball. I have a feeling that they could well be a Premier League striker in there in the future, playing for a team like Burnley and whilst I’m usually disparaging about Burnley, For once I don’t mean that in a disparaging way. To get to that level though he does need to be playing regularly in the Championship so this is a good move for him.

Another friendly was played, this time in the Netherlands as we played Feyenoord. Once again, Ralph played two separate teams in each half with the first half team being what you would expect to be closer to the starting 11 in the first league game. For all the talk of the 4-2-2-2 formation, it’s became apparent what I have suspected all along that unless we sign a commanding central defender, Ralph doesn’t trust any two of the current centre backs to play in a back four so we have to go with a back 3 of Bednarek, Yoshida and Vestergaard. Anyway, we won 3-1 with another goal from Che Adams, a bundled effort from Yoshida and a last-minute goal from the returning Sofiane Boufal having calmly skipped past the defender, sat the goalkeeper down and smashed into the roof of the net. Whisper it quietly but Wesley played really well in the second half. I initially thought he was only on this Dutch trip because he knew where all the best gear could be found and the location of all the best dodgy bars, being a native of that part of the world and all that but it appears that he might actually be a part of things next season. Whether this is down to a change in attitude or no one being interested in buying him, is unclear at the moment though if he has won Ralph over then fair enough. As previously said, he is better than Jack Stephens anyway who was conspicuous by his absence from the Dutch trip.

Overall in the Feyenoord game, we looked like an exciting side going forward with Adams, Ings and Redmond, not to mention Boufal but the central midfield of Hojbjerg and JWP looks a bit light without the presumably injured Romeu so defensively, it all looks a bit worrying.

Danny Taking a Penalty Properly

The final pre-season game was at home to Cologne and though he was apparently in hospital, Ralph put out what I expect to be the starting line-up next week. Maybe he went to hospital because he didn’t want to watch the one surprise, which was Jack Stephens playing in central defence.  Regardless, we saw off the Germans with relative comfort by 2-0 with a penalty by Danny Ings and a nice goal by Hojbjerg who combined very well with Obafemi and Adams. There was also time for Danny Ings to look a twat by chipping a second penalty straight to the goalkeeper who stood in the middle of the goal and patted it down.

There weren’t any huge revelations that weren’t known from the Feyenoord game. We are good going forward and we look ropey as soon as the opposition break our initial press high up the pitch.  Remember that goal we let in loads of times last season where the team broke on us from their own penalty area and we were all over the place.... get used to it.  Against Burnley, you know that the high press is going to be negated by them smashing the ball up to whatever seven foot striker they got on the pitch so it’ll be a different challenge we have to rise to.  Moussa Djenepo made a debut but didn’t have time to prove he’s going to be anything other than an impact sub to start with.

So, an unbeaten pre-season.  In football, it is of course always better to win rather than lose but you can never read too much into it.   I vaguely remember us doing that once in the 90s and then losing our first five matches. That only happens of course when the players think they’ve cracked it and all they have to do is turn up and win. There is no danger of that with Ralph in charge. We will hopefully see a couple more in through the door before the transfer window closes but if not then we will get on with what we’ve got and I think we can have cautious optimism for the season ahead. We aren’t going to be pushing for a European place against the likes of Everton and Leicester but we should certainly have enough about us to be nowhere near the bottom six and I would take that.