Premier League Match 27 - Southampton 2 Aston Villa 0

Armstrong Shows Grealish What Truly Magnificent Hair looks Like

Aston Villa are in town as we get our second home game in a row, only this time without a big storm. After the horrific game against Burnley last week, it will be nice to play against a team who I think are quite open and it should actually be a good game despite them being one of the worst teams away from home and us being one of the worst teams at home.

Actually, scrap that. We aren’t one of the worst team at home in the Premier League, we are actually the worst, which is pretty appalling to be frank. We’ve been abysmal at home ever since Ronald Koeman left. The lack of variety in our attacking play makes us very easy to defend against for any side who fancies camping on the edge of their own penalty area and playing on the break. Still, that particular deficiency can’t be fixed by signing any new players any time before the transfer window opens again so we have to make do with what we’ve got and Ralph has got to sort it out.

What we’ve got is Shane Long who has a ridiculously good record against Aston Villa and we have Danny Ings, the King of the Scummers who is of course going to be looking to add to the two goals that he got at Villa Park just before Christmas. Ralph’s press conference revealed that we will be Without KWP, Boufal and Redmond for this game so unless Yan Valery is suddenly back from the dead, I see JWP at right back, Romeu in the centre of midfield and Moussa Djenepo on the wing.

The Villa player who we have to watch out for is of course Jack Grealish who is the closest to a one man team that there is in the Premier League at the moment. A truly outstanding player in a very average team. He will be a threat today and we have to get around him and crowd him out and take advantage of his tendency to hold onto the ball too long. The most important player elsewhere on the pitch is Tyrone Mings who missed the game against us at Villa Park and it will make a huge difference to them if he is fit for today. In goal, they have 53-year-old Pepe Reina, whose loan move to Villa in January just shows the ridiculous wages that even clubs threatened with relegation can afford to pay in the Premier League.

Next week of course, Villa have a trip to Wembley to get stuffed by Manchester City in the League Cup final so hopefully they will have an eye on that today. We are not under immediate threat of falling back into the relegation zone but another home defeat today will have us looking over our shoulders again. Oh and of course they have Marvelous.

Because we are the worst team at home in the Premier league and because our eight defeats at home is the worst we have ever had at the Premier League, since football began in 1992, there has been some talk about why we can’t play particularly well at St Mary‘s. As I alluded to earlier, I think it’s totally down to the style of football and the limited personnel that we have everybody was to seem to queue up to try and blame the fans for it which quite frankly, is completely absurd. Burnley didn’t win because our fans were relatively quiet last week, they won because we conceded a shit goal in the first minute and only had two shots all fucking game. I am firmly of the opinion that we still would’ve let in a shit goal in the first minute, even if 25,000 people have been giving it a rousing rendition of “Oh when the Saints go marching in” at the time.

The main talking point before the game came when the teams were announced and Ralph had thrown another curveball with a first team debut for Will Smallbone, starting in the centre of midfield. with Romeu on the bench. JWP was a right back and I just hope he has room in his pocket for both Zaha and Grealish.

There is an early sign that things are going to be okay today as Villa, with the marvellously named Marvelous Nakamba losing the ball in the centre of midfield to Armstrong which leads to Djenepo rolling the ball sideways for Smallbone to shoot and it deflects of a Villa player and wrong foots the goalkeeper before hitting the outside of the post and going off for a corner.

On eight minutes is a lovely bit of interplay between Bertrand and Djenepo before Bertrand’s pass somewhat fortuitously found its way back to the Malian winger who keeps on in pokes across and Shane Long has got in front of the goalkeeper to bundle into the net.  The big screen replay shows that it's scruffy as fuck and looks like it's just hit Shane but they all count and it's amazingly shit defending from Hause in particular to allow Shane to appear totally unmarked 5 yards out.  There’s the obligatory VAR check to make sure Shane's tackle is still in good working order but happy days and 1-0 up.

Quick VAR Check to See If Everything Intact

Pepe Reina is trying to add some calm to the proceedings in goal, as you have to do when you’re 59 years old and it takes his time before clipping a ball straight to Ryan Bertrand who powers a header forward and Danny Ings is up against his rhyming defender Tyrone Mings and he bundles past him but Reina makes up for his shit distribution by getting out quickly and smothering the King of the Scummers shot. The ball gets recycled through hard work of Smallbone and Armstrong and eventually Long gets the ball across and Djenepo has to take it quickly and swings but he smashes it miles over the bar.

Unperturbed Villa try again and piss around with the ball at the back and this little passage of play ends with Reina chipping a dreadful ball into the centre of midfield which Hojbjerg heads back in and this time it’s Djenepo who gets the shot away and Reina once again makes up for his own bullshit.

The rest of the first half falls a little flat, mainly due to stoppages and the performance of El Ghazi in particular.  He rolls off the pitch, then back on.  Mings tells him to get up, so does Grealish and eventually he’s substituted with most likely, nothing wrong with him.  Apparently he has a reputation for it and the rolling on and off the pitch kind of makes me think there’s fuck all wrong with him.  Grealish is hitting the deck every time he gets the ball which is becoming a bit tiresome.  I spend a bit of time watching Luiz and my mate Marvelous in midfield and they are shite.  Real nothing players.  Smallbone is having a great game, knocking it about and comfortable on either foot – great to see.  Half time and a comfortable 1-0 lead.

Djenepo has terrorised Guilbert for the whole of the first half and second-half starts with Guilbert trying to make a mark on the winger but dumping him on his arse. The free kick comes in from Bertrand and Stephens flicks a header just over the bar. We have another chance soon after as a ball gets deflected through and Armstrong reacts quicker than anybody and gets in between Mings and Reina before running out of pitch and his shot from a narrow angle hits the side netting.

A rare Villa foray forward finds Grealish and it’s ended when he tried to do too much with it and Hojbjerg started an attack and sends Long away down the right wing and he intelligently takes his time before picking up the skippers run on the edge of the box. A first time volley from Hojbjerg which is surprisingly on target and Reina was in the right place to push it away again.

Double substitution time and it’s both of  the forwards being replaced and Obafemi and Adams coming on for Ings and the clearly knackered Long. The new guys combined straight away with Adams winning a flick on, Obafemi running into traffic but the ball ran loose to Adams who smashed a shot goalwards and it hit a Villa defender and was cleared. Might have hit his hand but as we know, absolutely no point in appealing.

Time runs down without much incident – certainly not much at our end and there are 30 seconds left to go and Grealish has the ball on the edge of a penalty area and his shot is deflected wide by JWP for a corner. Over it comes and Reina is up in our box, up goes McCarthy and punches it well clear out to the left where Che Adams picks it up and turns inside before spreading a brilliant ball across and in front of Armstrong who has bust a gut to get there and Armstrong rolls it into the net from 30 yards with Reina still jogging back. What a man, what hair.

Get in. Now that the game is over, I’m sure everyone will look back on this and see it as a very comfortable win and I’m sure when you look at the stats for the game, it will be like that but it didn’t feel it for the last half an hour until Stuart Armstrong rolled that ball into the net. We were undoubtedly the better side throughout but with Saints home form being what it has been, you are never comfortable. Let’s face it though, Villa were fucking abysmal, I mean really bad, I mean competing with Huddersfield as the most nothing team we’ve seen visiting St Mary‘s this season. More of them later.

Let’s start off with Will Smallbone who was absolutely excellent throughout, particularly in the first time where he looked to the Manor born, strutting around in midfield and being equally comfortable off of his right and left foot. He kind of glides across the pitch and in addition to having a good range of passing he is also a goal threat I was really unlucky with that one that hit the post in the first 10 minutes. He faded a bit in the second half but his physicality will no doubt improve as time goes by.  There's no way he's getting served a celebratory drink in the pub without ID because he looks about 12. 

Villa’s main threat was of course Jack Grealish but JWP had a superb game at right back. He has developed this season into someone who is just a very good all-round footballer. It was used to be a bit of a disaster when he was asked to play at right back but he is really showing that he can be really good in that position and if he’s not careful, he will end up playing there for the rest of the season.

Having been appallingly bad last week, Moussa Djenepo was absolutely brilliant this week, completely terrorising Guilbert on the right side of the Villa defence. Direct running at pace and being encouraged to take the man on at every opportunity. That’s Moussa’s game and whilst it’s not going to work every week, it makes such a difference when it does and it really gets the crowd going because it’s exciting. Having a big bandage on your head always adds to the spectacle as well. Stuart Armstrong was superb on the right hand side and totally deserved his goal. He seem to get a bee in his bonnet about Grealish going over so easily and I don’t think I’ve ever seen him work as hard defensively as he did today. If there was a most improved player of the season award, he would be right up for it alongside Jack Stephens.

I didn’t realise at the time because I was at the game but there was a lot of talk the Shane Long actually scored that goal today with his cock and balls. I really hope that’s true and it certainly looks like it. This is probably going to throw VAR into total confusion now because If you can score a goal with that part of your anatomy then they might have to take into account how big in the lunchbox a player is because it might actually be the furthest point forward but you can score a goal with.

As said before, Villa were outstandingly bad. There was a point on about 75 minutes when I was actually thinking to myself that I don’t know if Saints could be possibly bad enough to gift Villa a goal. I never felt like they were going to score, ever. I didn’t say this out loud of course because if you do that, it always bites you in the arse. Grealish hardly got anywhere near our goal which was down to the hard work of the right hand side of the team and the fact that he was ineffective was quite serious for Villa because about 80% of their play goes through him and you can tell that most of their players are abdicating responsibility and just wait for Grealish to do something. I have to admit that I like Tyrone Mings. I like the fact that he is no nonsense though he did show a couple of Vestergaard moments when at 6 foot 5, he failed to get off the ground and got beaten in the air by Shane Long.  I've heard that people are saying that Reina played well which is a bit like praising an arsonist who starts a fire and then puts it out.

What the fuck was that all about with El Ghazi in the first half. Went down injured and was off the pitch, seemingly fatally but whilst dying he managed to roll back onto the pitch and this is the point where any sympathy with the injured player totally went out of the window. Both Mings and Grealish went over to him after a couple of minutes and told him to stop being a pussy and get up and eventually the game continued after he had been rolled back over the touchline. After all that he was eventually substituted, probably because he’s been rolling around for so fucking long that it would’ve been too embarrassing for him to run back onto the pitch and start playing again. I wonder if he got substituted because he was genuinely injured or because Dean Smith just got fed up with him being a dickhead. Maybe he didn’t wanna play any more today to save himself for the cup final next week. If that’s true, I expect he will enjoy his nice comfortable seat on the Wembley bench. Five minutes later, Moussa Djenepo got the cut on the head and played the rest of the game in a turban bandage. That kind of sums up the difference. The Saints players wanted it a lot more than Villa’s did.  I felt a bit sorry for Dean Smith afterwards and I hope he sticks to his word and doesn't pick players for Wembley who didn't put it in today.  He seems like a decent guy and was badly let down today.

The league table makes decent reading after that win with Saints now 10 points clear of West Ham who occupy the last relegation place. Considering where we were a few months ago, it’s a great place to be. Talking of the relegation places, it is absolutely staggering the Villa aren’t in one of them but there is now a little group of five teams fighting to avoid joining Norwich in the Championship next season with Villa, Bournemouth, Watford, Brighton and West Ham adrift by a few points. Good luck in the final against Manchester City next week Villa. Try and keep it to single figures because you won’t if you play like you did today.

Anyway, onwards we go to West Ham next week. West Ham are one team who I really want to get relegated so I think we can do a lot of people a favour next week when we go to the Taxpayer Dildo Bowl.

Premier League Match 26 - Southampton 1 Burnley 2

Southampton - Finding New Ways To Let Shit Goals in Since 1885

Burnley at home in what promises to be a fun fixture as it always is against Burnley RFC. It’s a game where a shit footballing spectacle can be guaranteed, usually ending in a 0-0 draw or a 1-0 win for Sean AllarDyche’s men. I make no apology from the fact that I would gladly see the back of them from the Premier League but every year they do okay and you have to have some sort of grudging respect for that.  At some point in the season they always have a massive slump and you think for about half an hour that this might be the year but they always sort themselves out in plenty of time to guarantee another season in the top flight. There is lots to admire about what Dyche has achieved but there is a lot to dislike as well.  I guess the crunch will come, like it did at Stoke under Tony Pulis, when the long serving manager leaves for whatever reason and the club has to decide to either carry on in the same way or try and change their style a bit.  It didn’t work for Stoke. Mind you, getting Mark Hughes to implement a change of style was probably not the best of ideas.

On the positive side, Jay Rodriguez is back at Burnley who are of course his hometown club. He has had to wait patiently for a chance in the team whilst the Bruise Brothers of Wood and Barnes started off the season but Jay has gotten the team recently with an injury to Barnes and has done pretty well including scoring an absolutely amazing goal at Old Trafford.  Jay is one of football is genuinely nice guys and I wish him every success. He is living proof of how football can be such a cruel game as he was on his way to great things with us when he got that injury at Manchester City which killed his chances of going to the World Cup and killed three of the prime years of his career. Also firmly in nice guy territory is Jack Cork who left Saints, like Rodriguez, for the right reasons in that he wanted to play more and he has been a mainstay in the midfield for a few years now and good luck to him. Elsewhere they have Nick Pope in goal who started the season poorly but has shown a massive recent improvement and is heading for a place in the England squad for the upcoming Euro 2020 tournament.  On the negative side, they have some horrible fucking players, chief of which is of course Ashley Barnes who goes into a bulldog-licking-piss-off-a-stingling-nettle faced rage whenever a decision goes against him and virtually always manages to not get booked or sent off. They also Phil Bardsley who is a horrible fucker, Erik Pieters who they signed from the remains of Stoke City and Ashley Westwood.

Consternation all round as the team is announced and Vestergaard is in the starting line-up and Bednarek is on the bench.  I’m assuming that it’s to combat the long balls that we are going to be showered with and that’s fine but word comes through that Ralph thinks Jannik is better on the ball and ‘adds more in the red zone’.   Sound like more over-clever-over-thinking to me.  Elsewhere, Redmond is out presumed injured and Boufal starts with Kyle Walker-Peters coming in at right back as we try to bump his price up so Daniel Levy can sell him to someone else.

Away we go and we send it down the left and Hendrick wraps his arms around Long and shoves him out of play.  Good fair tackle and we’ll have a line out.  Oh hang on, it’s not rugby.  The referee Simon Hooper clearly thinks it’s the 6 Nations because he sees nothing wrong in that.

I’m rolling my eyes into my head as Burnley go straight up our end and win a corner on the left hand side.  Over it comes from Westwood and …. what the fuck has happened here? Everyone has stopped and then Ben mee has stuck in the net whilst the Saints defenders are all standing around looking at each other. What the fuck is happened here?   The 30 or so Burnley fans present don’t make much noise but the ref is pointing to the middle so it’s a goal.  What the fuck?  What in fact happened was that Westwood curled in an absolutely shite corner about 3 foot off the ground and Danny Ings left it and it looks like he and McCarthy might exactly the same misjudgement and expected it to curl into the side netting but it went straight in. McCarthy was stood in the fucking goal behind the line. Absolutely ridiculous and just what you do not want to do against opposition like this.

Saints actually respond quite well and take control of the game with it taking about 15 minutes to sort things out.  Ings tried to back-heel a ball through to Armstrong but it bounced back to him and he skipped around one player and smashed it low to the keepers left and it skimmed into the corner for a quite brilliant finish from the King of the Scummers to make it 1-1.

King of the Scummers Strikes Again

The wind, which is blowing straight in our faces is an issue with the long ball barrage from Burnley causing all sorts of problems from central defenders. Vestergaard, whose responsibility is to head most of the balls away the come towards our defence, is getting caught flat-footed on a number of occasions as he misjudges the path of the ball.  His task is made different by the fact that Wood has pulled up and Vydra is on in his place. Now Burnley have two strikers who are both quite quick and there really is a case for taking Groot off, especially as we are trying to push up.  Mind you – are Burnley going to play any differently?

Boufal is doing his best to inject life into the proceedings and spins past Hendrick only to be clumsily carted to the ground to get the Irishman the booking he deserved after three seconds. The freekick is knocked short to Boufal who switches it onto his right foot and knock it in from the left hand side which Stephens meets and flicks onto the crossbar and away. Straight away at the other end Vydra has a chance as Vestergaard goes under-10s and lets the ball bounce, meaning he gets no distance on his eventual header allowing Burnley to find the striker who thankfully scuffed it.

This game is fucking terrible.  No one is controlling the ball and it’s just being whacked into the wind and either holding up and going nowhere if we do it, or flying too far if they do it.  There’s little or no decent play and it’s just got worse as Boufal’s off to be replaced with Djenepo.  The referee is letting Burnley get away with murder.  Cork trashes through the back of JWP with a scissor tackle and I’ve seen those given as reds before but no card is shown.  If only there was a rule about holding players – oh there is – it should be a yellow card but no, play on chaps, we all like a good game of rugger.  Half time, pissing down, windy and horrible.

The second half starts badly and then goes downhill. Bertrand puts a half chance into the side netting and we don’t really look like we have much about us and thehn on the hour it all goes to shit as Hendrick picks up the ball on the right hand side and the player with absolutely no ability,  pings a diagonal ball into Vydra and he controls and spins Stephens in one move, jinks past KWP and then lashes it into the net left footed. Absolutely fucking brilliant goal to be fair.

We respond with fuck all really.  Burnley are still winning all the second balls and when they do get possession, we’re making them look like Man City.  They have more energy and desire about them than we do.  Ralph takes off KWP and puts on Obafemi and we go 3-5-2 with Djenepo and Armstring in the wide positions.  Doesn’t matter what formation you play if you play like we are though.  Nothing much has changed and we’re not creating anything. J Rod who has had a quiet game so far then has a little dive over a non-challenge from Vestergaard to try and get him sent off but a little fat twat with the whistle doesn’t give it.

Our most creative player is Jack Stephens who comes rampaging forward, beating about three players down the right hand side and eventually he crosses it and it hits Mee on the arm and bounces down. It’s a clear handball and should definitely be a penalty but the little fat bald twat of course doesn’t give it and even though it goes to VAR, you just fucking know they’re not going to overturn it, such is the way things are going for us at the moment. Here comes the decision, no handball. What a fucking joke.  Hits his arm, not really down by his side, so therefore he made himself bigger, killed the attack stone dead.  Wank.

The last move Ralph makes is to give up.  Shane Long has been crap today as he always is when there is no space behind the defence but as far as I’m concerned, we’ve officially given up when we take him off and bring Che Adams on. We are playing with absolutely no urgency for a team that is to one down at home with five minutes to go and we do not remotely look like scoring. Eventually the ball works its way out To Bertrand who crosses and it goes all the way to Hojbjerg on the right hand side he smashes it straight at the fucking goalkeeper for our first shot on target since the goal, 75 minutes ago.  Whistle blown, game over, cold, raining and we’ve lost at home to fucking Burnley again.  It was predictable in the extreme.

If Sean Dyche could choose what he wanted in terms of conditions to help him win a game as Burnley manager, he would choose absolutely shit conditions, preferably including wind and pissing rain and he would also choose an absolute soft touch lenient/incompetent referee/VAR set up. He got all those things and that undoubtedly helped them get the result. We, as Southampton fans can moan about all this, all we like but it doesn’t change the fact that we were fucking dreadful,  pretty much from the first minute. The first minute was when Danny Ings ridiculously left that corner instead of kicking it anywhere like the guy on the front post is supposed to do but once he’d done that, what the fuck was McCarthy doing 6 foot behind the line in the goal?

It was actually before that the Burnley's rugby tactics came to the fore for the first time.  It was actually from the kickoff as mentioned earlier. The fact the Burnley played rugby the entire game did not come as a surprise to me and it certainly shouldn’t of come as a surprise to the Saints players but we didn’t deal with it. We didn’t fight fire with fire and we didn’t concentrate on playing football. We got drawn into the game at the Burnley wanted to play which was scrappy as fuck and just did not suit us. There were a couple of patches of play in the first half where we did actually play some proper football and that was when we scored and looked like scoring again but other than that there didn’t seem to be any real game plan or intelligence in dealing with the opposition, the referee and the conditions.

We even had the gift of Wood having to go off so we didn’t have to deal with the physicality upfront that you normally have to deal with but Burnley kept on playing the same way and we just didn’t deal with it. Having convinced myself at the start of the game that I thought that playing Vestergaard might be a good move, I saw the error of my ways pretty quickly because he was fucking useless pretty much all game and with us trying to press forward, always looked like a liability. JWP and Hojbjerg didn’t win the midfield battle because there was no usual midfield battle to win because it was all about winnind second balls off the Burnley strikers.  The ball in the main bypassed the midfield which again should have come as no surprise. Burnley do actually play some football once they are within about 40 yards from the oppositions goal but deeper than that and they just belt it forwards and compete and if the ball does have to drop to them they do try and play.  Also, it was a brilliant winning goal I have to say.

This went in at the near post and the keeper had no chance.

We again showed our absolute cluelessness in how to attack against a deep defence. This is one thing that hasn’t changed from the start of the season and it is what is going to derail any fanciful notion anyone has of us finishing in the top half. Shane Long did next to nothing today and goal aside, Danny Ings was had one of those game where nothing really came off.  Boufal looks quite lively in the first half until he got injured but his replacement Moussa Djenepo did absolutely nothing. I can’t even remember him taking a player on once as he seem to be content just knock it sideways and backwards which is not what he was brought to the club to do. He now keeps the ball and plays it safe so all the attacking intent and flair that we bought him for seems to have been coached out of him. The loss of Redmond wasn’t such a huge deal with Boufal on the pitch but we really noticed it in the second half.

KWP had a solid enough debut I thought.  Not brilliant but not bad as he tried to do the right things and showed a couple of nice touches. On the couple of times he got forward far enough to make a cross, he showed Cedric levels of crossing quality (I don’t mean that in a good way) but defensively he looks solid enough even though he was targeted by Burnley because of his lack of height. As a full-back though he will be judged on what he does in terms of crossing the ball and defending. Just being a neat and tidy footballer isn’t enough to stand out as a Premier League full-back so let’s hope there is more to come from him.

Ralph didn’t have a good day. The Vestergaard thing didn’t work overall and any ‘red zone’ gain was not as great as the ‘defence zone’ loss.  The change of formation at the end didn’t make us look any more like we were going to score.  First sub Djenepo did very little and though they didn’t have long, both Obafemi and Adams didn’t add anything and our lack of second ball wins cried out for Romeu for the last half an hour. There seemed to be no game plan whatsoever to do to deal with what we knew was going to come from Burnley and what we knew was going to come from the weather. You’re not going to be able to win the ball up front against Burnley because they don’t pass the ball at the back. You might get a block in place for when they try and smashed the ball at the park but it’s just gonna fly after throw-in. The only reason they pass the ball in their own half is to try and manoeuvre space to woof it up the pitch.  Aside from Jack Stephens occasionally slaloming forward with the ball, we had next to no creativity from anyone on the pitch, especially after Boufal went off.  There seemed very little attacking intent from us and this is borne out by the fact that we managed a whole two shots on target all fucking game.

We may as well talk about the referee. Simon Hooper was fucking useless and as per the Dyche perfect scenario wish list, he was ideal.   Doing nothing for Cork’s scissor tackle on JWP from behind was a highlight. The repeated holding and pulling by the likes of Hendrick, Bardsley, Westwood and Tarkowski went virtually completely unpunished. Then of course you have the penalty shout. For the third game running on wondering what the fucking point is of VAR.  Today’s shout was less of a penalty than the ones we had at home against Spurs recently but in all three cases, for me, they all should have been given as the defenders have gained clear advantages by having their hands and arms in unnatural positions and making themselves bigger. It’s a fucking joke. It would help if the referees actually made some fucking decisions instead of preferring to give nothing and then have VAR back them up because the player hasn’t actually caught the ball with two hands and run off with it so it’s not a clear and obvious error. It’s not just the way that VAR is used that is the problem, it is also the absolutely horrific standards of refereeing in the Premier League. None of this is helped by the fact that as an attacker, you can’t even get away with the ball brushing your arm but as a defender you can seemingly do whatever the fuck you like.  The referees will no doubt have a conference about it now and decide to give handballs again and we’ll concede one next week.

When I got to the ground today, there was a guy sat behind me talking about the possibility of us maybe sneaking into Europe with Manchester City getting banned from the Champions League.  Let me ponder that one for a moment… we are still looking over our shoulders at the bottom three and I hope that no one who has anything to do with the club, thinks otherwise.

Next up – Villa at home.

FA Cup 4th Round Replay - Tottenham 3 Southampton 2

No Words Necessary

Sorry this has taken a while.  I felt a bit jaded and decided to have a winter break for the FA Cup as it’s a shit competition which I don’t care about.  I knew that I’d have to write an FA Cup replay blog is we drew the first game and that it would impact my winter break but there you go.  This has been written by a collection of kids but I did Facetime them when they were half way through and everyone at the FA and in the media loves me, I can do what I want.

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Spurs again in the FA Cup replay and a very expensive trip to the capital and the brand spanking new Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. Having charged their fans a tenner to come and watch the original game, Daniel Levy is charging us £25 to go up and watch the replay. The reason for this is nothing to do with the cost of opening the stadium or the fact that we are a fellow Premier League team. The reason is because Daniel Levy is the kind of twat who would sell his own family and buy a replacement on the cheap.  Saints could’ve taken 9000 tickets as dictated by FA rules but in the event only decided to take 6000 which, despite being 150% dearer than the first game, were snapped up. Are away fans are magnificent in their numbers and this is something that the club would do well to realise.

The Liverpool game in the league that we had on Saturday was sold out for away fans and the club showed their complete ignorance at a time when many potential away fans are pissed off about not being able to get tickets, by putting on their official YouTube channel, a fuxcking vlog showing Liverpool fans in the Southampton end and it was all happy and jokey and jolly japes.  They really don’t help themselves sometimes. Talking to the Liverpool game, I found a match report for their game against Saints on the Scouse version of this blog. Here it is.....

Yestidee de mighty Reds played us some shite from de South o' England. England is a country dat we’re not part o' cos we’re Scouse. Anyways, Yerrgen stewd and gorped at dem d'n their warm up cos 'e’s magic and we kicked off. De feeder club 'ad a few moments and dee actually got in us 'alf and Danny Ings, Reds legend wuz caus'n us miner grief but nowt dat Virgil, oo came through us youth system cos we breed greatness and don’t buy it in, sorted 'im out. Robbo’s accidental backpass wuz picked up by de worlds greatest keeper, oo wuz breeched ed over de Wirral cos we breed greatness and don’t buy in. 0-0 and Bobby gets assaulted by dat little Jack Russell Irish git they’ve got up front and it’s a deffo penno. It’s evun gone ter VAR and they’ve not givun it, it’s a fuck'n outrage, 'e’s fuck'n assaulted 'im. VAR and referees ay so bent against der Pewl try'n ter stop us march ter immortality. Kevin Friend – yer in Karius death threat tiritory. you’ll never walk alone yous bastard, I’ll be behind yous wi' a big stick and me da. We graft dem a few chances ter keep de game intiest'n and us Wirral breeched keeper saves everyth'n easily. Half time and we’re not winn'n. it’s a fuck’n conspiracy ter graft City de league. Five minutes into de second 'alf and Ingsy dives ter try and win a penno. I’m not 'av'n de disrespect – it’s norra penno because Ramos skint Salah’s shoulder. Anyroad, bent Kevin doesn’t graft it cos it’s a fuck'n dive and Bobby sets up dat promis'n Scouse kidda we developed called Ox, oo’s play'n instead o' Mane, oo comes from de African bit o' Merseyside and 'e scores. you’ll never walk alone, you’ll neahhhhhh…. oh or'rite Carra kidda, avyer spilt some milk? Luis Suarez is na a racist Jordan 'enderson, worlds greatest midfielder, goaaaaaaaal, you’ll never walk alone!!! Mo Salah… fly'n down de w'n, Ramos is a bastard, goaaaaaaaal. easy peasy this. they’re Arabian Night. we 'ad de Titanic and dee fuck'n sunk it. Mo Salah… wa' a finish kidda, 4-0, Fuck'n 'uv dat Pep.. You’ll never walk alone, you’ll nehhhhhhhhhh-ver walk alone. We’re gonna win de league – de beeskneesiest premier league ever and we’re de beesknees ever and this is wi' all referees and VAR and de Premier League and England be'n against us and de media and Sky Sports all 'ate us and dun write about us.

Anyway, Spurs got away with an act of robbery at the weekend when they basically got in Manchester City’s half twice and scored twice and won 2-0 – the Jose effect. One of the scorers, Bergwijn one is not available today as he was not available in the first game. It’s a shame those rules about eligibility didn’t apply to some way to Daniel Levy and his pricing. Kyle Walker-Peters of course can’t play for us for the same reason and also because he’s on loan from Spurs. Hopefully, Yan Valery is back from the dead or else we are going to have a severely out of position player at right back, be it either Danso or JWP.

… and the lucky recipient of the right back role is JWP with Romeu keeping his place in midfield.  The only other change is that Boufal starts ahead of Djenepo and there is a welcome return on the bench for Stuart Armstrong.

Saint start really well with Redmond breaking away down the left hand side and he gets his head up and pings are superb all over the top to Ings who takes one touch inside Vertonghen before drilling at straight at Lloris.  This is a really good opening and Ings did superbly until it was time to shoot.  He’ll be disappointed.

Spurs first attack shows what happens when you’re luck is in compare to when your luck is out. Stephens gets a superb tackling on Sessegnon to stop the initial attack but the ball goes out to Ndombele on the edge of the box and he hits a shot which is heading towards the corner flag until it hits Stephens who is still on the ground and spins past Gunn into the far corner. For fuck‘s sake, 11 minutes, 1-0 down.

Saints immediately set about putting the world to rights and after some decent play by JWP on the right hand side to retain the ball, he plays a superb curling ball outside the left back and Ings is clean through. Lloris stays at home and Ings eventually gets to the ball on the 6 yard line and smashes it past Lloris but off the bar and away. We are all reluctant to criticise the King of the Scummers too much but that was a bad mess.

It’s not a miss that we worry about for too long as Hojbjerg finds Boufal who was drifted into the central area and he plays it behind the defence to Redmond.  Redmond appears initially to have turned the wrong way but gets a shot away anyway which Lloris can only parry out and Shane Long is there and even Shane Long can’t miss from there and it’s 1-1 and deservedly so.

Just when you think everything is going well, something goes to shit as Spurs play a short goalkick and JWP closes down Sessegnon. As JWP arrives, the Spurs player tried to clear it and his follow-through catches JWP below the knee. Fuck, this is not looking good as the stretcher and the oxygen and all that shit comes on. Shane Long doesn’t help by coming over and shouting “fuck me you can see the bone“. Not a good moment and off he goes.  With our right back crisis in full flow for tonight‘s game we have to move Jack Stephens over there and On comes Jannik Vestergaard to play against the very quick Son and Moura. Oh good.

Half time and Spurs must feel that it’s their lucky day to be level.  Personally, I’m always happy when we’re still in the game at half time away from home against one of the big boys but it should be better.  The injury to JWP has cast a bit of a cloud as well.

The second-half starts with another superb passage of play by Saints with Redmond and Ings passing their way through the Spurs defence before Ings shot deflects wide right to Boufal with a clear sight of goal but he screws it across the goal and wide.  This is a pretty poor miss to be honest and once more, we’ve carved out a really good opening and failed to put it away. You just know this is going to come back and bite us in the arse.

Spurs come close when a ball down the left hand side looks to have run out of play but Son keeps it in as the linesman kept the flag down and crossed and Moura drifts inbetween Vestergaard and Bertrand, meets it 6 yards out and heads wide. To be fair, that’s as bad a miss as any of ours.

Armstrong is on for the clearly disappointed Boufal as we approach the 70th minute. Spurs sling across in from the right hand side which is headed out by Shane Long to Redmond and Redders is away, spinning and turning past three players before finding Ings about 30 yards out. Tanganga backs away which is all the King of the Scummers needs to curl the ball into the far corner past Lloris. It’s a brilliant goal and quite puts me in mind of the famous Shane Long goal at Anfield in the League cup semi-final.

Dele Alli is on for Spurs and he is virtually playing as a false 9 in between Romeu and our central defenders.  In the next Spurs build-up he is miles offside but comes back in line with the Saints defenders to pick up a ball from Moura before returning it to him and Moura easily dances around Vestergaard before smashing it in the corner of the net to level things up again. Bollocks.

Che Guido Austin Adams has come on to replace Shane Long which means we have given up on pressing up front but Spurs have all the momentum now. A Saints attack breaks down when Redmond plays a blind ball inside and Spurs break on us and Alli spreads a diagonal ball behind a defence to the onrushing Son. Gunn comes out in instalments and over goes Son and the referee gives a penalty without even thinking about it. To be fair, at first look it looks like a nailede on pen. VAR has a check for the amount of time recommended for the opposition at a big ground, about one second and upholds the decision even though on just one replay you can see that Gunn has actually got the ball and there is no contact until after Son is already on his way down. That’s a fucking cheating bastard and a fucking shit use of VAR yet again.

Needless to say, the smiling, chest kicking, leg breaking fucker gets full reward for cheating and scores the penalty. There are a couple of minutes to go but we are dead and don’t get anywhere near fashioning a chance to force an equaliser.

Out of the FA Cup again and much to the delight of everyone at the FA and in media land, Spurs are through. We were the better side for about 80% of the game and managed to lose because of a variety of reasons but chief amongst them is a failure to take our chances or pick the right option, injuries to key players and the fact that we stopped playing once we went ahead on 72 minutes.

The the second Spurs goal illustrated, a lot of our problems stemmed from the injuries and who we ended up on the pitch with. Vestergaard coming on meant that the defence couldn’t push up as much as it normally would and this left spaces in between the defence and our central midfield players which Spurs exploited once Alli came on. If you look at Moura on the second goal, he picks up the ball in so much space before easily stepping past Vestergaard and burying it in the corner. It’s just too easy for him to score that goal. That space would not have been there, either if JWP was in the centre of midfield or if Jack Stephens was still in the centre of defence.  Also, it’s the second game in a row where an attacked has been miles offside, then got involved in a second phase and been onside again and we’ve not picked him up at all.  Henderson at the weekend, Alli tonight.

Then of course we have the winning goal which is another fucking refereeing/VAR calamity. The trouble is the Gunn came off his line in instalments so he made it look as though he was struggling and even though he actually got the ball and there was no touch on Son until he was already on the way down, I also do wonder why Gunn went with his feet and not his hands as this adds to the clumsy nature of the challenge. I don’t blame the referee for thinking it was a penalty. VAR is supposed to be able to pick through it and work out if it is a penalty or not and it’s just fucking isn’t. The main selling point of VAR is that it gets the right decision and no matter how long it takes, it gets it right,  However, for the last two games we’ve had, coincidentally at big ground, this hasn’t been the case and because of the amount of time taken, you can tell they’ve barely looked at it.  Son is a horrible bastard. Breaks a players leg with a deliberate foul, kicks another one in the chest, waves imaginary yellow cards at referees and then dives. He is the nicest bloke you’ll ever meet though.

It’s all a bit raw at the moment with the fuss over the Danny Ings penalty shout at Liverpool and now this. Again, we’ve made a trip to a huge stadium owned by a big six club and been given no breaks whatsoever by the officials. It’s almost getting like boxers when they go to America to fight a local boy when they know they basically have to leave the guy unconscious to just to get a draw. VAR was supposed to make this imbalance better but it doesn’t, it just makes it worse.

Positives. Our second goal was absolutely fucking brilliant by Nathan Redmond for the skill and the pace and the decision-making in his 50 yards burst up the pitch and it was a brilliant finish by Danny Ings which is great to see after his mini goal drought that he’s been on. I was very impressed with Hojbjerg in the centre of midfield as well. He is adding more consistency into his game now and it’s becoming the player that we all hoped he would be.

No one really played badly but some of the misses were bad, particularly the one where Ings hit the bar and Boufal’s miss at the start of the second-half. Misses like that are the reason why we are not out of sight after dominating the game. Angus Gunn didn’t make a single save all game and let in three goals from three shots. To be fair, he didn’t have a chance with any of the actual shots of the beat him but I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve seen holograms with more presence than he’s got. He reminds me a bit of when we had Maarten Stekelenburg in goal. He never seemed to let in any goals that were obviously his fault but he never actually made any saves either.

Another highlight for me was when Romeu was possessed by the ghost of Paul Wottonn and went round on a one-man murder spree for about five minutes committing about eight fouls in record time before eventually getting booked.  After the seventh one which left sun on the deck, the nicest man in football was waving imagine a yellow cards at the referee, so Oriol tried to decapitate the next Spurs player who came near him and finally got the yellow card he so badly wanted.

Ralph focused on our performance and was clearly annoyed about the way we managed, or rather failed to manage the last 20 minutes after we had gone in front. He also made mention of the amount of chances that we had missed and that we need to learn from that. He really is a classy guy. Even if he thought the penalty was soft, he wasn’t going to say anything about it and instead, rolled out the “I haven’t seen it yet” answer to the question. I could probably learn from him and not blame referees and VAR but where would be the fun in that?

Again, Ralph and Jose must be congratulated for the full strength sides they put out and their genuine enthusiasm for the competition. More should be made of that but all we hear are Klopp apologists.

Time for the winter break of approximately 10 days which will with any luck, give JWP a chance to recover. Stuart Armstrong‘s quick recovery from his injury was a bonus for today and hopefully by the time we play Burnley at home, Kyle Walker-Peters will be up to speed so we can go into that game with more or less a First choice line-up.  That’ll be a horrible game and a different kind of test.

Premier League Match 25 - Liverpool 4 Southampton 0

Over to your VAR Official: Jamie Carragher

It’s time for the Liverpool free hit. Every team that’s gone to their ground in the last year or so has ended up getting beat, so there should be no expectation that we will be any different. You never know of course and it of course, would be fucking glorious if we got anything out of the game.
I accepted that Liverpool would win the league this year and fair enough. A couple years ago they had a near miss with the champions league and won it the following year and last year had a near miss with the Premier league and are going to win it this year by a street. It will be painful watching those wankers lift the Premier League trophy after a gap of 30 years but I have accepted that it is going to happen so when it does, it won’t be too bad. The inbuilt superiority of their supporters is something I have got used to so in all honesty, I don’t actually see that being any worse. When they are finally mathematically certain of winning the league and someone has explained that with an abacus, Jamie Carragher will spontaneously combust and leave spit and jizz all over Roy Keane, Gary Neville and the walls of Sky Sports and the world will continue to turn.

Jurgen Klopp, he of the clandestine meeting with his transfer targets in Blackpool that never got investigated, has chosen this week to be a monumental bell end again. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you will know that Klopp has decided to miss his teams FA Cup fourth round replay against Shrewsbury to, as he puts it, honour the winter break. This is the winter break that was always going to be adjusted if there was a replay And everyone, including dear old Jurgen, knew about this. The reason Liverpool have a replay is because Klopp gave his players a winter break for the first game and they didn’t win it so now I have to play a replay. What goes around comes around. I can kind of understand him not playing any of the first team players because after all, it is Shrewsbury at home but not be there himself is the work of a complete wanker. He obviously has a little break planned somewhere and he wants to go on that rather than manage the next generation of Liverpool players. Imagine what it would mean to the 16 and 17-year-olds to have him in the dressing room instead of their age group manager. It is far too late to hope they crash and burn and win fuck all this season but we can’t have them being Invincibles or winning the treble or anything like that.

So it’s been a busy few days with the transfer window coming to an end with Kyle Walker-Peters joining on loan from Spurs and Cedric departing to Arsenal in another fantastic bit of work by his agent. Can we get all the shit players that we have out on loan, signed up to Cedric’s agent. We might have a half decent chance of getting them out the door if we do that. KWP arrives with no option to buy and Cedric joins Arsenal for the last five months of his Saints contract, for which we will pocket 5 million. KWP is a right-sided full back but I was encouraged when I did the fan boy thing of looking up his highlight reel on You Tube, to see that he has played at left back a lot as well so it really does cover both sides.

In terms of the first team, it is just a short-term move and one has to hope that the club has a plan in place to sign a right back permanently in the summer. Hopefully, we have a target identified and some sort of outline deal in place. Les Reed always used to say that we knew the player we were going to bring in before we actually needed to and whilst that has proven to be complete bollocks over the last few years, this is hopefully a time for that kind of succession planning to start again.

Cedric was at his best for Saints when we had Jose Fonte and Virgil Van Dijk as the central defenders so as long as Arsenal have got really good central defenders, Cedric will do okay. Oh yeah, it’s Mustafi and David Luiz isn’t it? Oh dear. Is Cedric better than Bellerin? I know which one I’d rather have and he’s not Portuguese. Oh well, it’s their problem now at least till the end of the season. The only shame is that with him leaving on loan, he won’t be able to play against us which is a bit of a shame because I think Nathan Redmond would tear him to pieces. Ironically, one game where he was recently horrific was against Arsenal at the Emirates where he allowed Arsenal’s left-sided players to get in as many crosses as they liked and produced the party piece of not being able to pass a ball 5 yards on the ground for Obafemi to have a tap-in. As crosses go, that one was phenomenal. Luckily, this happened before Arteta became the manager so he is clearly unaware of it. It is also quite amusing that as of this moment, he is joining a team lower down the league.

So Cedric has gone. Little boy band Harry Styles tight shirt with no socks Twat has left the building. He has been with us since summer 2015 and mainly did okay for the first year and a half, though he did find himself behind Cuco Martina in the pecking order at various times which doesn’t look good on anyone’s CV. After that however he just downed tools and seem to sleep walk-through games. He never blocked any crosses because he never got close to any wingers and he never put any tackles in either for the same reason. He also was repeatedly beaten at the back post in the air, mainly due to being a midget but most the time he didn’t even get close to the guy or even manage a jump to put them off before they scored. A laughable loan spell at Inter Milan ended with him only having played four games for them and all their fans thinking he was shit but he somehow turned the spell into a positive in an interview in the Daily Telegraph. The fact that he had gone from 1st to 4th choice Portugal right back in the last couple of years was also span as a positive as he was “on his way back“. He has only started playing well the last few months when Ralph, obviously told him a few home truths about actually having to defend positively and get near the player. There is a good player in there but the attitude has largely been appalling. He scored a goal against Pompey and knocked in a nice free-kick against Manchester United but to be honest, there will not be much that I’ll miss when he leaves though it might be worth tuning into Arsenal Fan TV after he’s played a couple of games.

The only thing that I’m worried about is that Saints have been so monumentally shit at signing players the past couple of years and now we have to find a replacement. KWP is the man in the short term but even if he does well for us, there is no option to buy so Spurs will just be flogging him to the highest bidder in the summer and that probably won’t be us.

And then came transfer Deadline day itself. There were rumours that Kevin Danso might be off elsewhere and we waited to see if anything came of Leicester and Vestergaard or if Leeds would fail to understand plain English again and put in another bid for Charlie Austin Adams. In the end, there was only one move and it was a bit of a gut wrenching one as Maya Yoshida departed to play for Sampdoria for the rest of the season.  You cannot not love Maya.

The Sampdoria Ex-Saints Club has a New Member

In an era where the game is full of players who don’t give a shit about anything other than themselves and certainly don’t give a shit about the club that they play for, Maya stands out as a player who has been with Saints for 7 1/2 years and has never once given less than 100% in any game that he has played in. He has never really been a first choice for a sustained period of time but has never caused any controversy and has always been deeply respectful of the club that pays his wages and the fans that support that club. He also was totally happy to be at Southampton and never had his eye on going elsewhere or thinking he was better than the club.

On a day which started with people defending Cedric, a player who basically phoned it in for two years and couldn’t be bothered, we have lost one of the players who embodied everything that football should be about. Not the best player but the best he possibly could be. Off of the pitch he has of course been amazing as a representative of the club and the 1% salary donation to the Saints Foundation is something he can rightly be proud of and I hope that someday he returns to continue his association with the club.

Taking sentiment out of it for a second, he had four months left on his contract and wanted to play some football and let’s face it, a move to Serie A and a reunion with Manolo Gabbiadini is a fantastic move for him and I’m sure every Saints fan wishes him a brilliant few months there and a resolution that he is happy with in the summer. It seems that we have picked up about £3 million quid for this loan move so that is approximately £9 million quid we have got, just for letting two players go four months early. Cedric has hopefully been replaced with KWP and Yoshida was our fourth choice centre back so was unlikely to get much game time between now and the end of the season. We could always bring Wesley Hoedt back I suppose.

Back to today and JWP is to deployed at right back with Romeu coming into the midfield.  Armstrong’s injury has opened the door for Moussa Djenepo on the right hand side so with Redmond on the left and two up top, we are certainly going for it.  Liverpool have selected Kevin Friend to referee the game, a first choice appointment for them since the pre-Klopp days.  The rest of the side is as you’d expect with Oxlade-Chamberlain filling in for Mane up front.

Away we go and Saints make a decent start with Hojbjerg driving from midfield and giving ito to Redders who switches play to Djenepo.  Unsurprisingly he runs at Robertson who seems to panic under pressure from Ings and passes it straight to Allison who picks it up. It’s the clearest back pass ever but no, Kevin Friend is referee so that’s not going to get given. From the next attack, Mo Salah clearly has the last touch as it runs behind but Friend gives a corner. Fucks sake. This is how it’s going to be.  Liverpool’s next corner is won when Salah brings a ball down with his arm before seeing his shot deflected wide.

Saints are standing up well against the 12 men and the Anfield whisper with Djenepo trying his luck from 30 yards but you don’t beat a keeper like Allison form there and he easily pushes it wide.  Up the other end though it’s carnage.  As Dave Merrington would say… “What we don’t want to do here is let that twat Van Dijk score a goal but we nearly did as the big bollocks found himself free in the middle of a penalty area and tried to score with a back heel but luckily McCarthy come flying off his line and blocked it and still managed to get up in time to block the rebound shot from Firmino. We don’t clear it and the ball gets chipped back in from the right hand side and it’s going over everybody and Firmino collapses on the goal line under a challenge from Long and appeals for the penalty. The ball is going absolutely nowhere near him but if you read the rulebook, that doesn’t actually matter (despite what many commentators seem to think) but miraculously, luck appears to be on our side because the VAR twats have a look at it and decide that Shane Long wrapping both arms around his neck and pulling him down is not a penalty. I think that it’s Firmino’s theatrical flop on the floor that has saved us there.

Firmino then has a shocker and plays a through ball to Ings who works himself a chance to shoot and manages to hit Shane Long’s heel with it.  We have another chance straight afterwards as Long’s attempt to find Ings comes back to him and then he hits it and Allison just basically stands there and catches it.  Bastard.  We’re all over them though and Allison has to bail out Gomez as Ings catches him in possession and we end up winning another corner which comes to nothing.

Half time and we can really hold our heads up high here. We’ve been brilliant in the first half and deserve to be level if not in front. Kevin Friend has refereed the game to usual Kevin Friend standards though he and his superiors will doubtless be annoyed about his failure to award Liverpool a penalty. Other than that though, he has been absolutely textbook, refereeing differently for one team than the other. I’m sure it will carry on in similar vein in the second half.

Five minutes into the second half and we break and Danny Ings is away with Gomez and Fabinho for company. They back off and allow him into the penalty area and he has a little shuffle to go between the two players any bundles past Fabinho who flicks out a foot and brings some down. That’s a penalty… clear as fucking day but Kevin Friend waves it away and Liverpool break like only Liverpool can and 30 seconds later Robertson and Firmino have combined near our goal line to set up Chamberlain who jinks across the top of the penalty area and hits a shot through a defender past the unsighted McCarthy to make it 1-0.  There is a very quick VAR review (by Jamie Carragher) of the penalty incident but do you honestly think they are going to disallow a Liverpool goal in order to give us a penalty? Of course they’re fucking not.

There’s not really much point in talking about the rest of the game. Henderson took advantage of the different phase offside crap rule and scored the second on the hour after Firmino’s cut back and in the last 10 minutes when we were pushing forward, Salah help himself to 2 goals, the first courtesy of a brilliant ball from Henderson which enabled. Salah to run on against McCarthy and finish superbly and the fourth one in the last minute with Firmino again setting him up and he bundled it into the net without I think, knowing too much about it.  4-0 is an absolute travesty. They’re better than us, of course they are and even if the Ings penalty decision have gone our way and we have gone 1-0 up, I’m sure they would’ve gone up through the gears and beaten us anyway.

What I like about us today is that we turned up and gave it a right go. Too often in recent history against the big boys, we have just completely folded and be dead and buried by half-time Ralph’s team are made of different stuff to what we’ve had a previous three seasons.  So we lost 4-0 in the end but it was considerably better than our last two 3-0 defeats here, daft though that sounds.

I guess I’m probably about to write all the things I normally write when you play away from home against one of the big boys. We have lost and of course, they were better than us and deserved the win but we are leaving with the usual burning sense of injustice and the feeling that it wouldn’t have mattered what we did, there was absolutely no fucking point because there is barely any point in turning up. When you get a referee like Kevin Friend who is basically going to give you absolutely fuck all then you may as well not bother at all. Your ridiculously hard task to come away to Anfield and get something just gets made impossible by the wanker in the black and the team of wankers in the VAR room.  I think most accept that referees could get intimidated at big grounds but now we have VAR and guys who are not even at Anfield in this case, making baffling decisions.  In effect it's worse because we now have two sets of twats instead of one.

Our game plan in all our away games has been to keep it tight and score the first goal. Not particularly complicated but that’s the way we try and play. If the referee wasn’t a complete fucking clown then we could well have had the first goal today because Ings was clearly brought down for a penalty and Liverpool went straight up the other end and scored. I firmly believe that we had a better chance of getting the penalty if Liverpool hadn’t have scored but once they stuck it in the net there was no fucking way on Gods Green Earth they were ever going to disallow a goal and give us a penalty at the other end. If we’d been given a penalty, we probably would’ve been 1-0 in front but instead we are one down and then we have to chase the game and then, because Liverpool are unbelievably clinical, we get fucked.  It’s a completely different game if we go one up because they Liverpool might start getting frustrated in the crowd might start to turn etc but as they went one up, everything is alright in Liverpool world and we get fucked and no one really cares.  I mean, it’s not even close and there is no argument. Fabinho’s initial challenge gets the ball and then hooks Ings down with a second lunge for the ball. It’s a penalty and there is no way that any other decision can be reached unless you are Kevin Friend and the VAR fuck wits.   Remember the one we conceded against Wolves a few weeks back – ref didn’t give it and you could see why but then VAR rightly overruled it and they got the penalty.  This was the same scenario so why not given?  It will probably get mentioned in the online media and in the newspapers and stuff like that but then no one will give a fuck and the same thing will happen next week to whatever other team is visiting Anfield.

Admittedly, they should have had a penalty in the first half when Shane Long pulled down Firmino which once again is another staggering VAR failure. It’s interesting that when referees have a complete shocker, they get stood down for a few weeks and don’t referee Premier League fixtures. I think we are getting to the stage where if the VAR officials make absolutely horrific errors and use VAR in a stupid way then they should be getting banned as well.

I guess when we arrived at half-time at 0-0 and we were the better side and look in the more likely to score, someone had a little word in Kevin’s ear and said “we can’t have this Kevin you’d better do something about it”. We should’ve known what was coming because in the first half we had an absolute fucking classic with the back pass.  Let’s just hand them the league now and fucking get it over with. This is before we even get to the free kicks and a little decisions and then we had two different sets of rules for what warranted a yellow card for us and for them. Fabinho hacks over Djenepo 100% deliberately in the middle of the field and nothing happens and then Bednarek commits a much less cynical foul and get a yellow card straight away. Kevin Friend is an absolute fucking ball bag.

Moving away from Kevin the Wanker, we really should’ve scored today regardless but we were guilty multiple times of taking the wrong option and therefore we didn’t test Allison nearly as much as we should’ve done. There is something arrogant about the way they defend and they do give you chances (mainly because neither full-back can actually defend very well) but you have to take them and today we just didn’t. To get beat4-0 is harsh and that is testament to how clinical Liverpool were when they got the chance but it was also testament to how open we were when we were trying to chase the game. There were good performances all over the park for us but at the end of the day, we are not in the same league as Liverpool and we needed to have a three chances and three goals type of performance in order to get anything out of today.

Still, never mind as it doesn’t matter in the scheme of things and we move onto the next game which is the FA Cup Replay at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. It’s another top six club away from home but they are half the team that Liverpool is so we have to make our chances count and I reckon we could be in for a good night.  Bring it on.