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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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