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.