The Shortest Pre-Season Ever

Manager of the Month: First of Many

After the end of the season and our 11th place finish, a strange thing happened in that Ralph deservedly won the July manager of the month award.  I say strange because usually it’s the preserve of Jurgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola. There is a curse commonly associated with manager of the month which is that things go to shit immediately afterwards but August was actually a month off from Premier League football so no chance of that.  So, a quiz question in future years will be ‘Who was the only ever Premier League manager of the month for July?’.

The first business we had to do this summer involved having to deal with Daniel Levy and Spurs over the transfers of Pierre Hojbjerg to them and Kyle Walker-Peters to us. In hindsight, it was always going to get done despite Levy and Spurs being notoriously difficult to deal with but it was just a case of haggling over money and in true modern football fashion, no one really knows who has got the better end of the deal. The details we are being fed is that KWP cost us £12 million and PEH cost them around £18 million. If that’s the case then it seems about right to me but it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest, if the figures are completely different. Again in hindsight, it looks like the fact that Spurs wanted one of our players made it easier for us to sign KWP because if they hadn’t wanted one of our players, I’m sure that Levy would have priced KWP out of the move.

Hojbjerg leaves and I have absolutely no problem with that because over the four years that he has been with us, he has always given 100% despite playing under some pretty ropey managers until Ralph arrived. I have a feeling he will do very well at Tottenham and let’s face it, Jose Mourinho knows what the game is about. Pierre was a player who always showed leadership qualities even when he wasn’t the captain and he was instrumental as captain, in helping to turn things around after than the nadir of the 9-0 defeat. During Project Restart, when it was abundantly obvious that he was leaving, whenever he was on the pitch he still put the effort in and they should be remembered when he is compared to certain other players who decided they wanted to leave and then couldn’t give a shit whilst wearing a red and white shirt.

KWP arrives of course having quickly proved himself to be an excellent right back, once he acclimatised to the way that Ralph wanted us to play. This guy is a proper defender who also offers a lot when going forward and it really looks like an excellent signing for us and for the first time since we had Nathaniel Clyne on the right and Ryan Bertrand on the left, we have a pair of really good full backs who offer us a really good balance between defence and attack. We’ve had Cedric, Cuco Martina and Valery at right back over the last five years and to be brutally honest, none of them could defend and our right hand side has been a weakness.

It almost became a comedy sketch in the end but eventually Mohammed Salisu emerged from quarantine and became a Southampton player, signing from Real Valladolid. It’s all been a bit mysterious and it appears that he will not be fit for the start of the season but on paper, it’s a great signing of a player who is very well thought of but we have to remember that he is young, especially for a centre half, he will make mistakes and we all got very excited over the signing of Kevin Danso last season.  There's not even been a picture of him in a Saints shirt as yet and he's not been in any of the training ground galleries on the website.  Slightly odd.

We are still hamstrung in this transfer market in some respects by our mistakes of the past and part of our summer has been wondering what happens to our shit boy band. Maybe they could be called the Wilsations after Ross Wilson or maybe the Reed-Jects.

We have Mohammed Elyounoussi who we thought was a lead violinist who could play to a really high standard to packed halls but it turns out that he can only play a fucking tambourine at a village fete in Scotland.

We have Wesley Hoedt who thinks he’s brilliant at everything and can sing and dance and play every instrument under the sun but in fact, he is Darius Dinesh (look him up) and a bit of a wanker with no redeeming features.

We have Guido Carrillo who we’ve had to tell to just stand there and mime because he can’t do anything else. It’s not his fault and you can’t blame him for being here but it’s just the way it is.

We have Mario Lemina, the God of gangsta rap on lead vocals and Instagram.  He’s the main talent of the band and delivers the least and we have 200 gigs booked for next year and we know Mario is going to turn up for about three of them. 

Back in the real world with the boy band and Elyounoussi fucked off for a second season on loan at Celtic as soon as the English season ended. It probably suits us to get him out the door for another year but it seems absolutely ridiculous to me that you can loan in a player that you obviously cannot afford to buy, for two seasons. We can only hope that the loan fee was very substantial.

Carrillo has been mentioned a few times in terms of being loaned to an Argentinian club to once again link up with Mauricio Pellegrino but either way, he has not been invited to join in pre-season training here, so is in limbo at the moment as he enters the last year of his very lucrative contract, given to him by the Teflon man Ross Wilson. I wonder if Les and Ross, having both left all their shit behind to take up new positions, still think he has a future at Southampton? The last time I looked, we had plenty of staff in the megastore.

Wesley probably wakes up every morning thinking that his agent is going to be on the phone with news of a potential move to a big Italian, Spanish or English club but it isn’t happening for a player who is destined to be pissing around in the Belgian league for the rest of his career. He has been linked with Antwerp but he hasn’t gone yet and he seems to have a swipe at Ralph in every interview that he does. He will be missed in the way that you’d miss haemorrhoids when they’ve gone away.  Always remember that there are no good players called Wesley.

"Where the fuck is Fulham? #BellEnd"

Then we have Mario. Oh dear. He has spent the whole of the season just gone, calling Galatasaray the greatest club on earth with the greatest fan base. A “mythic” club no less and the perfect club for him #LionTeam #TonicLikeLeminarse #Waster. Well guess what? The mythic club don’t want him and have fucked him off back to us. He was initially linked with Besiktas who are of course one of the main rivals of Galatasaray, which was probably fabricated by Mario and his agent to get back at the snub from Galatasaray. Meanwhile, it appears that Saints have agreed a fee with Fulham which will probably be news to Mario. I couldn’t imagine for a second that he would end up at Fulham but it appears it might have some legs - they would be absolutely mad to rely on that absolute fucking waster in the relegation battle but they have ahead next season and it saddens me to look at Fulham fans on Twitter, looking at the infamous sped up highlight reel of Nathan Redmond and getting excited.

Speaking of Fulham, It was good to see them get promoted through the play-offs and that Harrison Reed played a massive role in their success. Reed has of course been mentioned as a possible replacement for Hojbjerg at Saints but to be honest, I think that ship has sailed and it looks like he will sign for Fulham for around £8 million. Can’t blame him for a second for going but I feel that we may be missing a trick if we don’t have him here this season. With one year left on his contract though, I guess we could gamble on keeping him for the first half of the season and if it doesn’t work out, letting him go for a few million in January but with money being tight at the moment, that’s not really a feasible option.

Another player was out on loan last year was Fraser Forster who has decided off his own back it seems, to come back to Southampton and fight for a place which is absolutely fair enough as far as I’m concerned. Celtic fans seem to be taking the news quite badly but at the end of the day lads, a player who knows your club well has decided to come back to Southampton, where he stands a very real chance of being on the bench.  Celtic are a huge club…. in Scotland, though they did give the mighty Ferencvaros a good game at home in the Champions League before losing and exiting the tournament before the season has actually started, as usual, which means that their decent players will be available for less before the transfer window closes.

On an extremely positive note, Gareth Southgate announced his England squad and both Danny Ings and JWP were in it and deservedly so. There was the usual strangeness with Southgate though in that he didn’t pick a left back and we have a very good one at Southampton.  The very fact that he didn’t pick a left back at all just makes me have grave doubts over Southgate’s ability as England manager.  Anyhow, Danny will always have loads of players in front of him in the pecking order, no matter how many goals he scores as there are quite a few English strikers at the big clubs but JWP will hopefully be given a really good chance to impress, in an area of the pitch were England are not that great. Southgate will probably play him at left back.  Of course though, JWP can always console himself with having signed a new 5 year contract at Saints.

Back at home, shock of shocks, LD Sports turned out to be a bit dodgy.  They have either been kicked into touch or left of their own accord, depending on what you read. Either way, the £7.5 million per year we were getting from them is no longer a thing and we were in the situation of beggars not able to be choosers, so we've ended up with a sports betting company which is not ideal. I’m not going to speculate on how stable Sportsbet.io are but I assume it will be a one season thing. Lots of replica kit will have to be replaced or rebranded though, which is a massive deal to the slightly peculiar breed of fans who didn’t like the sponsors logo and it was the biggest deal in the world. I guess they will have to find something more important to worry about now.

The football itself all starts again in a couple of weeks with our first game being an away trip to Crystal Palace. We usually do quite well up there but as I always say, historical records against teams, even recent historical records are largely meaningless. For example, you may have heard on the grapevine that we lost a game 9-0 last season... and the next meeting of the clubs was slightly different.