"We should yav won that roight"....
Similar to last week, we have a team to play who are over performing so far this season, with a visit to Villa Park to take on Aston Villa who won the first four games but came back down to earth with a bit of a bump last week, getting slapped 3-0 at home by Leeds. Villa’s first two wins were against teams who weren’t particularly good in Sheffield United and Fulham but the third win made a few headlines as it was a 7-2 annihilation of Liverpool, where Villa had one of those games where in 90 minutes, they used up every single bit of good luck they could possibly have over season with four of the goals being a big deflections. On the day they were absolutely brilliant but the overriding feeling about that game was that it was very, very funny. Following the Lord Mayor’s show, they then won at Leicester which is never easy at the best of times.
Whilst not being world beaters, they are decent side this season with Dean Smith having done well in the transfer market recruiting players in positions they actually needed. It is very hard to see them struggling at all to stay up this season. I would say that the defence is still ropey though.
Eyebrows raised when they paid over £30 million for Ollie Watkins but he has started well and of course scored a hat-trick in that Liverpool game. He will be key to their season and if he can get 15 goals then Villa are going to have a decent year. They still have Jack Grealish of course because the market wasn’t ready for him to move for £80 million quid this summer. Grealish of course divides opinion and some of his diving about is completely pathetic but I think he’s a marvellous footballer but as far as England are concerned, he seems to be going down the Matt Le Tissier route of never being completely trusted and almost having to rely on there being absolutely no choice before he is grudgingly given a chance by the risk averse management of Gareth Southgate.
Villa have added added a similar kind of threat with Ross Barkley on loan for the season. Barkley is one of those players who for a few games every season, will look like the best player on the planet but for the vast majority, he won’t actually do very much, which is why he has fallen out of the reckoning for England and Chelsea were keen to move him on.
Villa’s most pressing need was at the back. They’ve signed Matty Cash at right back who was highly rated but at the end of the day he was a defender from the Championship so he’s not gonna make that much of a difference but the best signing was probably Emiliano Martinez as he finally gave up on ever getting a fair shake Arsenal and is now the undisputed number one goalkeeper with Villa having spent last year pissing around with Pepe Reina, Tom Heaton and an average Scandinavian, Nyland.
Once again it has been a quiet week down South with not much news coming out of Staplewood. It appears that Moussa Djenepo is nearing fitness of sorts and last weeks squad will be boosted with a return of Theo Walcott, which presents Ralph with a nice problem of having to decide which two out of Redmond, Armstrong and Walcott start the game.
In the event, the team news had a bit of a surprise in it because Walcott started on the left ahead of Redmond. For me, this is exactly the right selection but it’s still quite surprising that Redmond was left out. Just perhaps Ralph watches the games a bit more closely than Alan Smith. Djenepo did make it back as far as the bench and there was a place once more for Dan N’Lundulu.
Away we go and Saints make a positive start with Walcott and Bertrand combining to put Ings away on the left and Mings blocks his attempt to cross and we win a corner. In it comes from JWP, flicked on by Ings and the ball hits a Villa defender and Adams and bobbles apologetically over the line and into the net and bloody hell, 1-0 up with our first attack. Hang on, it’s been checked by VAR and you can see that there’s going to be a microscopic onside or offside decision against Adams. The ball Has actually hit Konsa’s foot and then his hand and then it’s flicked off Adams and gone in the net. How can Adams be offside if he hadn’t touched the ball and Konsa has handled it? It should surely be a penalty or a goal. Fucking joke if this is disallowed but sure enough, it is. The expression on Che’s face clearly shows that he thinks it’s absolute bullshit as well. They’ve basically applied every interpretation possible to disallow the goal – decided Adams was active from the moment Ings flicked it on, decided Konsa’s touch with his foot wasn’t deliberate and decided that the handball doesn’t matter.
Never mind and we immediately attacked on the right hand side through Armstrong a via nice flick by JWP, Ings finds Walcott on the left and he takes it on first time and side foots it over the goalkeeper and pings off the bar and goes over. Not to worry as on 18 minutes, Armstrong works a crossing position for KWP and as he overhits the cross, Targett crashes through him and so we get a free kick to the side of the penalty area. JWP takes it and there is Vestergaard to absolutely bullet a header back across and into the side netting on the far side. Get the fuck in. Brilliant header and laughable that he was being marked by John McGinn who is about 5 foot 3.
Villa are struggling to pick up our two wingers who are coming in off the wings and they don’t close down Vestergaard either and he manages to slide a ball through the Villa midfield to meet the run of Walcott who gets trashed by Douglas Luiz on the edge of the ‘D’. It’s the absolute perfect position for JWP and it just feels like one of those days where you know he’s going to score. We all know where it’s going, the guys in the wall know where it’s going and Martinez in goal knows where it’s going. Over the wall and ripping into the top left corner as we look at it. Brilliant freekick. Get in.
The expected Villa fightback doesn’t really materialise and we win a free-kick as Grealish fouls KWP. We take it quickly and work it down the right hand side with Adams slinging over the cross. The Villa defenders are all in horrible positions, none more so than Matt Cash who has Walcott behind him so he sticks his hand up and pushes it away. He is last man and he surely has to go off but the referee, Darren England gives us a free kick and books him and totally bottles it. What a fucking shambles. This freekick is a bit closer and right on the edge of the box and it will be nice to score just exact some measure of justice for the cheating fucker and crap referee. It looks like Vestergaard it’s just going to belt the shit out of it but no, it’s JWP once more and he whips it over a very half arsed wall and into the far corner in exactly the same way as the last one. The best view in the house was had by Emiliano Martinez, who stood still and watched it rip into the far corner. He may as well have had his phone out and filmed it. Three fucking nil.
Half-time and Saints have to make a change. Bednarek came down from a great height in the first half and banged his head on the pitch so it’s no surprise to see him replaced by Jack Stephens. Villa start the second half well because they couldn’t be any worse and it’s all going through Grealish as it always does and like him or loath him, he is making things happen, often with theatrical falls to the ground. They do work a quick free-kick to him though and he fires over across which Trezeguet meets at the back post but McCarthy keeps it out well down low. Back it comes in from the other side and Grealish himself wins the header after the cross has floated over Stephens head, heads it down and McCarthy has to go to his left again to pull out a decent save.
No worries though as KWP skips out of defence and finds Armstrong running forward and the man with a magnificent hair carries it to about 30 yards out before finding Ings on the left hand side and everyone knows what’s coming, except for the little shit Matty Cash, who has the best seat in the house to watch the King of the Scummers curl a shot over Martinez and in off the bar on the far side. It’s a quiet outstanding finish.
It’s all been absolutely marvellous so far but complacency is key as we doze off and no one close down Grealish on the left hand side and he gets over a decent cross with the outside of his boot and there is Mings to flick it past McCarthy to reduce the arrears.
There is still half an hour to go and there is still work to do here and another cross from the wing goes over everybody to Trézéguet who brings it down and Vestergaard throws himself in the way like a big fucking tree falling down and pulls off a superb block to bail out Bertrand who had let the ball go over his head. Another cross from the left, another shot from Trézéguet and once more McCarthy has to take off and tip it off the bar. We are suddenly making very heavy weather of closing this game out and the discipline we showed in closing out the Everton game is nowhere to be seen.
We are forced into a reshuffle straight after this as Bertrand has pulled up and has to go off and with no other defender on the bench, it’s Diallo who comes on in the centre midfield with JWP going to left back. The fact that JWP is at left back is less of an issue than the fact that JWP is no longer in midfield as Villa are now running the game. Then, we have a fucking disaster as Danny Ings tries to run the ball out on the left wing, gets blocked off by Douglas Luiz and falls really awkwardly with his left leg folding underneath him and he’s not getting up…. The world stops…. Fuck!. This is not good. He’s down for a good three minutes and there is concern from the Villa players who know him from England like Mings and Grealish so you know that this is potentially quite a bad one. There is one good sign as he eventually gets up and walks off the pitch but the replays look horrible and we fear the worst.
Shane is on to pick up his appearance bonus and the 90 minutes tick around but there are 6 to go – I’m not happy. Ings in injured and I just want this game to be done. There is some defending to do and Armstrong doesn’t do it again, allowing Grealish to walk past him and get to the line near the 6 yard box and when the cross bounces back to him, Diallo swings a leg at it clear it but only succeeds in booting Grealish who goes down like he’s going to be left paralysed for the rest of his life…. Regardless of this though, it’s a definite penalty. H Ollie Watkins, who has done precisely fuck all all game takes it and scores easily, sending Macca the wrong way. I can’t believe it, we were 4-0 up with half an hour to go and I’m looking at the watch nervously.
We’re up to 95 minutes but we then manage to fucking do it again as a big switch of play finds Grealish on the left hand side and he makes space and drills at the near post, McCarthy is unsighted by Stevens and it zips into the net to make it 4–3. There are seconds to go and we kick off and still managed to boot the ball against the Villa player but luckily, the referee decides that that’s enough and blows the final whistle. Another three points on the road but worries about the injuries, particularly one of them. It’s not a mental celebration like it would have been if we’d scored a last minute winner to win 4-3 – it’s a bit subdued.
What a fucking team we are! For the first hour we were absolutely brilliant and looked like we could score any number of goals that we wanted to. For the last half an hour we were absolute dog shit. Only Saints can be 4-0 up with half an hour ago and still have you looking at the clock nervously at the end of the game. It’s fucking ridiculous.
So we won the game and got the three points but how many people would swap a Villa equaliser in the 99th minute for Danny Ings not being injured? I know I would. The result of his scan tomorrow is kind of pivotal to determining how the rest of the season is going to go but more than that, you don’t want to see him injured again after what he’s been though in the past and where he has got to right now. I’m no medic but at least the knee wasn’t twisted in the incident and I’m searching for positives.
So – bad news first – the last half hour shambles. It was no coincidence that we started to get worse once we had to make substitutions with Jack Stephens being a notable downgrade on Bednarek. Jack is nowhere near the levels of last season and will need to improve massively to stand a chance of regaining his place, especially with Salisu nearing fitness (maybe). Everything was coming down that side in the 2nd Half and KWP and Armstrong weren;t great defensively when it got tough either. Armstrong in particular will certainly need to look at himself for the first two goals we conceded.
Ryan Bertrand is one of the few players that we don’t have a natural replacement for and moving JWP to left back wasn’t the best, mainly because it took him out of midfield. Diallo looked slightly raw and was trying to hard to steam into tackles when he would’ve been better served just pressing. He was a little bit unfortunate with the penalty he gave away because he was just trying to clear the ball and didn’t seem aware that Grealish was there. It’s not really a dive because he did get kicked but fuck me, did he make sure with the theatrical finish.
The god news was that we were brilliant for an hour and that was ultimately enough. It should have been 1-0 but for the already explained shite VAR application and the four goals we did get were all marvellous in their clinical nature. Vestergaard’s header put me in mind of Sir Rickie’s header for England v Scotland at Wembley and what can you say about JWP’s free-kicks? It’s a matter of time before teams start putting a player on the line. As said earlier, Cash should’ve been sent off for the handball and then none of the second half shambles would have happened and we’d have won about 5-0. It was nice to see Cash show Danny onto his right foot for the 4th goal – how did that work out for you?
As predicted before the game, Villa’s defending was their undoing. High on the checklist of things you shouldn’t do again Saints must be leaving the 6 foot 7 guy virtually unmarked, giving free kicks away around the edge of the box and allowing Danny Ings to cut-in from the left onto his right foot. Dean Smith thinks they should have won though – cretin.
JWP led the way today on what was his 26th birthday. The two free-kicks were brilliant of course but his overall play was superb and though I don’t think it was the best move to him put him at left back, he did a passible job when pressed into service there. His partnership with Romeu really gives us an amazing platform to go out and play the way we want to play.
Theo Walcott justified his selection on the left wing ahead of Nathan Redmond and it was a very good bit of play the lead to the second goal, getting himself in front of Douglas Luiz and being carted up in the air. It’s a matter of time before he scores as well and it would have been today but for the handball. On the other wing, Stuart Armstrong still didn’t look entirely hundred percent and as mentioned, his defending wasn’t great today but it struck me again what a good player he is when he gets in the opposition half and he got the assist for the fourth goal. Mind you, giving the ball to Danny Ings is not exactly rocket science.
We must just hope that the King is not badly injured as the partnership with Che Adams is getting better with every game. Adams was very unlucky not to score today but more than that, the movement of the front two gave the whole Villa back for absolute nightmares and when you had Armstrong walk off into the mix as well, It was no wonder Villa felt apart. Look at the 4th goal – Ings is left, Walcott and Armstrong are in the middle and Adams is right. That’s great movement and very difficult to mark.
The improvement any Jannik Vestergaard has been noticed by many and this is mainly because it is such a contrast with what he showed for the majority of last season. He has been nothing short of magnificent this season and whilst scoring goals will get you in Garth Crooks team of the week, it’s his defensive work and passing that is showing off the scale improvement at the moment. The block he pulled off in the second half was brilliant and he even managed to look relatively light on his feet. Jan Bednarek had started the game pretty well and we missed him in the 2nd Half.
Alex McCarthy also had a very good game. Having had absolutely nothing to do against Everton last week, he pulled off a string of saves today and was heading for a real 10 out of 10 performance until Grealish scored the third goal in the 97th minute which was a strange one and that it went near post and he seem to be completely deceived by it and just watch it fly in.
Look at that league table. We are third.
deserve to be there as well. Over the last three games we’ve gone away to Chelsea and got a draw, beat Champions-elect Everton and now won at Villa who had won four out of their previous five games. It’s not as if the fixtures have been falling particularly kindly. We are now a bloody good team that is hard to beat and we have a cutting edge and now we have a bit of depth as well. Hopefully, that depth won’t be too severely tested over the next couple of games and all three of the injuries are not bad.
Next up – Newcastle at home on Friday – win that and we will actually be top for a day.
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