Premier League Match 29 - Southampton 1 Brighton 2

 

Saints Demonstrate How Not to Get Stuck In

Brighton at home in what is a huge game as we try and march towards safety and having a relatively relaxing end of the season with just the FA Cup to focus. They win here today will put us on 36 points which Martin Semmens has always said, is the point where you can start planning for next season with regards to recruitment and contract extensions and the like. Brighton are right in the shit, being in a group of three teams currently, who are trying to avoid getting dragged into the third relegation spot, joining Sheffield United and West Brom in the Championship next season. Of the three under threat, Fulham, Newcastle and Brighton, Brighton are the most pleasing on the eye but that doesn’t always matter.

Brighton are the kings of xG apparently. XG is a relatively newly invented stat which is based on Opta analysing positions on the pitch where goals are scored from. I have no idea whether it takes into account defenders positions or any of the other things like how fast the ball is coming to you or how wet the ground is or anything like that. For example if you get the ball on the penalty spot and the goalkeeper is not in the goal, does that carry a higher xG tariff then if he is.? Answers on a postcard please and all the postcards are going straight in the bin because I don’t fucking care.

I can see with my own eyes that Brighton create chances and can’t score and I don’t need a stat to tell me that. You don’t get given any extra points if your xG is higher than a certain level. I’m sure that being the kings of xG will be a great comfort if they get relegated, playing an amazing amount of pretty football between the two penalty areas if, when they get to the final third they do a possible impression of a jigsaw.. As we know, jigsaws fall to pieces in the box. 

When defending, Brighton cough up chances, usually from set pieces which is strange when you consider how tall some of their defenders are. So, is Graham Potter a good manager, and overrated one or just a bang average one? Is it down to him or is it down to the recruitment in the summer when they signed it Danny Welbeck and Adam Lallana to give them a cutting edge. All this could come back to bite me of course if Lallana creates one half chance and Welbeck smashes it in the net from 35 yards or if Brighton have 3 shots and score 3 goals.

As far as Saints are concerned, the only news post to Manchester City is that it looks like Djenepo might be fit after all and that his body reacts differently to everyone else’s it seems.  From this we can deduce that Moussa is not human and is made from another substance rather than flesh and bone.  Anyway, it appears that someone has put the biscuit man back together again.

Team news is in and Saints has the best line-up that they could possibly have with Forster, KWP and Diallo, all present. Lallana is starting for Brighton and there is one guy who is glad that there are no fans in the ground. His first appearance for Liverpool at St Mary‘s remains the only time I can remember at St Mary’s where the crowd with genuinely hostile and he absolutely shat his pants and did nothing before getting substituted.

Brighton cut through in the first couple of minutes as Lallana puts Maupay away doen the left.  He finds Trossard in the middle and Bednarek does well to block both the first shout and the shot from the rebound.  As usual, we find he may as well not bothered with getting two ball sting-marks on his body as Maupay was clearly offside anyway.  More decelt play from Brighton and Maupay tries from the edge of the penalty area on the left and Forster saves comfortably enough, tipping it for a corner.

Gross puts in the outswinging corner from the right and it’s met powerfully by Lewis Dunk about 15 yards out and it bounces down and in at the post, giving Forster no chance. The replay shows an absolutely pathetic effort by Ryan Bertrand to compete with the Brighton central defender. For fucks sake.  At least try and put him off.  1-0 down and Brighton deserve that to be honest.

Saints have had the wake-up call and come back into the game and look to pin Brighton back a bit. JWP can’t get a cross in so he knocks it short to Armstrong who swings it to the back stick first time. Bertrand gets up and heads it across and via some shite defending by Lewis Dunk, Adams waits and absolutely crashes a volley in at the far post to make it 1-1.  Great finish and 3 in 3 for Che.

Bednarek comes for a challenge and gets it all wrong, missing the ball and we allow the walking streak of piss that is Dan Burn to lumber forward on the left hand side and play the ball across and we’re all over the fucking place as it goes across one more to Gross who has a free shot but shows absolutely no technique or conviction when hitting the shot and Forster sticks out big boot to deflect it wide. We got fucking lucky there. 

There is one more chance for us as the half runs down with Minamino, proving with every game that those two goals were the exceptions rather than the norm, dragging an effort from the edge of the box which Sanchez saved comfortably.

Half-time and 1-1.  On reflection, we started the game poorly and it took about five minutes after Brighton scored before we woke up and had a bit of pressure. To be honest, I’m pleased to be level but we must do better second-half and show a bit more appetite to actually go on and win the game.  Potter is using half-time to change things, bringing on Zeqiri to play at left wing-back, so they are clearly going for a 5-3-2 formation. 

JWP has a decent enough shot comfortably saved by Sanchez as the half gets underway but it’s soon looking a bit worrying as there is suddenly an alarming amount of space around our central midfield players who are now getting bypassed, with Brighton having an extra man in midfield.  Brighton are winning all the second balls and are easily picking their way through. As I think that, Lallana picks it up in between Diallo and JWP and threads a pass through the midfield to Welbeck, who knocks it off first time and Trossard is completely free on the edge of the box and he absolutely buries it. Its fucking depressingly dreadful play by us. Everyone is stood still and Bednarek has totally left Trossard and is about five yards further forward than he needs to be. 

Saints respond reasonably well and a nice bit of play around the edge of the box and Tella is trashed but the ball runs loose to Adams who has a chance very similar to Trossard but instead of hitting the net he hits the goalkeeper. Stuart Atwell, never usually a good referee, then give us another chance by giving us the free-kick because Tella has been fouled and of course, because Adams has fucking missed. The trouble is it is right on the edge of the box and JWP tries to smash it the goalkeeper side and it hits Gross and deflect wide of the far post with the goalkeeper nowhere.  My take from these chances is that Adams has to score the absolute sitter that he has been presented with. 

Off You Come, I'm Going to Send on Someone Who Will Do Fuck All

Time goes on and we are gradually getting worse. There is nothing going on. There is no movement from the forward players and it’s beginning to look like one of those games when we can confidently predict that we can play all fucking night and not score.  We shuffle the deck chairs by bringing on Redmond and Djenepo for Tella and Minamino and it looks like we have finally changed the formation to move Armstrong in field so he can chase the horse that has already bolted and has legged it up Britannia Road and is now bolting up The Avenue heading towards Chilworth.

That change achieves fuck all and with five minutes to go it’s the final substitution with Armstrong coming off to be replaced by Dan N’Lundulu. We should at least see some more attacking intent as we now have a target man now…. Or so you would have thought but nothing happens straight away.

Kick in the nuts time as Lallana was named as man of the match by Danny Murphy as our misery continued, which was not surprising because Murphy was cracking one off over him since the game kicked off. To be fair, the little rat has had a very good game, helped by no one putting in a tackle on him. Boy, did we miss Oriol Romeu for that.  Lallana would have been subbed before the hour mark had Romeu been playing.  In Romeu's absence, has anyone put in a tackle, has anyone get a yellow card, has anyone even get spoken to by the referee?  No - wankers!

90’s up and at fucking last, we put a couple of balls in the box.  Nothing happens from them and there is a half shout for a penalty as KWP gets crowded out in the box. 93 minutes – no urgency, knocking the ball about like we had loads of time left.  This is utter shite. It probably came as a surprise to a few players when Stuart Atwell puts us out of our misery. We could still be playing on Tuesday or Wednesday and we wouldn’t have scored another goal. We were absolutely fucking dog shit.  It totally sums it up that in the 94th minute of 93, the final whistle goes and we are still not attacking with any urgency, we are still pissing around passing the ball about and the whistle goes when the ball is 45 yards out, in our possession and on the ground. It’s not been launched into the mixer for the big lad we’ve sent on for the last eight minutes to compete for. We send him on and then do not cross one ball in his general direction.

We’ve been unlucky in some games this season but let’s be clear – Brighton deserved to win because Brighton were better than us in every department. They had more urgency, they had better shape, they had more heart, they had more bottle…. Oh and despite the xG thing, they took their chances – well, they took enough of them to win at any rate.  Their manager won the manager tactical battle within the game, hands down. He tweaked his formation at half-time and it made them a lot better, they got more bodies forward and still kept tight at the back. We were open in the first half and we carried on being open in the second-half and Brighton took advantage and deservedly so. Diallo and JWP were getting bypassed in midfield and were also not picking up any of the second balls. We clearly needed an extra man in there for that period of time but by the time we did it by moving Armstrong, we were already 2-1 behind.  The substitution that Potter made, bringing on Zeqiri at half-time, had a notable effect where is our substitutes, Redmond and Djenepo did the square root of fuck all.  They didn’t beat a man once, put a cross in, nothing.  What’s the point of being an attacking substitute if you don’t try and make anything happen?  I feel that I’ve said that before.

The warning signs were there in the first half whenever Brighton got the ball down and played. They found it too easy to find the gaps in front of our central defenders and in the wider areas but we got away with it with our equaliser and went in at half-time level. 

So many players has shocking games. That was JWP‘s worst game for a while. Diallo started well and then faded horribly. Armstrong had a decent first half and then disappeared. Minamino and Tella did nothing and Adams scored, missed a sitter and then just gave the ball away constantly. The back four was all over the place, especially Bednarek who kept passing the ball behind whoever he was trying to pass to which meant we didn’t actually go anywhere with our attacks when Brighton were sitting back in the last 10 minutes.

A problem throughout the day was a lack of movement up front and Danny Ings was really missed. So many times we tried to force a pass in the final third and ended up giving the ball away or usually, there was no one to pass to so we turned around and just went backwards again.  

There seem to be no realisation that time was running out. We should’ve been absolutely throwing the fucking sink at it for the last 20 minutes. Our period of attacking urgency literally lasted two minutes and it was the 91st and 92nd minute. That was atrocious. Is that down to the manager or is that down to the players? Personally, I put most of that on the players, many of whom seemed heartless and gutless today. You can be the best tactically drilled team in the world but at the end of the day, when you cross that white line you’ve got to have heart and guts and a little bit of in-game intelligence and we were lacking in all those departments today. 

Ralph isn’t blameless in all this – not by a long chalk but in a perverse way, I enjoyed his post-match interview.  There was no sugar-coating, no platitudes, no excuses – it was the worst performance of the season and just not good enough.  He also said that the subs made us worse - he's right, they added neither energy or intent.  He definitely knows that there is a problem and that’s the first step towards fixing it. He gave them every chance to succeed today by resting six players for the City game and the players let him down.  We all know that we have to be at 100% in order to win games in the Premier League and we were nowhere near that today.  If you are marking players out of 10, no one gets more than a 6.

We’ve got a week off from the league now with a trip to Bournemouth on Saturday.  I’m not remotely enthusiastic about it I’m sure that will change by the time it comes round. We still only have 33 points and we are still looking over our shoulders and what other teams are doing behind us. If you had to pick one of today’s teams to get relegated it would be us because Brighton, as I said, were so much better than us, in every single department. This was a thoroughly depressing game and we got what we deserved out of it… fuck all.