Semi-final time at Wembley against Leicester.
There Is a remarkable thing that happens when a semi-final comes around. On
Monday, I doubt I was alone in having all the wind and optimism sucked out of
me by our dismal performance against West Brom. It wasn’t just that game, it’s
been the way we have generally been playing for the last few months with a
couple of exceptions. All of that seems to have melted away as the week has
progressed as people have been talking about 1976 of course.
As I write, the other semi-final has just been played with Chelsea beating
Manchester City by a goal to nil in what was a pretty dismal game. Not wishing
to get too far ahead of ourselves but we are much more likely to beat Chelsea
in the final then we were to beat Manchester City. Now for the small matter of
trying to overcome Leicester in the semi-final.
Leicester of course are going along quite nicely and are currently third in the
Premier League, where they have been roughly all season. On the face of it,
given our current form, we should have as much chance as a balloon over an open
fire but Leicester are showing signs of cracking recently as well, losing their
last two league games. Those two league games have been against Manchester City
and West Ham though where is our form has of course been rather sketchy as well
and much worse than theirs. We do however have a better chance than we would’ve
had a couple of months ago.
Leicester been having some fun and games recently with three of their players
deciding to be dickheads and go to a Covid rules defying party. The three
players – James Maddison, Ayoze Pérez and Hamza Choudhury are of varying
importance to this Leicester side but they were all left out of their last
league game against West Ham. Needless to say, they are all available for
today. Maddison will doubtless make up one third of what I think is the best
midfield three in the league outside of Manchester City, with Wilfred Ndidi and
Youri Tielemans making up the other 2/3. Ayoze Pérez of course turns into a world
beater against Southampton, against whom he has two hat-trick‘s despite never
really doing much against anybody else. Upfront of course they have Jamie Rat
Bastard Vardy who has been a thorn in our side in more than one way for the
last five years or so and must have about 30 career goals against us. He has
not been Leicester’s most in form striker though as that has been Kelechi
Iheanacho who has forced Brendan Rodgers to abandon his usual formation and
play with two up top which means that they are currently playing with three at
the back. In Ricardo and Castagne, they have the fullbacks to play it though
and a back three that usually contains Jonny Evans, Wesley Fofana and one out
of Lord Farquaad and Daniel Amartey. In goal of course is Kasper Schmeichel,
still a very good goalkeeper. In short, they are decent whatever team they put
out.
This year I have accepted the fact the Brendan Rodgers is not the dickhead that
I couldn’t stand when he was manager in Liverpool and is in fact a very good
manager. This was very well illustrated in the last round when he
comprehensively overcame the fraud Solskjaer.
Saints have no new injury concerns ahead of the game so I hope for Che Adams
coming in upfront to partner Danny Ings and it being a three-way shootout between
Redmond, Djenepo and Walcott for the left-wing slot. It also wouldn’t surprise
me if Ralph named a completely unchanged team from the diabolical shitshow
against West Brom. Redmond has been in front of the Saints media team this week
and Walcott is being largely praised from all sides for his contribution on and
off the pitch this season. Maybe I’m reading too much in to the fact these two
players have been in the media this week.
Wembley is not actually empty today as there are apparently going to be 2000
spectators there. I use the word spectators instead of fans because it’s not
like Saints and Leicester have 1000 each. Apparently it’s all local people, so
that’s going to be 2000 people looking at their phones all the way through the
game if they can be bothered to spend 80 quid on a ticket to watch two teams
that they are not interested in. That decision tells you how little, the powers
that be understand the game. They have no idea about the tribal element of
supporting your club and especially in an FA Cup semi-final and especially for
teams like Saints and Leicester. I was amazed to find that this is Leicester‘s
first semi-final since 1982. Imagine how much of their fans want to be there.
To the suits in charge, the people that watch the games are just punters or
customers. If the Chelsea v Manchester City semi-final had been played at St
Mary‘s, which is 4 miles from my house, I wouldn’t have even gone if the
tickets were a tenner, let alone 80 fucking quid.
The question that most Saints fans have going round in their brain is which
Southampton is going to turn up? If it’s the one that went into games at the
start of the season looking like they could be absolutely anybody, then great
and we have a real good chance of getting to the final. If it’s the version
that’s been on the pitch since Christmas then we could be on the wrong end of
an absolute fucking shoeing, especially if we get as strung out as we were
against West Brom. A hell of a lot depends on how we manage the space on the
pitch and the distance between the lines. Diallo and JWP need to get a grip
early against the Leicester midfield because half an hour of getting outplayed
in there and the game could be gone.
The defence need to get their line position right and absolutely must not get
caught on the turn. Vardy is of course on a bit of a goal drought and as we
know, Saints are always the ideal team to play when you haven’t scored for a
while and keeping Rat Bastard and Iheanacho quiet will be key.
I feel that Saints have got a chance going forward and if Leicester have a
weakness than it appears to me to be in the defence. Fofana is going to be
brilliant in a few years and he is very good now but I feel that he can be got
at and Daniel Amartey is certainly a bit random in some of his decision-making.
It’s a huge game for the managers. For Brendan Rodgers, it is a very real
chance to get to a final to try and win a first trophy in English football.
Winning them in Scotland when Rangers are in division four doesn’t really cut
it at the top level. For Ralph, this is a chance to prove to the watching world
that he is a top level manager. Getting to the final and maybe even winning it
makes you a Southampton legend up there with Lawrie Mac and the 9-0 defeats
(shit... I mentioned it) will merely be footnotes, similar to Lawrie’s
relegation with Saints in 1974.
Anyhow, the team news I was looking for is in and I’m looking to see the
changes from the West Brom shitshow.
One, just one? Really? Walcott
out, Djenepo in? Why? Why is Che not playing? To make matters worse, Amartey is not playing
for Leicester and Soyunchu is fit so their defence looks better now. Maddison is on the bench but his fellow
Covid-denier Ayoze Perez is in from the start.
Iheanacho forms the strike partnership with Rat Bastard.
I can’t believe I’m this nervous before a game I’m watching on TV. My real interest in Saints started just after
the semi-final in 1976 so after Adrian Bastard Heath, Mark Wright’s broken leg,
Brett Ormerod’s header and Mario Lemina’s Walking Football, this is the 5th
FA Cup Semi-Final I’ve been involved in.
Five in 45 years… that’s a bit shit really, isn’t it?
Come on boys. Away we go and Ian Skate Darke mentions 9-0 after 30 seconds and again after 90. Two and a half years ago at a different ground in a different competition but still he does it. An incredibly cagey start
as everyone tries to get a touch of the ball and play a safe pass. Everyone seems to have read that particular
memo except Redmond and Diallo. Redmond
comes short to pick up the ball and knocks is straight back to a Leicester
player and when we recover that situation, Diallo dwells on the ball, Vardy
nicks it and Leicester are away. Perez
lines up a curler from the left with his right foot and puts it well wide. Referee
Chris Kavanagh has noticed though that Diallo has levelled Rat Bastard in the
middle so our most inexperienced player has a booking after 3 minutes.
Diallo’s afternoon gets worse not long after as he again gives the ball away
cheaply and this time it’s Rat Bastard away and he gets to Fraser, draws the
big man out and luckily, lives up to his recent form and lifts the ball well
wide.
I’m waiting for our first effort but we are content to try and soak it up and
Leicester are content to let us pass it around until we cock it up and it’s
Redmond again who gives it away and Vardy is away again and we concede a corner
just before half time. Over it comes and
Ndidi heads it back and a combination of Ings and Bednarek stops Rat Bastard
scoring and the ball goes over as Bednarek smacks into the post.
That’s more or less it for the first half – pretty uneventful all told. As an attacking force, we’ve done nothing at
all. Ings has barely had a touch and
Armstrong and Djenepo have not made any incisive runs at all. Redmond is trying to come deep and pick up the
ball but it just giving the ball away and every Leicester attack has been
started by either him or Diallo giving the ball away. Diallo to be fair, has improved after a
shocking opening ten.
Saints start the second half with a bit more intent but not enough to fashion
an effort on goal. We are at least
trying to impose ourselves on the game a bit and that spells danger in our
current form. A ball down the Leicester
left sees Vardy against Bednarek and Jan really should trash the Rat Bastard
but he allows him to just piss past him with ease. On he goes and pulls it back to Iheanacho
whose first time shot is bollocks and going five yards wide but it hits
Vestergaard and bounces straight back to him and the lucky fucker isn’t going
to miss from there. Could have bounced anywhere off at an angle but no, straight back to him.
Leicester look momentarily a bit rattled and Soyunchu, who has already been booked, then has a brain fart and blocks off Ings nowhere near the ball but needless to say, the ref misses it and no one looks at it. You can't have VAR for a second booking anyway.
Djenepo has contributed next to nothing so on comes Theo Walcott and Leicester make
a Covid sub with Maddison coming on for Perez.
Needless to say, it’s their sub that makes an impact - Maddison picking
the ball up in between our midfield and defence and going forward before
driving just wide from about 20 yards out.
Time goes on, nothing happens. We are
going to whimper out of this as we all kind of feared we would. Ralph goes into random shit substitution tombola mode, with Tella and Salisu coming on for KWP and Bertrand. We now have a back 3 with Tella and Walcott
operating as wing-backs, probably a position neither have ever played. Nothing happens. With 3 to go, Vestergaard plonks himself up
front. We’ve created fuck all all game
so now it goes all Wimbledon Crazy Gang 1988 as Salisu hurls a long throw from
half way and Vestergaard gets fouled. 93
minutes gone and everyone up and JWP overhits the delivery straight to
Schmeichel. That says it all. Final whistle – a bit of anger, a bit of
disappointment and a lot of resignation.
So we turned up at Wembley, we did fuck all and we lost and then we went home.
Absolute fucking shit and a complete waste of time. Four rounds we got through,
one game from the final and we turn up and play like that.
I can understand the first half performance to keep the game tight but once we
went behind in the second-half we had a five minute spell when we looked
vaguely dangerous (I mean vaguely as in we didn’t have a shot on fucking
target) but after that, for the last 25 minutes we just walked through it and
did fuck all. No urgency, no intent, no heart, no guts, no bottle. Nothing.
Leicester weren’t even much fucking good but then they didn’t have to be. A
lucky goal at the end of the day but they deserved to win, and I hope they win
the final. They will have to play considerably better than that though.
This performance was another example of how bad Saints have been
since Oriol Romeu got injured but more on that later. More recently, a few days
ago in fact, the seeds for this performance were sewn with that dismal
performance at West Brom. That game affected us in that we were so bad that we
played with complete caution today to avoid another shit show where we were out
of the game by half-time. We could’ve learnt something useful from that game in
the second half by maybe playing three at the back and/or maybe playing three
in the centre of midfield to match Leicester up but we did nothing and that’s
down to Ralph. “We lose or we learn” apparently… but we lost, and we learned
fuck all.
Today’s team selection was bizarre. Walcott deserve to lose his place but there
is no way the Djenepo deserved to be picked ahead of Che Adams. Adams after
all, has scored 3 goals in his last 4 starts and in the other one, had a goal
disallowed for a tight offside. Picking Che
would of course have meant Nathan Redmond playing on the left wing so one
assumes that there was a tactical reason why Ralph wanted Redmond to play as a
central striker. Whatever it was, he didn’t do it and Djenepo was a complete
waste of space out on the wing. Didn’t beat a single player and I think managed
one cross into the box which was at knee height.
Our attacking play as a rule was non-existent. Armstrong didn’t contribute any
of his normal bursts forward from midfield and Ings, given admittedly shit
service, did very little as well. JWP and Diallo played a lot better in a
discipline sense, than they did against West Brom (not difficult) but they
added very little in terms of progressive play through to the front players.
Again, that area was a massive problem. It was going to be tough enough anyway
and then with Diallo getting booked after three minutes, it got even more
difficult.
Oriol Romeu became a better player today through not playing. Romeu gives
everyone the confidence to go forward and it is just not happening at the
moment, not just today. Everyone seem scared about leaving the back door open
because we don’t have the insurance policy of Romeu always being there. KWP
barely got forward today, Bertrand has not got forward for months, JWP is not
making the runs ahead of the ball to be an extra player in the box like he was
doing at the start of the season. This formation with the central midfield
options that we have at the moment does not work and Ralph has made no visible effort
to find a solution. I know we don’t have a like for like replacement for Romeu
but just plugging Diallo into that space when he is not the same type of
player, is not the answer and it has clearly not been the answer for quite a while. It’s not Diallo’s fault.
The only person who hit any progressive passes to players in front of him was Jannik Vestergaard. Our 6 foot 7 centre back is now our most creative player. Where is the creativity in this team? Armstrong is usually half decent but Djenepo, Redmond and Walcott (slight caveat as he’s coming back from injury) are all shit with one good contribution every 10 games or thereabouts. Oh, and those contributions are much more likely to come against Championship level sides. We played like a Championship side today. We played like fucking Bournemouth played against us in the sixth round. Turn up, do fuck all, lose. I took the piss out of Bournemouth for not even trying on their big opportunity and yet here we are a few weeks later, doing exactly the same fucking thing.
It’s all very well for Ralph to say that we don’t have the quality on the transitions at the moment and we undoubtedly do have a lack of quality but he picks the team, he trains them, he chooses the formation, he wrote the playbook. This is his team and they do not think on their feet and they do not find answers for themselves. The one exception being Vestergaard who took himself to go up front for the last couple of minutes to try and make something happen. Were our players motivated? If they were they’ve got a funny fucking way of showing it and performances like this just raise more and more questions about the manager. We have one way of playing after two and a half years of his tenure and if that doesn’t work, we have nothing. We didn’t leave everything on the pitch did we Ralph? All that we left on the pitch was the lingering smell from a team that played in an FA Cup semi-final and did nothing. I appreciate that he may not want to throw players under the bus publicly but then you leave them out next week, in exactly the way he didn’t after the West Brom shambles.
We will survive this season and we will be in the Premier League next year but we will be one of the favourites to go down because at the moment, we are a fucking shit football team. We are too open and get pumped or we are tight defensively and don’t attack.
It’s not acceptable to play like that in a showpiece game. We managed to do even less than we did in the game against Chelsea three years ago. We had a goal disallowed in that game and the keeper made a couple of really good saves. Today, we didn’t even get a shot on target and the Chelsea team from three years ago was a lot better than the Leicester team of today.
The only small mercy from that shower of shit was that of course, I wasn’t there.
The rest of the season starts on Wednesday against Spurs. I’m not expecting any massive improvement. It’s quite amusing in a black humour kind of way that we were fucking dreadful today but there is no spotlight on it because it became a very good day to bury bad news with the announcement of the European Super league. I needed a good laugh after our performance and when I saw the Spurs consider themselves part of the European elite, that was comedy gold. Jose Mourinho obviously thought it was funny too and Mr Levy sacked him on Monday. Spurs could get kicked out of the league and not turn up on Wednesday and we would still struggle to beat them at the moment.
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