EFL Championship Match 42 - Southampton 3 Preston North End 0

His Hair Is Fine, He'll Send You the Wrong Way Every Time

Preston North End visit St Mary‘s today and will make the trip down for a second time in a few weeks, after the first game was called off because of the fire in the industrial unit adjacent to the Chapel End car park. If you look at the league table, Preston are in the last chance saloon with regards to getting a playoff place in that they have to win all four of their remaining games to have a chance of catching the team in sixth place, who currently are Norwich City. Unfortunately for Preston’s hopes, they lost at home to Norwich on Saturday which has really put a dampener on things. Hopefully, they will turn up today and play like a team who know that their chance has probably gone.

In the away game against them, we of course needed a Ched Evans own goal after Gavin Bazunu’s headed flick, to come away with a 2-2 draw but today, we are in the situation where only a win will do.  Ched appealed against the own goal but lost this time.

The main news since the last game is that Sekou Mara has managed to make a contribution to the promotion effort by getting himself suspended.  Throwing a dig at Ryan Porteous should not be an offence but someone clearly thinks it is and so he's been banned for three matches.  We will miss him... I very much doubt.

Team news and I like it. Ryan Manning has come back into the side left back and THB and Bednarek are the centre back pairing.  Joe Aribo remains in the side with Stuart Armstrong coming back in so overall, it’s as close to our first choice lineup as you can possibly get. Or at least it was, until about half an hour before the game.  I had literally just got within view of the pitch when I saw Gavin Bazunu being helped off the pitch, limping rather heavily on his left leg. I am no medical student but that does not look good.  Bizarrely, bearing in mind he hasn’t even been on the bench this season, it looks like Alex McCarthy is going to go and go judging by the warmup that is going on. Weird. I am sure we will get an explanation for Joe Lumley being bypassed. The issue that is screaming is that Alex McCarthy is to playing out from the back, what Joey Barton is to female football pundits.

This is the only game in the Championship tonight so all eyes will be on it.  Eyes from Leicester, Leeds and Ipswich will no doubt be hoping that we cock the opportunity up.  Win tonight and we are just three points behind Leeds with a game in hand. Who’d have thought it?

What were the goalkeeper situation and everything, it was a slightly surreal start of the game and you could immediately see that Saints defenders weren’t as comfortable with knocking the ball back to the goalkeeper as they usually are. Preston‘s first shot was a comfortable low one straight at McCarthy and there was a heart in mouth moment as it popped out but he managed to grab hold of it easily enough. Hopefully that gives him a little bit of confidence.

Because we are not looking to pass back to the goalkeeper as a first option, the defenders are working a lot harder than usual to find a passing angles to enable us to pass forward. Five minutes gone and I’m already seeing that this might actually be to our advantage especially as Preston don’t look that arsed about pressing. Osmajic, who scored a hat-trick a week or so ago, really looks like and absolute lard.

Adam Armstrong has started the game well and in keeping with his recent upsurge in form, gets the ball on the left, the full back Holmes doesn’t get close to him and he plays it across the top of the 6 yard box where Che Adams arrives and side-foots easily passed Woodman and into the net.  Simple.

Arma is having great fun against Holmes on our left who is giving him the space to do exactly what he wants, so he tries to lob the keeper from 40 yards and it’s close enough for Woodman to have a mild heart attack as it lands on the roof of the net.  This game looks so easy.  We’re knocking it about for fun, they aren’t pressing and if we do lose it, we win it back really easily.

It’s The 28th minute and everyone stands up and applauds for Joe Godden, a Saints fan who was killed in a hit-and-run in Romsey a few days ago. With the fans on their feet and clapping in Joe's memory, the ball is fed in to Adams but he steps over it and makes a run and Brooks is of course good enough to find him with the pass and he simply rolls it past Woodman and into the net.  Brilliant goal and a fitting tribute to the fallen Saints fan. Emotional stuff.

Adams, now full of confidence, goes for his hat-trick with a long range lob of his own from the right but this one clears the bar a little more comfortably for Woodman.

USA International Duane Holmes, who is absolutely fucking dreadful at right back looks like he handles it as a cross comes over from the right and all he does is panic and spoon a clearance out to Stuart Armstrong on the edge of the box and he gives Woodman the eyes and the Preston keeper obviously buys that he’s going to go to his right and the magnificently haired one cuts back across it and fires it into the other side of the net with Woodman just looking at him, no doubt swearing loudly.

Preston have nothing in response to the three goals and Manning lines up Holmes again on the left hand side before being unceremoniously carted over on the edge of the penalty area. Surely that has to be a second yellow for the already booked liability but no, leniency shown and Stuart Armstrong again tries to catch out the goalkeeper by shaping for the near post and going far post but Woodman reads it easily enough.

There is still time before half-time as Manning comes forward and finds Stuart Armstrong on the edge of the box and he takes a touch onto his left foot and drills it Lowe past three Preston bodies and past the keeper but it pings off the inside of the post and flies wide the other side. Fuck.  Preston manager Ryan Lowe then decides that Binfire Holmes needs to be taken out the firing line before he ends up on a YouTube video of worst performances ever seen by anyone ever and he is taken off on 40 minutes and replaced with Cunningham.

Duane Holmes with a Binfire of a Performance

Half time and this is a piece of piss.  There’s not been many games over the years where I’ve been here at half-time thought this is absolutely done and we’ve won.  They are so shite it’s unreal.  No one in a yellow shirt wants to run when Saints have the ball and no one has any urgency when Preston actually have possession.  No wonder the manager has been booked and made a sub already.

Talking of which, we’ve made a sub as well with Flynn Downes coming off and Shea Charles coming on in a straight swap.  You would think, a perfect stage to show what he can do.

Away we go and it becomes apparent pretty soon that Saints are just going to do enough. After McCarthy tries to execute a Cruyff turn in comically awful fashion and just about gets away with it, we get on with not letting Preston have a sniff.  Che is crowded out as he tries to complete his hat-trick and then we work a corner out to Bednarek on the edge of the box and Janny B tries to find the far corner and on this occasion, the B stands for Bollocks as it sails wide.

Preston are still shit. They seem to have settled into a damage limitation 4-5-1 formation and are looking to the final whistle without getting humiliated.  KWP chips one over the defence and Adams stretches out a leg to bring it down as it drops over his shoulder. He manages to knock it goalwards but Woodman has come flying out and it’s hit him in the face and gone wide for a corner.  Good save to be fair.  More subs to save legs as Stuart Armstrong and Aribo are replaced with Smallbone and Rothwell.

Adams feeds Smallbone in the box and his pullback is met by Brooks on the penalty spot and he hits it well enough but Woodman, on a one-man mission to keep the score down, takes off and claws it out of the top corner. Brilliant save and you can’t do much about that.  Ryan Manning was all about goals and assists when he was at Swansea last year and he hasn’t managed any goals this season but he takes aim from the edge of the box with his left foot and Woodman is certainly worried about it as it passes about 2 foot wide of the post.

As the early leavers begin to drift away into the night, Edozie and Sulemana make appearances but it’s hard for them to do too much because it’s testimonial pace now.  We’ve settled for 3-0 and so have Preston.  Three minutes extra at the end but the ref may as well blow up early cos nothing’s happening here.

Well that was an absolute piece of piss. An absolutely dominant first half enabling us to just canter through the second half.  Preston were the perfect opposition because with their play-off hopes virtually evaporated last week, they looked like a side who didn’t really wanna be there at any point.  You expect teams like Preston to come down and show a bit of grit and determination but not a bit of it.

It’s a difficult going to analyse really because any praise of any Saints players must be given with a caveat attached, that caveat being the fact that Preston were fucking useless, all over the pitch. The defending was shambolic and there was no attacking threat at all and the attackers didn’t press, so any weakness that Alex McCarthy has with a ball at his feet was not explored.

Taylor Tells Alex Not to do the Fucking Cruyff Thing Again

McCarthy was a big story before the game of course with Bazunu getting injured in the warm-up and in the main he did pretty well apart from thinking he was Alex McCruyff at the start of the second half.  If he stays in the team then his credentials with the ball his feet will certainly be tested more than they were today.   As I said earlier, there was a strange byproduct of the goalkeeping crisis in that the defenders obviously weren’t as confident in knocking the ball back to Alex as they would’ve been with Baz, so as a result we played forward a lot more so in a roundabout kind of way, it actually helped.  The big question is whether that would be as possible against a better team from Preston because as I said with a big caveat at the start, they were dreadful.  Russell Martin explained afterwards that it was a “gut“ decision to pick Alex McCarthy over Joe Lumley. He tried to obfuscate the issue a little bit by saying that Joe Lumley being on the bench does not automatically make him the number two, which seems like bollocks.  Either way, it looks like Baz is going to be out for the rest of the season so you would normally now expect McCarthy, having kept a clean sheet, to have a very good chance of being first choice for the rest of the season. If I was Joe Lumley, I would be very pissed off.

Ryan Lowe, the Preston manager must’ve really been looking forward to his press conference so he took the only course of action available to him really and waxed lyrical about how good Saints were. He couldn’t do anything else bearing in mind his own team were shocking. There weren’t many fans that came down from Preston but bearing in mind the hardy souls who did turn up, would undoubtedly have come down for the postponed game, they can’t have been terribly impressed by the lack of desire and fight shown by the team.  Proper fans though.

The Big Dog is Back

You can only beat was in front of you and our attacking play in the first half was exceptional. Adam Armstrong and Che Adams have both hit form together with Armstrong being a constant threat from the left-hand side, so much so that the Preston right back had to be substituted before he got sent off.  Che took his two goals in style and but for some inspired goalkeeping by Freddie Woodman in the second half, would’ve got his first Saints hat-trick. David Brooks also had a far more effective game than he has had recently.

The midfield just strangled the life out of Preston with every player contributing.  Flynn Downes superb until given a rest and it was pleasing to see Shea Charles play well when he came on.  Joe Aribo again showed what a force he can be at this level and Stuart Armstrong was back to his best, having been a bit ropey last time out.  Joe Rothwell... well you can't have everything can you?  What a strange player he is.

There was a much better balance about the team today of course because we had our first-choice defence out there, containing a right back and a left back and our best combination of central defenders.  None of the defenders had a thing to do defensively as any threat from Preston completely failed to materialise. Three wins out of three since we abandoned the Jack Stephens in midfield and left back hybrid thing.  Left back today was of course Ryan Manning and he was excellent and it should be no surprise to anybody that our first choice back four, that played in the majority of the unbeaten run, looked really solid today.

It was the perfect day for Russell Martin outside of the injury to Baz. Three points, very comfortable, some important players like Flynn Downes got a rest and we move on to Cardiff on Saturday knowing that a win there will put us right back in the mix. We couldn’t, could we?

Up the fucking Saints.