EFL Championship Match 45 - Southampton 0 Stoke 1

I Guess The Ref Thought the Keeper Got to The Ball First

When we were in the Premier League and you got to this stage of the season, there was no such thing as a dead rubber as long as you could possibly move up a place or down a place, because of the amount of money that was attached to every place in the Money and Greed League. In the Championship of course, the money is less but we cannot drop below fourth place and we are not going to make third so this is as close to a dead rubber as we are ever going to get. Consequently, I hope we use it to try and learn a few things about how we’re going to approach the playoffs. Can we find an alternative to Stuart Armstrong as the guy linking the midfield and attack? Do we need to give Joe Lumley a game in the Championship to see if it’s better for our playing out from the back. Can we trust some of the younger players in the squad in a physical Championship game? For me, finding answers to these questions is at least as important as winning the last home game of the season against Stoke.

Well, it isn’t the last game of the home season because we now know after our capitulation against Leicester, that we will have a playoff semi-final at St Mary‘s against either West Brom or Norwich. That’s for another day however. Today it’s the aforementioned Stoke City at home, another team that have a new manager from when we played them the first time around with Alex Neil being replaced by Steven Schumacher, who was tempted from Plymouth with The challenge of trying to make a success out of the poison chalice job that has been Stoke City since relegation from the Premier League. If Nathan Jones couldn’t do it, one of the best managers in Europe no less, then what chance has Schumacher got?

When we played Stoke at the Britannia Stadium earlier on in the season, they were a bunch of arseholes and managed to draw us into having a mass session of handbags at the end of the game, which is some achievement bearing in mind what a bunch of soft arses we are. It was quite a memorable game, containing as it did Stuart Armstrong going full JWP and putting a freekick in the top corner, a fantastically executed rugby tackle by Jan Bednarek which didn’t result in a penalty and Kamaldeen Sulemana beating Stoke right back Hoever at every opportunity and being pulled back about six times which resulted in one booking halfway through the second half. I don’t usually advocate Sulemana starting games but I would like to see him starting this one against a fullback who he knows he can piss past at every opportunity.

Team news and what the fuck… the promised dropping of those uncommitted during the Leicester defeat turned out to be hollow words as the one player praised, Che Adams, was left out with Sekou Mara coming in.  With Adam Armstrong also left out, goals might be hard to come by today.  Edozie and Wee Man are the other two forwards.  It looks like David Brooks is in midfield with Smallbone and Charles, who once again starts, with Flynn Downes on the bench.  Captain Jack is back of course but not at the expense of one of our woeful full backs – Bednarek on the bench with Bree and KWP continuing.

We start the game looking somewhat disjointed and not being able to string three passes together, so we are hitting it long up to our forwards who have a combined height of about 15 foot between the three of them. Captain Jack’s plays a ball forwards which is easily picked up and Stoke build down our left with Tyrese Campbell easily breaking free behind KWP and his shot is pushed out to McCarthy and Laurent has an open goal but somehow manages to put it wide.

Some nice play through midfield by Stoke, which is kind of what we’re supposed to do but anyway, the ball goes out to Manhoef on the right and James Bree shows he’s learnt absolutely nothing from the Leicester debacle by standing off and allowing him to get to the edge of the box before smashing it goalwards and McCarthy has to pull out quite a decent save to keep it out.

After a foray down the left wing with Fraser gets rejected, we pass the ball back to the halfway line, eventually to THB and he chips a ball over the Stoke defence and Mara does really well to get there before the goalkeeper and heads it goalwards and get absolutely wiped out by Iverson with a defender getting back to clear off the line. That is 100% a penalty with the referee David Webb looking right at at at it but he doesn’t give it. The keeper has punched him in the fucking face and not get anywhere near the ball for fuck’s sake. How is that not a penalty?  The lino must have been level with it as well.

Taylor and Macca Not Covering Themselves in Glory

Stoke right back Hoever launches a big ball down the right over Captain Jack’s head to send Campbell away against THB, who has to come to cover. THB tries to send him down the line but doesn’t get close enough and Campbell simply rolls the ball through McCarthy‘s legs and into the net. Diabolical defending and piss poor goalkeeping.  1-0 down.

Saints try and get back into it before halftime with Stoke rather presenting the ball to Edozie on the right wing and his ball across the top of the box is perfect for Wee Man to run onto and meet but his side footed effort is straight at Iversen who easily pushes it away.

Half-time and that unsurprisingly, has been dog shit. The ball is not sticking up front at all with Mara either in cable or unwilling to withstand any physical challenge from the Stoke central defenders. The midfield isn’t passing the ball quickly enough and there’s not enough movement. Defensively we’ve been all over the place with Stoke finding an easy way forward all the time as once again, we’re not getting close enough to anyone.  Not good.  We come for the second half and there are two changes with THB being replaced by Bednarek and Shea Charles being replaced with Aribo meaning Will Smallbone as the number 6.

The first attack of the half by Stoke is caused by a Stephens mistake on the halfway line to send Bae Jun-Ho running away and he gets deep into the penalty area before he overdoes it and a combination of KWP and Bednarek stop him.  Saints break out with Wee Man being taken out off the ball and Stoke try and take out Brooks as well but his ball find his way through to Mara, who has an opening on his left foot but it lands somewhere between Row Z and Row FF.  More great refereeing - there were two clear cynical failed attempts to bring a player down by Stoke as we broke forward but the referee decided that neither was worthy of any action.

Edozie is coming more to the fore out on the right and he picks up the ball from Mara and burns past ex-Skate Stevens before pulling it back to Brooks on the penalty spot but he gets a shot all wrong and it was so bad that it probably didn’t go on the stats as a shot.  Straight from the clearance, Stoke surge up the right through Laurent and he finds Campbell who rolls the ball across the top of the 6 yard box to Manhoef and McCarthy throws him self in the way for a quite brilliant save.  Jon-ho picked up the ball on the left and finds Cundle in front of goal and McCarthy cops that one in the face but regardless, another good save.

Saints are still struggling generally to clear the ball and Campbell spins away from Stephens in the box, Stevo clips the back of him and Campbell hits the deck. This time the shit referee comes to our rescue as he gets that one wrong as well.

Mara gives the ball away in really shite fashion twice in about fifteen seconds and you can see Russell Martin losing his rag and immediately, Adams comes on to put Mara out of his misery.  Flynn Downes enters the fray in place of David Brooks as well.

David Webb with the Universally Understood Referee Signal of "I Haven't Got a Fucking Clue"

Adams first contribution is to spin the ball out to Edozie out of the right and he gets into the penalty area before dragging the ball back and hits the deck. Looks a bit soft to be honest and it will be a scandal if that got given, seeing as there’s been two obvious ones not given. Stoke quite rightly play on and it’s down our right and Manhoef is quickly clean through to go and have a shot at McCarthy which he has to push away again.  Manhoef again gets a sight of goal and puts it just wide.

We have one more sub to make and we’re not going to see a re-run of the Sulemana versus Hoever slaughter at Stoke and instead it’s Adam Armstrong coming on for Edozie, who has been our threatening attacking player by quite a long way. Arma has one chance when after a little mazy run by Downes on the edge of the box, the ball finds its way out to Wee Man and Armstrong throws a leg at the cross and well over the bar.  Six minutes of injury time but nothing much happens.  Boring as fuck.

Well that was absolutely abject. The first half that was as boring as a game of football can possibly be and a second half where the opposition has sat in a low block for 45 minutes to protect what they have and played on the counter and we had absolutely no idea, especially when we took off the players who can actually take on a player 1 v 1 or provide any creativity.

As said, Russell Martin’s words after the Leicester game rang hollow as he basically tossed off this game with that starting lineup. That can be justified seeing as it was a dead rubber for us but don’t say you’re gonna bomb out the players who didn’t show much commitment against Leicester and then not do it. I guess he calmed down the next day and realised that he didn’t really have that many options.

As it was, he picked Sekou Mara to start upfront which was probably out of desire to give Che Adams a rest and Mara gonna Mara. I mean, he was absolutely 1 out of 10 shit. He can’t control the ball, he has no strength to hold off a defender and when he gets the ball he can’t pass it.  He shoudl have had a penalty however and our bunch of soft arses should have been all round the referee demanding he spoke to the lino but no, passive acceptance. 

So, were our full backs any better than last time out? James Bree was given another chance and he defended with no more intensity that he did against Leicester.  He’s so scared of getting done for pace he just doesn’t engage.  The one time this season he had a race with a winger was against QPR and Ilias Chair, and Bree did his hamstring.  He was terrible on the left and then we moved him across to the right so we could be terrible in his natural position. On top of his no contact defending, he also managed to get himself in good crossing positions a couple of times, once on either flank and both times put the ball 10 yards behind the goal.  KWP showed a little bit more in the defensive department than he did against Leicester but still not enough.  It’s almost like that at the start of the season he knew he was the best in the league and now he’s allowed himself to be dragged down to their level.

It’s a very low bar but I think there was one positive in that David Brooks looked okay as the potential Stuart Armstrong replacement. It wasn’t brilliant because today nothing was, but I think he proved that he is the best fit to potentially provide the forwards with some ammunition. Put it this way, it was worse when he went off and at least he tried to play forwards.  So lightweight though so I question where you can balance a midfield with him and Will Smallbone in it.

Sam Edozie is a player who gets a lot of flak, but he was one of the few today who actually asked some questions and caused the left back Enda Stevens, quite a few problems. On the other flank Ryan Fraser put a couple of crosses over with his left foot and spent the rest of the game turning back and passing the ball back into the midfield. Considering he was playing against Ki-Jana Hoever, who proved up at Stoke what a dreadful defender he is, should’ve meant that he was driving at him every opportunity, but it didn’t really happen. I know it may sound completely obvious here and maybe it’s a nod towards his commitment, but I can’t really believe that Sulemana didn’t get any time on the pitch considering we were losing from about half hour onwards and he ripped him apart up at Stoke.

The other positive was that Flynn Downes played for twenty minutes, hopefully without any reaction. Maybe half an hour to forty-five next week against Leeds before putting him in properly against whoever our playoff opponent will be.

If it is Norwich then they have form for playing the low block tactics so we are going to have to do considerably better than we did today. It was a comfortable win for Stoke and it was another game with the amount of possession means fuck all because the only goalkeeper that got tested in the second half was Alex McCarthy who had to come up with three big saves to keep the score down. He could’ve done better on the goal we conceded however. THB did half a job in forcing Campbell to have a shot from a narrow angle but he didn’t get close enough to him to block the shop and once the shop has got away, there is absolutely no way McCarthy should be beaten from there.

Did we learn anything today that we didn’t know? Maybe a bit with the Brooks experiment in midfield. We certainly didn’t improve morale about the place and inclusion of Jack Stephens, which was supposed to sort out a lot of the problems if you believe the narrative from Tuesday night, didn’t really help much with him making a fair few mistakes including the old failing of letting the ball just drift over his head.  Maybe this is just me being old school but if I was centre back and captain, I would have been yelling at the full-backs at every opportunity for not getting close enough and I didn’t see much of that.

Russell Martin was at pains to point out at the end about there fixture pile up that we’ve had throughout the last month and the implication is clearly that we have run out of steam. Of course, we’ve lost two key players to injuries and that hasn’t helped and if we cast our minds back to the start of April when the Preston game got postponed because of the fire, we all knew that the fixture pile up would be difficult to navigate.  I keep coming back to that game at Cardiff though. If we had won that game like we should, the energy would’ve continued through adrenaline.  You don’t feel tired when you’re winning.  Leicester wouldn’t have been certainly as much of a disaster as it was and today would’ve been a competitive game that we would’ve taken more seriously. We can only hope that come in the playoffs, the adrenaline rush from playing a really meaningful game means that collectively, we find some more energy and some inspiration and play like a functioning team again.

Leeds away next week.  The good news is that we have a week to prepare, the bad news is that Leeds are going to have something to play for going into that game, even if Ipswich win their game in hand at Coventry in midweek.  Good luck to anyone who paid the £47 to watch that.

Up the fucking Saints.