Premier League Match 15 - Aston Villa 1 Southampton 0

Joe's Not In His Goal Again

Villa Park is the ground that brings back great memories for me as it was the ground in 2003 where we won an FA Cup semi-final before they rebuilt Wembley and ruined all FA Cup semi-finals by putting them in the National Stadium. For me, it’s one of the best grounds in the country, given, that it is old and traditional. Still, it’s not a time to daydream back to 2003, but time to focus on the Premier League 2024/25 and Southampton’s place in it which as we all know, is currently rock bottom.

Under Unai Emery, Villa started the season on fire, were very close to the top of the league and had a remarkable start of the Champions League campaign, beating Bayern Munich. They seem to have hit a bit of a wall recently and were tumbling down the table until they arrested the descent by beating Brentford during the week, whilst Saints were getting soundly beaten by Chelsea. Villa have a very big squad so should handle the upcoming Christmas rush pretty well given that the Champions League is on hold for a while. Saints on the other hand, not so much.

Villa’s standout player for me this season, has been Morgan Rogers, who they signed from Middlesbrough. Considering we spent last season in the Championship and our coaching and recruitment staff clearly knew everything about the Championship, I find it somewhat annoying that we weren’t even linked to a player like that, who moved for a relatively modest amount of money (£8m rising to £15m) and has stepped up to the Premier League and even the Champions League, with no problem whatsoever. It’s especially galling that he was a Manchester City youngster so Jason Wilcox would have known all about him but of course, Wilcox was gone by the time Villa signed him.  He tends to play just behind Ollie Watkins up front, who a few years ago they also signed from the Championship, when he moved there from Brentford. Now he’s scoring goals for England in the Euros semi-final. Meanwhile, we signed Ben Brereton Diaz.

The good news is that after, the triple suspension against Chelsea, Tyler Dibling, Flynn Downs and THB will be back today, with Captain Jack of course going in the other direction. The Chelsea defeat seems to have sucked any remaining optimism out of the Saints fanbase and personally, I am expecting absolutely nothing out of this game.

Some storm with a silly name is battering the UK today and Everton vs Liverpool has been called off.  No such luck further South however and Villa Park is on.  Team news and I look at the eleven names and I see five that shouldn’t be on a Premier League team sheet. Once again we have squeezed in another defender and as a result of that, Joe Aribo is left out, which is ridiculous given that he was by far our best player on Wednesday.

Saints make a reasonably positive start with Fernandes picking up the ball on the edge of the box and having a dig and it deflects wide to KWP on the left and he sets it up for Manning to drill goal but it hits Carlos on the heel and deflects away without Martinez being tested.

The wind is quickly proving to be a bit of a problem but it’s not the reason that we fanny around with the ball in the left back area and an Archer panic clearance bounces straight across the top of the penalty area to Morgan Rogers, who shoots and it’s deflected and with Lumley completely wrong footed, we are grateful that it goes wide of the post.

We make a massive opportunity at one end the pitch but it ends when Archer’s cross is deflected up in the air to Martinez and Villa break to the other end and Duran is put through and he’s in a foot race with Lumley, who goes old school and dives at the strikers feet with his hands and comes up with part of the ball at least. Really good goalkeeping to be fair. ,

Another chance, or rather another opening that should lead to a chance, goes begging as we win the ball high up and the ball is poked through to Downes who has an absolute nosebleed when he realise he’s clean through and instead of shooting from the edge of the box, he tries to cut inside the last defender and the defenders gets a bit of it with the ball squirting off to Archer, who smacks it against the nearest defender.

Tyler Dibling has been quiet but diligent so far and does some good defending to see the ball out for a goal kick when hassled by Rogers.  Lumley plays suicide ball giving it to Wood who is all of 6 yards out, who gives it back to him and Lumley shites his shorts and tries to find KWP in exactly the same way that he did it against Chelsea and to the shock of no one, in exactly the same way that he did against Chelsea he gets tackled and Villa have the ball ten yards out and we’re diving in all over the place and we get lucky as Lumley dives at Duran’s feet again and the follow-up shot from McGinn is deflected up in the air by KWP and Lumley catches it. We are a fucking nightmare, honestly.

Lumley boots the next one long and it goes through Martinez. One long ball from the right back area and Wood holds off Duran with THB behind him but THB, instead of launching the ball into the crowd, decides to take a touch and Duran nicks it off him, advances on goal and from the edge of the penalty area with Lumley out of position and flapping like a budgie, curls it into the net very, very easily. Absolute fucking rubbish and you can’t help but think that everyone was unsettled by the incident that happened just before.  Shite.

We’ve killed ourselves again and nothing much happens before half time when Russell decides that we don’t need all these Championship players on the pitch and so Bree is replaced by last weeks’ man of the match Joe Aribo.  Saints immediately look better but Villa are looking to kill the game off with Digne’s cross causing absolute havoc before we break with Archer nodding the ball down to Dibling just outside our penalty area and he just takes off through the middle of the pitch and he eventually slips the ball left to Archer, who takes a terrible touch away from the goal and his eventual effort is easily blocked.

Not long after that, Archer (and not invisible captain Armstrong) is replaced by Sam Amo, who is a welcome addition because he has got the nod ahead of the Chuckle Brothers. The first time Sam Amo gets the ball, he jinks away from Digne and puts in a lovely cross with his left foot, which is just in front of Armstrong, but it at least makes Martinez work.

Time running out and we take off Flynn Downes to stop him getting sent off and we decide to play with one less anyway and bring on Ben Brereton Diaz, which as we all know, is a complete waste of time. We get lucky again as a long ball comes in from the Villa right and Watkins, for some reason decides not to head it, but let it run across him and the chance disappears,

Digne puts Watkins away on the left and he’s got the whole pitch to run into and pull it back to Ross Barkley, but Nathan Wood chucks himself in the way and deflects it away from goal. Good defending by the big man.

Not Today Ollie

As time runs out there is our usual lack of urgency and cutting edge.  We are having good possession in the Villa half, but we are doing absolutely fuck all with it and then we give the ball away with seven players ahead of the ball and Rogers breaks again and feeds Watkins.  The England man has options but decides to go it alone and Nathan Wood again, backs himself and puts in a brilliant tackle.

Russell responds by taking off another Championship player in Manning and replacing him with fuck knows what in Sulemana and there’s another mighty scramble in our penalty area as Villa has four players queued up to score but it ends with McGinn hitting a shot straight at Lumley, who is already on the ground. Shambles.

93, 94 and we win a free kick as Sam Amo gets brought down by Rogers.  Winning a free kick should be enough for Saints fans to start doing a conga round Villa Park, such has been how shite we’ve been.  Joe Lumley is up in the box and Fernandes chips sit into the mixer and it’s nodded out.  Sulemana puts it back in there but that’s the end of that.  Wank. Again.

To summarise Saints performance Jeff, “They had most of the possession, didn’t do anything with it, gave away a shit goal, did nothing and lost”. Let’s not kid ourselves that Villa were an amazing side as they were average at best and we proved how average they were at times, with our domination of the ball but who got the three points at the end of the game?

At the start of the game I looked at our eleven and saw five players who are never good enough to be Premier League footballers right now.  Ironically, one of them was our man of the match today, with Nathan Wood proving the Jack Stephens will not be missed in the slightest. Wood was absolutely heroic in his defending especially at the end of the game. He looks like he absolutely loves defending and unlike previous games where he has looked a bit lightweight, today he looked like an absolute unit and was prepared to throw himself into any situation to keep the ball away from our goal, showing great skill on 1v1 defending as well. It’s an excellent, example of a player waiting for their chance and then absolutely taking it when given the opportunity. 

The lack of Premier League quality in our team is there for all to see, especially up front. The forwards were not helped today by tactical tinkering that saw Archer playing off the left and Dibling through the middle. At the start of the second half we put Dibling to his more natural right-wing berth and Archer went in the middle with Adam Armstrong out left. It was better but it was still shit. Archer and Armstrong were completely useless for the entire game and Dibling had a bit of an off day which absolutely can be excused. He was however, at the heart of anything decent that we did going forward, in the second half, which wasn’t much.

Adam Armstrong was born offside. He comes from a place in the north called Offside, which is a little hamlet in between the villages of Shittouch and Nobrain. There was one move in the second half where Dibling had to hold onto the ball because Armstrong was offside and though Tyler held off the Villla players for a couple of seconds, Armstrong never got back in an on-side position at any point to enable him to be passed to, Eventually Tyler had to pass it and the flag went up. Absolutely fucking brainless. Elsewhere in attack, Cameron Archer was terrible on his return to Villa Park, barely getting in touch of the ball and when he did just handing it straight back to whichever Villa defender was nearest to him.  Our options off the bench where the Chuckle Brothers, who didn’t get much time but predictably, BBD and Sulemana had enough time to show that they are shit but not enough time to show that they can do anything remotely decent.  One positive from today was that Sam Amo was used before them and he put in the best cross of the day straight after coming on. We’ve got to the point where we are so bad in attack that we celebrate when someone puts in a decent cross.  Zero shots on target.  Zero.  Our xG was 0.34... which is basically fuck all and it was a flatline from the 15th minute.

Bloke Calculating our XG Went to the Pub on 67 minutes

What the fuck are we doing in midfield? Why is Flynn Downs playing as a number eight? Yes, he runs harder than Fernandes but Fernandes is much more suitable and creative to play further forward and Downes is much more suitable for anchoring the midfield which is what he’s done his entire career. It’s fucking dumb and it makes no sense.  It’s probably because Fernandes is better at keeping possession, which is of course more important than having any creativity further up the pitch.

Five defenders again. We started a Premier league game with both Bree and Manning in the team.  This was through choice.  THB made the mistake the cost us the goal but we didn’t need five defenders today and at half time we corrected it and looked better, even though Ryan Manning playing at left back in a back four in the Premier League is something that should just never happen. Aribo came on at half time and immediately showed that he should’ve been starting.

Russell Martin bemoaned the fact that we didn’t have any shots with the possession that we had - that’s your job, isn’t it, mate? Find a way to get the ball to the centre forward in a position where he can have a shot.  All this possession in the middle third with ten opposition players behind the ball doesn’t fucking work does it? It’s the same old shit that has been pointed out countless times this season.

Russell Martin came into the club when we were at a low point and did a brilliant job in giving us an identity, winning games in the Championship and ultimately getting us promoted.  The play off final was my best day as a Saints fan of over 50 years standing and basically, I loved Russell Martin for what he did for us that day and going to that game with my son and my Dad was the best day ever.  However, the longer this goes on, the more that goodwill is disappearing. I don’t expect a team that wins all the time but I do expect a team that looks like it has a clue.  We are once again a laughing stock. You could hear the Villa fans getting excited every time we had a goal kick and that’s fucking ridiculous. They get excited because they know they’re likely to have a shot of goal in the next minute when we’ve got a goal kick.  That’s insane.  A goal kick means that the attack is over, not that the next one is just about to start.  Villa rested Ollie Watkins against us, Chelsea rested Nicolas Jackson against us – teams now feel that they don’t need their best striker and can rest him against us.  Bournemouth’s manager and players were taking the piss out of us openly earlier in the season.  Laughing stock.

Russell also said something amazingly dumb after the game when he pointed out that we played out, lost the ball and got away with it and then Lumley kicked it long, the crowd cheered but thirty seconds later it was in our goal.  He’s being a disingenuous fucker because he’s failing to point out the goal came about because THB tried to play too much football when he was last man and fucked it up. Many fans have been saying that he was blaming the fans for the goal going in. He wasn’t but he is saying that fans don’t know what they’re talking about and that’s not a good thing to be implying either, even if you think it’s true.  Russell talks frequently about the players being brave and him being proud of them.  I tell you what, fans travelling to the Midlands in yesterday’s weather is brave and I’m proud of the 3000 who made the trip to support the bag of shite that he puts out there.

Onward with this depressing shit show to Tottenham at St Mary’s Next Sunday. Spurs are in a bit of a crisis themselves but not as big as ours. It’s a clash between two teams who you want to play against when you have a rut to get out of. I bet they get out of theirs. Mind you – guess which manager is more likely to get sacked if they lose? 

Up the fucking boring depressing Saints.