After
the win against Ipswich, we looked at the three incoming home games of Burnley
in the cup, Bournemouth and Brighton as a chance to build some momentum before
Chelsea away and Liverpool away came along. We have built some momentum in that
we have got worse in every single game. If Burnley was light brown shit that
will come off your clothes in the washing machine, Bournemouth was dark brown
which will always leave a mark no matter how many times you wash it and
Brighton was a black sticky tar shit where you just throw clothes on the bonfire.
Chelsea away today it is. Chelsea have been shit as well in terms of their
results recently. Not to the level of our good selves of course but it’s all
about expectations having spent billions of Todd Boehly‘s money and flouting
PSR rules as Amortisation FC, I don’t expect they were expecting to have three
defeat in a row at any point, but here we are with an FA Cup and Premier League
defeat at Brighton and a Premier League defeat at Aston Villa as their last
three results. Earlier on in the season,
Chelsea looked set to establish themselves as the main challengers to Liverpool
for the title but no sooner had that position being established, they shat the
bed. To be fair to the manager Enzo
Maresca, he did say that it was too early for them and he has been proved
right. This bit of insight doesn’t stop me having a smug little grin about Maresca
because he was a smug twat last year when he was leading Leicester to the Championship
title and he just has that aura about him. He will probably be getting sacked in the
summer I would imagine, such as the way at Chelsea. Both he and their fans have recently been bleating
about the injuries they have but do me a fucking favour - you spent a billion
and in the last game against Villa they were forced to play a £50 million
winger in Pedro Neto, as a striker. Cry
me a fucking river. They still have the
mics of Jaden Sancho, Tosin Adarabiyo, Robert Sanchez and Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall
on their bench against Villa, so excuse me if I’m not feeling too sorry for
them.
So after three defeat in a row, they will of course be looking to put all that
right against today’s visitors who are hapless Southampton. It’s been
interesting to see what adjective every journalist has been putting before
Southampton when they talk about us. I’ve seen hapless, hopeless, struggling
and my personal favourite “completely fucking useless”… Oh, that was me. Chris
Sutton made a little joke about our fans looking forward to having a day out in
Norwich next season. He’s a funny lad is Chris…. Nice to provide humour to
those who don’t usually have any.
Chelsea‘s main threats are basically everyone but in particular it’s Cole
Palmer, who has gone off the boil a little bit recently but he would’ve been
given an ego boost by every FPL manager triple captaining him for this week. There’s a small matter of their two £100
million plus midfielders in Enzo Fernandez and Moises Caicedo to deal with and
it can’t really be an injury crisis at Chelsea if Reece James is fit, which he
currently is.
They of course annihilated us 5-1 earlier on this season at St Mary’s in a game
that is best remembered for the captain Jack hair pull on Marc Cucurella. With Bednarek being injured on Saturday there
is a good chance that Captain Jack makes a return to the starting line-up today
though we are hearing that THB is fit as well. I can’t really see Joe Aribo
playing in defence today because we have no Big Les available for the midfield
as he can’t play against his parent club. If Ivan Aribo and Smallbone in midfield, then
I think I might have an early night.
With a mixture of anticipation and dread, I take the team news and Will Smallbone
is playing again, alongside Flynn Downs I assume. The back three is a shit
right back in James Bree, an unfit central defender in Bella-Karavan and a
midfielder in Joe Aribo. There are three central defenders on the bench, namely
Jack Stephens, THB and Nathan Wood. Surely
you could’ve got two half games out of them and then put Aribo in midfield? Is that too obvious? Elsewhere, Tall Paul is
our striker which is a bit like being put in solitary confinement as he won’t see
another Saints player.
Saints surprisingly actually start the game reasonably well and Chelsea‘s fans
are getting very nervous every time their goalkeeper Jorgensen has the ball
because he has to play out of course and no one looks particularly confident.
From one such attempt to play out, Jimmy Champo gets a foot in and Smallbone
picks up the ball and slides it through for Tall Paul to swing a leg at it and
smash it into orbit. If the Matthew
Harding stand wasn’t fucking huge, it would’ve been bouncing down the road.
There’s a warning straight after as Enzo Fernandez place a simple straight pass
through to Cole Palmer and you would be laughing if you didn’t know what a good
player he is, as he puts it well wide. It almost looked like he’s booted that into
his standing foot.
The warning is not heeded though as ABK tussles with Neto and the ball bounces
away to Sugawara who is facing our own goal.
For reasons that I can’t work out he just smashes it aimlessly back
towards our goal and it bounces away off of Jimmy Champo and falls to Enzo
Fernandez in midfield, who slides a lovely ball through the defence to Cole
Palmer who is on the penalty spot with just Ramsdale to beat but it’s Rambo to
the rescue again and deflects his effort wide for a corner. From the corner,
it’s easily flicked on by Tosin and Nkunku has wrestled his way past the most
half arsed of half arsed challenges by Smallbone and nods into the net from a
yard out. Pathetic.
Whilst it’s still only one we have a chance and Sulemana gets on the ball after
some decent buildup playing involving Downes Fernandes and KWP and has a run at
Gusto at right back and absolutely pisses past him before standing up an
excellent cross into the middle. Because
of his size, Tall Paul has a tendency to look half asleep but when we actually
give him some service and there’s a cross to attack, he comes alive and leaps
and powers the header goalwards but Jorgensen reacts well to claw it out. Good
cross good header and a decent save.
After that brief respite, now we can get back to the normal business of Chelsea
just pissing through our defence and Enzo Fernandez again puts Cole Palmer
through coming in from the right hand side and on his trusty left foot he rolls
it wider the far post. How the fuck we are only one down is beyond me. The man for man marking system that we haven’t
changed has makeshift central defender Aribo picking up Cole Palmer, so it
really isn’t surprising how that one’s going.
This isn’t Joe Aribo’s fault.
Though we’ve ridden our luck so far, it’s about to run out and Downes pass
forward is intercepted by Cucurella. On
to Nkunku it goes and then to Neto who has a free shot from about eight yards
and absolutely thunders it past Ramsdale at his near post but a free shot from eight
yards is always gonna end up in the net.
Where the fuck was the defence?
We are now in collapse-mode and Neto clips a free kick into the box from the
left and it’s a meat and potatoes cross but it floats over a Tall Paul‘s head
and Levi Colwill meets it to powerfully headed down past Ramsdale. Three fucking nil and here we go again.
We get to half time without any more suicidal defending and the tactical master that is Juric decides to bring on a centre back and remove of the makeshift players he’s got there currently. Off comes Jimmy Champo for THB.
To the shock of no one, Saints immediately looked tighter but the Chelsea chances still keep coming and Cole Palmer keeps on sending them into orbit higher above the crossbar. The game goes into a bit of a holding pattern as Chelsea know they’ve won and Saints just want to not get humiliated. KWP goes down and is replaced by Manning on the hour mark and Tall Paul is replaced with Dibling, which means that Ivan now has us playing with a false nine. Maresca takes the chance to give some minutes to kids and those who never play, with Dewsbury-Hall and a kid called Tyrick George replacing Sancho and Neto.
Chelsea sub George has a decent chance as Fernandes gets caught with a ball in the middle of the Chelsea half and the youngster loses his head at the last moment and smashes it high into the stands We actually venture into Chelsea‘s half and have a corner which is cleared out as far as Ryan Manning who tries a ridiculously speculative shot from 30 yards, scuffs it straight to a Chelsea player and they fly forward, with us mainly jogging back. Gusto finds substitute George, who gets to the line and pulls it back for fucking Cucurella to take a touch, get a mirror out, adjust his hair, flick a v-sign at Jack Stephens and then still have time to easily score the fourth. Ivan sent on Archer for Downes with ten to go so he could no doubt have a look at the Fernandes – Smallbone wall of steel in midfield in preparation for Liverpool away. It was as awesome as you’d expect and the game cringed to the end, with just gallows humour from the very loud away section to entertain everyone.
Well, in an amazingly unpredictable turn of events that no one saw coming, that was fucking shit, inept, apathetic, half-arsed and any negative adjective that springs to mind. Nine losses out of ten for Ivan the Terrible now and let’s not confuse the issue by saying that the players are bad, which they undoubtedly are. Ivan Juric is shit and the players, crap though most of them are, are not running for him we are worse organised defensively than we were under Russell Martin and unbelievably, he’s even managed to make the attacking play worse. The random selections of out of position players are now just fucking crazy and he is adding absolutely nothing apart from evermore increasingly being the lightning rod for everyone’s dissatisfaction which means that some of it at least doesn’t land at Sport Republic’s door. There are nineteen other teams in the Premier League who don’t play this defensive system, and they are all higher up the table than us. Funny that.
We actually weren’t bad today until the first goal went in, but when it went in it had a massive deflating effect on everyone, probably because it was from such a predictable source, as Smallbone’s piss weak defending at a corner allowed Nkunku to head in from two yards. After that, we had the header from Tall Paul after good work from Sulemana, which was clawed out by their goalkeeper and when the second goal soon followed and that was another absolute classic with Flynn Downs giving the ball away and then James Bree deciding not to defend, but to make a forward run ahead of the ball when we’ve already lost it. Great instincts Jimbo – a makeshift three-man defence and you do a runner. Yes it was Downes to played a shit pass but it shouldn’t be the case that when a midfielder plays a shit pass, there is no defence behind him.
The third was dreadful defending from a set piece, with Tall Paul missing a header and various other players not bothering to mark anyone and once again, Aaron Ramsdale was completely exposed. The second half was marginally better defensively because Chelsea didn’t need to score any more goals and because we bought on THB, which certainly strengthened things somewhat. It’s amazing what happens when you play defenders in defence. We still let in a fourth though as that dick Cucurella was left unmarked by the non-defending Sugawara and had acres in our penalty area, to pick his spot.
The most damning thing for Juric is the lack of running from players. Echoes of the Spurs home game which finally did for Russell Martin. There was one amazing incident in the second half where Aribo and Fernandes attacked down the left got to the edge of the penalty area and then we lost the ball and one pass and Chelsea were three on three at the other end which kind of made it look like we only had five outfield players on the pitch. Players aren’t running and players aren’t thinking. No one cuts off passing lanes, probably because everybody is trying to mark their own player so it stands the reason that one long ball is gonna present a situation where we are in the shit. It’s absurd on so many levels.
So, Ivan the Terrible picked his terrible team and rather predictably there were absolutely no changes to the style of defending from the weekend which we always suspected would be the case because there wasn’t much time, but then why say you’re gonna do it if you’re clearly not going to. We had the same mishmash of misfits in defence and Smallbone in midfield, contributing nothing to the defensive effort and on top of that, Sugawara, possibly the worst defensive fullback we’ve had since Lee Todd - who could’ve predicted that that wasn’t going to work against the team chasing a Champions League spot.
Ramsdale did his best as usual and kept the score down but without quite the heroics of Saturday and ABK did a decent job despite his obvious lack of fitness. Sulemana had a couple of threatening moments where he looked like he might actually turn some of the fart into actual shit but aside from that and THB‘s contribution to the second half, we were fucking awful, with Sugawara, Smallbone and Bree being comfortably the deepest out of their depth.
It was lucky for us that Cole Palmer somehow managed to continue his vein of poor form because if he had been even at 70% of his best level, this would’ve been about 7-0. I wonder if Ivan congratulated Joe Aribo as his man (Palmer) didn’t score. As it was, Chelsea settled for four and we allowed that smug bastard Maresca to put on three untried kids before the end of the game. Fucking embarrassing.
Eleven games to go now and eleven days before the next one, which should be used to get Ivan Juric on a one-way ticket back to Croatia and to install Simon Rusk as caretaker manager for the rest of the season. I feel that at least then the players would put some effort in and the disillusionment that they are obviously feeling with Ivan the Terrible in charge can at least be put aside for the end of season running and give something to the fans in the form of a couple of decent performances in the remaining games.
I watched this game on TNT Sports and all you could hear was the Saints fans, who were truly magnificent in their gallows humour and noise. The downside was that I had to listen to Rio Ferdinand adding absolutely nothing to the commentary, so I now feel more stupid than I was at the start of the game and have lost some brain cells. I do wonder if these broadcasters ever listen back to the commentators and give them some sort of performance review because if they do, Rio will be looking for another job at the end of the season.
Eleven glorious days off before we have to deal with this shit again and eleven games to go.
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