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.

EFL Championship Match 13 - Preston North End 2 Southampton 2

 

Our Biggest Goal Threat (Pink Shirt) Celebrates the Equaliser

A few days after Hull, came a trip across to the other side of the country to play Preston North End at Deepdale. Apparently, this is the first time in 15 years that the two sides have met in a league game.

Preston were on the face of it, a very surprising name up the top of the infant Championship League table for this season but they appear to have hit the buffers in the last few weeks with three defeats and two draws in the last five games. Look a bit closer though and two of the defeats are excusable, coming as they did away at The King Power Stadium and Portman Road, but the Preston fans will be a little bit apprehensive about their 4-0 home defeat by West Brom.

A quick look through the Preston squad reveals not many familiar names and then you get to one who is familiar for all the wrong reasons. I’ll let you look up Ched Evans Wikipedia page if you wish to do so.  I hope that I never have to make the choice as a Saints fan as to whether I can support a player with that on his record.

The last time we played three games in the week, Russell Martin insisted that there would be changes and rotation in the squad and then made one change across the three games. He has once again insisted that we will be rotating but I’m not sure if anyone believes him other than the enforced change at left back with Ryan Manning being suspended. One would assume that KWP will be shuffled to left back and either James Bree or Mason Holgate will come in on the right, but who can tell?

As it turned out, none of us could tell. KWP was still on the right but there were changes all over the shop.  THB was unsurprisingly not risked for a second game in a row and his place went to Holgate with James Bree coming in at left back. There was also a change in midfield with Stuart Armstrong coming out to be replaced by Shea Charles and a further two changes upfront with Alcaraz and Sulejmana out and Adams and Edozie in. The team on paper looks very strong in a physical sense but pretty light when it comes to creativity so I do wonder where on earth the goal threat is going to come from tonight and hope that the Stuart Armstrong-less midfield is not as stodgy as it was earlier on in the season.

Bobby Charlton in his Preston Days

There was a minutes silence at the start of the game to mourn the death of England World Cup Winner Bobby Charlton, who died a few days earlier. Bobby Charlton became Preston manager in 1973 when he left Manchester United so it would’ve been a bit more poignant at Deepdale then it would be elsewhere apart from Old Trafford for the passing of one of the genuine legends of the game.

And Away we go and an early Saints attack ends when Adam Armstrong blindly runs into a defender and we get broken on, down our right hand side with Liam Millar leading the charge and he gets all the way to the edge of the penalty area before cutting in on his right foot and going for the far corner but Baz gets down well to tip it out for a corner.

On 20 minutes it’s Janny B leading the charge of defence and he just keeps going and going, gets to the edge of the penalty area cuts in and it looks like he’s going to swing a big right foot at it but eventually decides that rather than smashing it into the crowd, that he’s going to lay it off and Smallbone finds KWP out on the right.  KWP does a quick step over and moves away from Millar before unleashing a curled left-footed effort at the far post which beats Woodman easily and slams into the side of the net. What a fucking goal that is!

"Now You've Scored, Watch Me Screw Up"

We break our usual pattern of letting in a goal within five minutes of taking the lead and build up well again with Charles winning the ball in midfield and it eventually goes to Smallbone out wide and his low cross superbly picks out the near post run of Adam Armstrong who has got in front of the goalkeeper and gets a touch but he can only divert it wide.

Smallbone has been undeniably better recently but there is still a massive problem with his defending in that he just can’t run. He picks up a booking for a very obvious pull back on a Preston player and then he makes contact again with Millar, who does seem to throw himself to the ground. The free-kick comes in from our right and Preston win a corner.  In it comes and over to the far side before being smashed back in and Will Keane picks up the ball and from six yards, turns and smashes it and Baz produces some kind of splits manoeuvre to block it with his foot.  The Preston players are all going mad appealing for a penalty for some reason, that reason being that the ball has come off of Baz and hit the back of Shea Charles arm.  Shea stood with his back to Baz about 6 inches in front of him. That’s never a penalty in a million fucking years.

Half-time and the ‘Carabao’ line-up we have on the pitch seems to be doing its job so far and we look to have a bit of grit about us in the way we are battling through. You would hope that we would throw a couple of our better attacking players on in the second half, score another and see the game out.  That might happen later but for now, Preston threw on a big striker called Osmijec, whilst Russell Martin took off Che Adams who had been shit, and replaced him with Sekou Mara, who will in all likelihood based on previous experience, be shit.

Straight away we didn’t start the second half well when straight from the kick-off, Mason Holgate got in the way of Baz and they ended up smashing the ball against a Preston striker and seeing it bounce back into the penalty area and Baz managed to get back and pick it up. Not a great marker to put down for the second half.

Osmajic is immediately making a nuisance of them self and Holgate decides to pick a fight with him, which a player with his experience really shouldn’t be getting involved with, bearing in mind that we are winning.  Osmajic responds by diving on the ground like a motherfucker under no contact at all.

Bednarek gives away a needless free kick out on the left with a clumsy tackle on the shithouse striker and in it comes, headed away and Shithouse absolutely smashes it through the crowd giving Baz not much chance even though it was pretty close to him. Shit. 1-1.

Bednarek then has another shocker leaving a pass short to Edozie and Preston break again through Potts that he swaps passes with Holmes and the Shithouse and is clean through coming in from the right, with just Edozie behind him and he gets to the 6 yard box and absolutely drills it straight through Baz to make it 2-1. Fucking ridiculous. Their substitute has certainly made an impact. Ours… Not so much.

Straight away it’s time for two more subs with Stuart Armstrong and Sulemana coming on for Smallbone and Edozie.  It’s nearly 3-1 as we get caught on the break again with Millar getting sent away on the left wing as we overcommit and his cross towards Shithouse is brilliantly tidied up by Bednarek, making up partially at least, for his hand in the two Preston goals.  The referee then makes a decent decision as Millar gets booked for a horrible dive in the penalty area over an imaginary challenge by Charles.

As we get towards the last 10 minutes there’s not a lot going on bar possession. Saints have all of the ball and all of the pressure but when Sulemana gets to the line and gets the ball across there’s no one in the middle and we have very little goal threat at all. Mara connects with one cross from the right but can only plop it into Woodman’s midriff.  Off comes the ineffective Adam Armstrong and Flynn Downes, to be replaced by Charlie Alcaraz and Ryan Fraser in a final throw of the dice.

Sulemana pops up on the right hand side and picks the ball up  when Alcaraz gets tackled and lashes it narrowly wide of the near post, with Woodman being incredibly confident of where his post was as it whistled into the side netting.

94, 95 and Stuart Armstrong is on the edge of the box has a shot which comes off of Alcaraz and a defender and is clearly handled by Jordan Storey.  It’s much more obvious than the Shea Charles one in the first half as the distance is much greater but all we get is a corner. Fraser takes the corner from the left-hand side and in it swings and fucking hell… Bazunu is up, attacks it in a way none of our strikers do and got his head to it and it has somehow ended up in the net. Absolute fucking pandemonium. Baz disappears under a pile of bodies and he is now officially a better striker than Sekou Mara, Adam Armstrong and Che Adams.

Baz Shows the Rest of Our Strikers How to Attack the Ball

In the aftermath of the goal going in it become apparent that it wasn't going to be a Baz goal but rather an own goal by that nice man Ched Evans.  Maybe Ched will appeal to the Dubious Appeals Commission and get away with it.  At the end of the day, whoever the goal gets awarded to, we have got a point and we once again are looking like a team that never quits.  Compare and contrast with the last few years.

Prior to that equalising goal it had looked for all the world like it was going to be one of those ridiculous games where we have over 75% possession, but the shots at goal and shots on target for both teams was the same, showing that most of our possession wasn’t effective.  This is unsurprising that when you consider if you take the two players with the best movement, Sulemana and Alcaraz out of the forward line, there is always going to be a negative impact when trying to pass forward.  By comparison, Che Adams moved as much in the second half as he did in the first and he was subbed at half time.   Stuart Armstrong missing from the midfield, robbed us of both best midfielder at receiving line breaking ground passes from defence and also our most creative player.  His absence was why our play was largely stodgy and our biggest goal threat of the day were our right back and goalkeeper.

The players who are supposed to be to goal threat, namely Adam Armstrong, Che Adams and Sekou Mara, were all varying degrees of dreadful today.  As said, Adams was incredibly static and easy to mark and his replacement Mara gave another really mystifying performance turning up on the right wing, at number eight and as a central striker and being equally useless in all three positions. Adam Armstrong made one decent run going to the near post to get on the end of a Smallbone cross but that was it in regard of goal threat. The lack of goal threat in the strikers means that the myth that is Ross Stewart becomes even more important.

Elsewhere, the other fringe players who came into the team had slightly mixed afternoons. James Bree did okay left-back and in the first half was relatively comfortable but when the pressure came on in the second half, he looked increasingly flaky. Mason Holgate was just massively inconsistent. He had ten minutes of looking calm and composed and then ten minutes of looking completely rattled when the Shithouse came on up front for Preston.

Afterwards, Russell Martin told everyone why the line-up was a bit Carabao, with information about injuries and players who needed the managing of their minutes. Charlie Alcaraz was still feeling tired from his trip to Argentina and back and we all know Stuart Armstrong will struggle to play three games in a week.  In addition, Kamaldeen Sulemana and Ryan Fraser had been struggling with injuries and illness respectively. With all that shit going on, four points from two games in the Frozen Wastelands of the North is not a bad return.

Referee corner once again. This one, Jeremy Simpson, was fucking shit. I don’t know what the rules actually are with regards to pulling a player back after they’ve gone past you or tactically fouling a player when you have been beaten and are nowhere near the ball. I thought that was an automatic yellow card but the referees in the Championship, especially the one today, seem to pick and choose.  Preston left back Cunningham could’ve been booked on four separate occasions and there were other players as well who were just pulling players back whenever they went past them. One player got booked for it, Will Smallbone and deservedly so. Surely, a tactical foul is easy for a referees spot and should always be a yellow card.

For those not in our magnificent hardy band of 1500 or so away fans who made the midweek trip to the North, the game was covered today on the Sky Arena channel which I must admit, was a channel that I didn’t know existed before now.  The coverage was augmented by the dulcet tones of Courtney Sweetman-Kirk, who I had also not heard of until today.  I’m up for people learning their trade and everyone has to start somewhere but if tinnitus came in human form, then this is it. If you’re going to review similar incidents for each side in a completely different way then you are going to piss off half of your audience. There are two issues here, one is the obvious one about being impartial and two is that sometimes, most of the time, less is more, unless co-commentators get paid in words per minute..

Roll on Saturday morning and Birmingham.  Up the fucking 5 games unbeaten Saints.

Cautious Optimism - Here Comes the Summer - Part 2

#TonicLikeAMassiveBellEnd

The first pre-season trip was to Austria and of course, eyes were in who made the trip and who didn’t. The surprise inclusions were Klarer, Vokins and N’Lundulu from the Academy and promising youngsters Cedric and Hoedt. Yes.... Hoedt.  Let that sink in... Hoedt. Let’s face it... he’s better than Stephens.

The high profile absentees were Slattery, Austin, Gallagher, Clasie, Reed and Lemina. I put Slattery first on that list because he’s different to the others in that he’s not up for sale.... rumour has it that he came back overweight. Not good. Of the others, Lemina caused the biggest reaction at the time because somehow, Arsenal and Man United appeared to be interested.  Was that real interest or agent bollocks.

Lemina signed for us when we had just finished eighth and got to a cup final under Claude Puel. He clearly didn’t look too far beneath the surface because if he had he would’ve realised he was joining a team that was in decline. It soon became apparent that this was not what Mario had signed up for and it soon became apparent why Juventus let him go.  It seems clear to me that he bought into the Sadio Mane approach in that he thought he would look decent for a couple of seasons for us and then sign for a Champions League club, in much the same way that Sadio and many others had done before over the past few seasons. He’s since admitted he only ever saw Saints as a 2 year thing and now he was only interest in playing for the biggest clubs.  Fucking waster.

The part of the deal that Mario forgot of course, was that you had to play consistently well. For a while, when it looked like he was going to get the Man United move, it seemed that you don’t necessarily have to, it appeared that you only have to do well in flashes and you will still get the move that you wanted from the start. His flashes of brilliance were spliced together by an enthusiastic Man United fan and retweeted by Mario himself as a very sad “this is what I do”. It’s a classic ‘de Ridder’ style video in that it shows hundreds of tricks and flicks and beating players but always goes onto the next clip before you see any end product or more often than not, the losing of the ball. This video is particular good because it is at 1.25x speed to make him look faster and one of the clips is Nathan Redmond.

So, having put himself in the shop window and made it obvious that he never intended to stay here very long anyway, it turned out to be a bit of premature bridge burning. Noise about Manchester United and Arsenal has now become noise about Everton and West Ham and Wolves and if the speculation/agent bollocks goes down another level then he won’t be moving to anyone that has any more money or is any better than where he is at the moment. I wonder why. Maybe it’s all the #TonicLikeLeminade #FuckingCringeBollocks. If you're a fan of Mario's Instagram like I am, you'll have noticed that his partner, the lovely Fanny, seems to have got fed up with him as well.

Somewhere along the line in the pub, Charlie Austin was clearly told that he was not going to be in the first team squad this season and massively threw his toys out the pram which resulted in the deletion of his Twitter account. This wasn’t before he posted some more fan baiting pictures of him in a Liverpool shirt. Strikes me as a guy who likes to give it out but can’t really take it. Apparently a fee was agreed between Saints and West Brom for him to move but he turned the deal down and there have been some whispers the new Newcastle manager Steve Bruce, wanted him at up there..... until Newcastle surprised everyone and spent 40 million on a striker that no one has heard of. If memory serves, Austin was linked with them when he left QPR so let’s hope that someone at Newcastle still thinks that he was the same player as he was at QPR and not the fat mess he is now.

All that Charlie and Mario need to know is that Ralph saw more value in Wesley Hoedt being in the squad than either of them.

Whilst this was all going on, we had a friendly on the Austria tour which ended up with a 1-1 against Altach with Austin‘s replacement, Che Adams, scoring after one minute. The first team friendlies continued when the players got home with a behind close doors 3-0 win against Brentford and a 3-1 win away at Preston which brought two goals the Danny Ings and one for Jake Vokins.  Ings’ first goal was a thing of beauty as the Preston goalkeeper drove the ball straight at him and it flew in over the keeper off of Danny‘s thigh. How often does it happen that a player who is struggling for goals gets a freak one like that and it sets them up for a nice run of goals . In this case, it will hopefully carry on at the start of the season. The Preston friendly also saw the Wesley Hoedt and Jack Stephens Dream Team combination reunited as two thirds of a three-man defence and these two even managed in a pre-season friendly to show no actual desire to defend and keep the ball out of our net with Preston’s goal seeing a player nutmeg Hoedt on the edge of the box and instead of being straight in with the tackle like he should’ve been, Stephens just stood off and allow the Preston player to walk into a dangerous area and smash it in the net. I can’t make up my mind which age group of schoolboy defending this counts as. I’m going to go for Under 11’s.

PR Trip - Completed It Mate.

Some of the youngsters with a smattering of senior players jetted off to Macau to play against Chinese super league side, Guangzhou and the game ended in a 4-0 win with goals from Adams, Long, Valery and Christophe Klarer.  Both Adams’ and Long’s goals where the result of horrific goalkeeping howlers, in keeping with the Ings goal at Preston.

We did manage to shift some of the squad excess and Jordy Clasie finally completed a permanent move away from Southampton when we cancelled the last year of his contract, enabling him to move to AZ Alkmaar on a free. There does seem to have been a certain amount of history revision regarding Clasie. From my point of view, he was not physically strong enough to make up for his lack of physical stature. There was obviously a player in there but I just don’t think he was ever suitable for the English game. If you comparing with our current first choice three midfielders then you would say he was not physically strong enough to play where Romeu does, not gifted enough on the ball to challenge JWP and not possessing of a big enough engine to challenge Pierre. This seems to have been an undertone on his part to blame Southampton for his situation but for me, the bottom line is that he has spent a year in Belgium with Club Brugge and a year in Holland with Feyenoord and neither have wanted to sign him at the end of the year despite him being available for not very much money by today’s standards.

Also, Sam Gallagher completed a move away to Blackburn Rovers, where he was on loan the season before last. For the past few years I have wanted Sam to be the replacement for Graziano but for one reason or another it never really worked out for him and he never really got given a chance. I was always really wanting him to do well whenever he got on the pitch but it never really happened, with him always taking a split secomd to long to do whatever it was he was attempting to do, be it jump for a header or shoot or release the ball. I have a feeling that they could well be a Premier League striker in there in the future, playing for a team like Burnley and whilst I’m usually disparaging about Burnley, For once I don’t mean that in a disparaging way. To get to that level though he does need to be playing regularly in the Championship so this is a good move for him.

Another friendly was played, this time in the Netherlands as we played Feyenoord. Once again, Ralph played two separate teams in each half with the first half team being what you would expect to be closer to the starting 11 in the first league game. For all the talk of the 4-2-2-2 formation, it’s became apparent what I have suspected all along that unless we sign a commanding central defender, Ralph doesn’t trust any two of the current centre backs to play in a back four so we have to go with a back 3 of Bednarek, Yoshida and Vestergaard. Anyway, we won 3-1 with another goal from Che Adams, a bundled effort from Yoshida and a last-minute goal from the returning Sofiane Boufal having calmly skipped past the defender, sat the goalkeeper down and smashed into the roof of the net. Whisper it quietly but Wesley played really well in the second half. I initially thought he was only on this Dutch trip because he knew where all the best gear could be found and the location of all the best dodgy bars, being a native of that part of the world and all that but it appears that he might actually be a part of things next season. Whether this is down to a change in attitude or no one being interested in buying him, is unclear at the moment though if he has won Ralph over then fair enough. As previously said, he is better than Jack Stephens anyway who was conspicuous by his absence from the Dutch trip.

Overall in the Feyenoord game, we looked like an exciting side going forward with Adams, Ings and Redmond, not to mention Boufal but the central midfield of Hojbjerg and JWP looks a bit light without the presumably injured Romeu so defensively, it all looks a bit worrying.

Danny Taking a Penalty Properly

The final pre-season game was at home to Cologne and though he was apparently in hospital, Ralph put out what I expect to be the starting line-up next week. Maybe he went to hospital because he didn’t want to watch the one surprise, which was Jack Stephens playing in central defence.  Regardless, we saw off the Germans with relative comfort by 2-0 with a penalty by Danny Ings and a nice goal by Hojbjerg who combined very well with Obafemi and Adams. There was also time for Danny Ings to look a twat by chipping a second penalty straight to the goalkeeper who stood in the middle of the goal and patted it down.

There weren’t any huge revelations that weren’t known from the Feyenoord game. We are good going forward and we look ropey as soon as the opposition break our initial press high up the pitch.  Remember that goal we let in loads of times last season where the team broke on us from their own penalty area and we were all over the place.... get used to it.  Against Burnley, you know that the high press is going to be negated by them smashing the ball up to whatever seven foot striker they got on the pitch so it’ll be a different challenge we have to rise to.  Moussa Djenepo made a debut but didn’t have time to prove he’s going to be anything other than an impact sub to start with.

So, an unbeaten pre-season.  In football, it is of course always better to win rather than lose but you can never read too much into it.   I vaguely remember us doing that once in the 90s and then losing our first five matches. That only happens of course when the players think they’ve cracked it and all they have to do is turn up and win. There is no danger of that with Ralph in charge. We will hopefully see a couple more in through the door before the transfer window closes but if not then we will get on with what we’ve got and I think we can have cautious optimism for the season ahead. We aren’t going to be pushing for a European place against the likes of Everton and Leicester but we should certainly have enough about us to be nowhere near the bottom six and I would take that.

Carling Cup 3rd Round - Southampton 2 Preston 1

Give us a song Phil...

Carling Cup 3rd Round and a visit to SMS from Phil Brown and Preston North End, newly relegated to League 1 and obviously making it a priority to return to the Championship at the end of the season. A decent start they’ve made too and so tonight could be a tricky game.... in theory. It’s a bit said that you cannot look at league form as a guide to how a cup tie will go these days as if it was a league match, about 16 of the 22 players wouldn’t be playing.

The Official Saints website has been entirely predictable and scoured the squad for a player who used to play for the opposition. They didn’t have to look too far to come up with Chappers who managed to do a ten minute interview without mentioning Darren Ferguson once. Fergie Lite of course bombed him out of PNE, then sold him to us for a pittance and then got fired from PNE after he’d done most of the hard work to ensure they got relegated. I ended the last blog entry by stating that Phil Brown is a bit of a knob and he undoubtedly is (a perma-tanned, all singing and dancing “everybody look at me” knob) but he’s a definite improvement on Fergie Lite.

The day had not gone too well for yours truly, starting with the experience on turning up for work in Brighton and realising that I had odd shoes on. This was not good considering it was one black and one brown and not just two different black ones that I may have got away with. So, looking like an extra from Miami Vice in my squash shoes, I had to listen to the Brighton fans banging on about their tie with Liverpool when they weren’t taking the piss. Fast forward to the end of the day and it’s time to catch the 5.33 from Brighton only they’ve cancelled the bastard due to incompetence. Railway employees are programmed to say one thing when faced with a pissed off customer and that is “ticket office”. The next train was to Pompey so I managed to get Dad to pick me up at Havant at 7.10 (where I kept my SFC shirt safely hidden in my bag as I went through immigration) and we pegged it down the motorway, arriving at SMS and only missing 5 minutes.

Radio Merrington said that in fact I’d been underestimating the amount of team changes as in fact, we’d made 10 and so had they. Bart was of course in goal and the defence looked solid with Butters, Big Jos, Aaron Martin and Dicko. Predictably the midfield contained Morgan and Chappers with Steve de Ridder and Lee Holmes on the wings. Still quite a string team and then we got to the forwards of Ben Reeves making his debut and Johnno Pace. Alarm bells of the loud clanging variety. I didn’t know much about Reeves other than up until recently he’s been a left back and there was no way that Johnno was going to be any good at leading the line on his own.

Saints started well with De Ridder and Holmes looking lively and Schneiderlin and Chaplow looking dominant in the middle. Johnno Pace had an early chance to show what he could do when Martin boomed a clearance forward and Johnno let it run before making up about 10 yards on the defender and keeping the ball in. Sadly, this was to prove the highlight of his display.

When he controlled the ball properly, Lee Holmes was getting into some good positions on the left and got some crosses in but the difference between today and a League game was really noticeable. In a league game, if the left winger (Lallana) gets a cross in then the chances are that Lambert, Connolly and Gulyman would all be in the box and possibly one of Cork or Hammond as well. Today there was Johnno who can’t head the ball for shit and maybe de Ridder and that was about it. Reeves was neat and tidy but playing far too deep and we looked pretty toothless up front as a result.

We took the lead just before the half hour as Holmes took a corner from the right which flew over everyone except Reeves who had peeled away beyond the back post. His nod back across was met by Big Jos who flicked it home for his first SFC goal. Jos then got on with the job marshalling the defence which he is doing with more and more authority with the more games he plays.

De Ridder then broke away against the left back who just grabbed him and took the booking. They couldn’t live with him at all at this point and then a second Preston defender got booked for exactly the same thing. Knowing now that they couldn’t grab him again, de Ridder broke away down the right and failed to get his head up and butchered a clear chance on goal when he turned the opposite way to where Holmes and Johnno were, screaming for a pass.

We had a minor alarm right on half time when we were treated to a performance by the Flying Bialkowski Circus Act who came flying out after a corner in impressive fashion, lacking only in that there wasn’t any contact with the white round thing. The referee’s half time whistle echoed round the 24,000 empty seats and it was time to have the piss that had been required since a 5 o’clock pint on Brighton station.

It doesn’t matter what 11 players we have on the pitch, we seem to be in the habit of starting the second half slowly s it all got very scrappy. Preston managed to get in our half for a bit and somehow managed to equalize when Bart could only parry an effort and the ball seemed to squirt between 3 Saints defenders and hit a forward on the shin and bobble into the net. Ridiculous goal though I expect Phil (and his tan) was warming up his vocal chords.

The scrap continued for 5 minutes or so and it was noticeable that many of the Saints players that showed up well in the first half had disappeared. Johnno was running around up front like Forrest Gump in a perfect exhibition of how to be where the ball isn’t. Reeves was dropping deeper and deeper but not getting involved and Holmes and de Ridder had faded. What you need when the game is going nowhere is some talent to come on from the bench and luckily we had some as Lallana came on for de Ridder.

His first touch was to come off the left wing and cushion a pass to Holmes and his second was to get on the end of the subsequent cross and bury the header past the keeper to make it 2-1 making it about 45 seconds on the pitch for one goal. Well, Nigel like his subs to have an impact doesn’t he.

Big Jos appeared to go down with cramp straight after the goal and was replaced by Jose Fonte and five minutes more passed before Johnno Pace was put out of his misery and replaced with Sir Rickie. The rest of the game was in truth, played out comfortably despite Preston throwing on Neil Mellor to try and give them something up front. Chappers was getting under their skin a bit which is what tends to happen when you go into Bald Psycho mode and start leaving your foot in. It was funny seeing the Preston midfielders taking turns to try and kick him.

The expected last few minutes onslaught didn’t really happen as whenever Preston got the ball, they seemed to just give it back to us. Aaron Martin and Fonte showed up well in dealing with the few balls that were tossed into the box and the ref eventually blew to end what was in truth, a rather limp kind of game.

Well…. We won and we’re through to the last 16 which is all that matters really. The players that you knew would be decent (Hooiveld, Chaplow, Schneiderlin, Martin, de Ridder) were decent and the fringe players who don’t usually make the bench, on the whole demonstrated why. Butters and Dicko both showed flashes of good play, mixed in with extreme rustiness and a few wayward passes. Surprisingly for such and experienced player, Butters also managed to dive in and get skinned a couple of times. Ben Reeves had a decent enough debut but really tired at the start of the second half before getting a 2nd wind towards the end. He’s one of the 5ft 7inch blonde clones that Dr Nicola produces in the lab at Staplewood but he certainly isn’t a forward though and neither on tonights evidence is Johnno Pace who barely touched the ball in the second half. Lee Holmes is an odd one as he mixed up decent crosses with bad first touches but overall, I can’t see him challenging for a first team spot any time soon. Maybe he needs a regular run of games out on loan somewhere.

The draw for the next round is on Saturday, when we will be away at Burnley in the league where I expect we will see a few team changes, 10 to be exact. If I had to pick one player from today who may get a start on Saturday it would be Chappers but I can’t see Nigel changing the winning League team just yet. I wonder what Phil sang to the Preston boys on the bus home…