Match Day Thread Saints Vs Brighton – Sunday 14th March 12.00pm, BBC1

You may be right but if you have £50 to bet on anything, put it on Liverpool to win the Champions League as they sometimes do when they have been rather iffy in the League - 1981, 2005, finalists in 2007!!!!

 

Let someone else have a go on that crack pipe, you've had enough by sounds of it!

 

Wow I reckon I'm going to be loaded soon.

 

Can you explain your first line please? If you’d watched anything of Brighton recently, you may have half expected that.

 

Poor to average would be a good start.

 

Yes,its amazing we didn't seem to know it was coming!
F***ing hit em!

 

With me it (chewing fingers) is when the team are doing well, like chasing promotion or having a great cup run. At the moment, I feel totally devoid of all emotion football wise. That is why my comments beat no relation to actual events on the pitch.

 

No going to lose my **** over this game.

We were poor, Brighton were good.

We lost.

There's a global pandemic going on and so much more **** to worry about. We are still 7 points clear. (That is 2 ½ games)

 

Do you think that fitness has anything to do with it?
They way that Hassenhuttl sets up requires a lot from the players and your 2nd half performances have generally been very poor.
Perhaps the compact nature of this season has had an impact, but could it be down to overall fitness levels?

 

I'd give the captaincy to Big Vester, I think that he might be a bit more inspirational than JWP and it's worth a try.

 

Yes, plus a truncated pre-season has hurt us more than most teams.

 

For roughly the first hour I thought we were fine. Not brilliant, but fine. Unfortunately, the double chance from Che and JWP was essentially when our match ended.

Each of our three subs just made us worse, and once Brighton decided to shut up shop, that was it. Back to our style of side, side, backwards, backwards, all until either someone gives it away or we just lump it down the throat of a Brighton player.

N'Lundulu doesn't look cut out for PL football. And Redmond and Djenepo are, by some distance, our worst two senior players. Any one of them coming on would have weakened us, but all three... It might have been very close to our first choice XI, but without Ings and Theo, our squad is still far too thin to have had serious options on the bench. I wouldn't be shedding any tears if we moved on both Redmond and Djenepo in the summer. As Ralph has shown with the likes of Valery and Long, simply being a body isn't sufficient - you actually need to be good enough too. That logic should apply to everyone.

 

Okay, well I've supported the team when we've had poor results playing well, so in the interest of balance, I do have to say that was up there as one of the worst performances we've had in a while.

Get this out of the way first though - Brighton were good. Very organised, great shape, smart change at half time. We couldn't cope with their press (which was no surprise, as we couldn't make a five yard pass or trap a bag of cement today for some reason).

Could Ralph have done something different? Well yes, in terms of what Fats was suggesting. But for me, this one is more with the players. I know we're knackered, but this was absolutely a team that should have been able to show a lot more than they did today. I wouldn't be surprised if Ralph was going mental at them today. They deserve it. It was the absolute basics today, but nobody was seemingly able to do them. Stu was misplacing passes all over the shop, Diallo was missing his usual dynamism, I thought it was Berty's worst game in a while. One other suggestion that we tell JWP we're kicking toward the opposite end every match - he'd be some midfielder then.

KWP and Adams were okay.

Everyone was a 6/10 in the first half, everyone was a 4/10 in the second.

International break is coming at a very good time for us, for once.

We'll be fine, but that was bollocks today.

One other thing though - bollocks does happen. It happens to every team. You could kind of tell in the first five minutes we were strangely not quite at it today. It really was a dodgy lasagne type of performance.

 

Some of those performances out there resembled a hungover me dropping shockers during my first season of men’s football on Saturdays. Loose touch, ropey passes, no clever movement off the ball, second to every challenge.

 

Don’t say that. I’ve got that for dinner tonight

 

One other thing - we really, really, really, really didn't see Stu make those dynamic surges forwards today. And it told.

 

I think some on here confuse being balanced and sensible with happy clapping.

 

Hi FLT. Happy to explain. l expect our team to be able to compete with a team like Brighton at home on at least an equal footing.

To add context: l expect us to be outplayed by the top 6-8 teams at most home games. I expect us to play better, but not always get the results, against bottom 5-4 teams at home.

Not saying they are crap, not saying we should win, but we should, at least, competed better than we did.

 

Ralph - "this was one of the worst games we've played this season. The basics are missing at the moment".

He's not wrong.

 

Truncated. It’s a great word.