Match Day Thread Saints Vs WBA Tuesday 9th December 19:45

I agree with you. I'm ecstatic with our progress over the last 5-6 weeks. Doesn't mean we can't discuss the flaws when they become a repeated issue.

Lots of positives tonight (from the first 45mins ). Adarma and THB are completely different players these days. But we still almost threw away a 3-0 lead against a very, very, very poor opposition. It's a hard one to ignore for me.

 

They must be under specific instructions from Tonda as there is a pattern here. I’m all for controlling and closing out games once you have a healthy lead, but that second half was terrible. It’s a long season and I can see why important players get subbed but their replacements must be able to hang on to a lead.

 

I do not understand why we let WBA come on to us in the second half. We should not be trying to play out from the back and invite pressure. WBA's miss at the end was very fortunate.

 

One thing making me chuckle - we're clearly way better at attacking than we are at defending (all hail the new Keegan), but Still set us up as a defensive team and couldn't work out why we were so ****.

 

Don’t think it helps that 10 of the 12 goals have been scored in the first half, with very little action going towards the Notham in the second half.
It will be interesting to see how we play when we go in at half time with a closer score line. (Pretty sure that will be our next home game against Coventry).That should generate a better atmosphere I guess? Hard to get an atmosphere where you can tell the players had eased off from the moment we kicked of for the second half last night

 

Yep exactly.

Still set us up to defend and not lose. We couldn’t and did.

Tonda sets us up to score more than them.

 

Tondas post match comments suggest firstly that he is not too concerned about the players performance in the 2nd half as we held on and got the points and also that the crowd were important during that time? I'm pretty sure I saw him geeing everyone up towards the end.

 

Re that late miss there was a cracking photo on the BBC feed of Romeu, Wood and Bazunu all giving Quarshie a death stare. Guess they didn't agree with him that it was Manning's fault.

 

What I will say is last night was the first time since QPR under Tonda (and that was his first game) where we didn't respond to the opponent upping their game. Against Birmingham we scored a few minutes after their goal. Even the Millwall game we responded to going 2-1 down, we just didn't see it out like we should have done. Therefore I'm not too concerned about the 2nd half last night.

 

It seems that playing with a three nil half time lead is as difficult, if not harder, than playing against ten men.

 

I think the other issue we have at the moment is that the subs are making zero impact when coming on, but they are also like for like subs with no real change in formation.
To be fair to Tonda, he hasn’t had time to work on these things and won’t have until January as we have 6 games now in 16 days.
This will be followed by the FA cup game, where personally I’d give most of the usual starters the weekend off to re charge batteries etc.

 

Disagree with your first point. Archer had a good impact when he came on Saturday. Having him back is important. I think Romeu will have a bigger impact the more he plays. I'd say the only sub having no impact is Aribo.

 

Logic would suggest that WBA had sussed what we were doing and were counteracting accordingly. Also this kind of play is extremely fatiguing, you can't keep it up for 90 minutes. The problem was that some of our players had "switched off" and weren't doing what Tonda was asking them to do, complacent perhaps. There didn't seem to be a defensive "plan B". That last Albion miss was criminal and that alone was a good reason why they didn't deserve a point! Their subs made a difference, ours made it worse, Aribo? why? Jack S would have been better at defending those corners, easy to see in hindsight. Hopefully some lessons learned.

 

Public comments v changing room comments not likely to be the same, except where coaches seem to cross the line with veiled criticism on screen.

 

I'm sure he was concerned but kept his main criticisms private which is absolutely the right thing to do. He's built a very good relationship with the players - why jeopardise that by throwing them under the bus publicly, especially as we did win the game?

 

Leo.

 

We need a quality CH and LB in the next window. JS is not good enough, I know he can have good games. We've been saying he's not good enough for years. Surely the plan is to recruit young talent that will be good enough for the PL. So far it's looking like we have for half a dozen of the squad.

 

LWB for me. Different positions and different qualities needed.

 

I'm actually glad WBA came back into it. It gives us something to moan/worry about. This board was getting too happy clappy!

 

I was actually joking with my mate last night, that all this 3-0 up at HT malarky means that there isn't much to moan about.

God bless that 2nd half.