Lol just saying, I am hacked off with Foxes performance today, time for a change, Guly never had a chance to get into the game, I was just hoping for once he would do something to shut the knockers up but, nope, he did nowt.
saw Olly Lancashire ply at Aldershot the other week. He was laughable, a shocking excuse of a player! Cant believe that when saints were threatened with admin we had to resort to playing just better than average sunday morning kickabout players whilst Pompey seem to be able to loan any ex or unused premier league player and be praised to the hilt for their effort and their fight against the unfairness a situation that was their own doing....
Well, I didn't expect to get a result tonight but I always live in hope! The disappointing thing was the contrast between how they closed us down all over the pitch giving us no time and forcing the ball backwards and our standing off. They just looked like they wanted it more than us. We weren't that bad. We just weren't good enough.
They played like We did for the first half against Fulham which I would suggest was our best half of football this season......and that was without Ramirez. That firs half against Fulham we gave them no time at all, snapped at hels etc. Why can we not do that every week both halves?
good post archers....nigel is a good manager who is doing his best trying to get 50% of championship standard players to up their game with the quality players he has....Its not easy and even though the not so good players are doing their best it just is not good enough. roll on January when Nigel will replace some of the players with premiership standard players.....to call for Nigel head is a gut reaction by some of you due to results but you are forgetting there is a huge gap between championship football and premiership football and if Sir Alex Ferguson was the boss now he would be in the same boat as Nigel.......2 promotions back to back says he is a quality manager and there will be teams begging for his services if he left you......
Our players cover so much ground. Morgan consistently covers the most ground of any premier league player of up to 7 miles a game. Lallana runs his socks off, but try's to do too much (all over the pitch) leaving Fox outnumbered. I actually thought Fox played well defensively tonight. The effort from the players is there for me, that's not the problem. What I don't understand is how we can cover so much ground and yet the opposition always seem to have so much space and time on the ball? Is it our shape? The personnel in the wrong positions (square pegs in round holes)? Are the players not disciplined enough to stick to their defensive duties? Another point that I'd like to make is that we play with two defensive midfielders in Morgan and Davis, who seem to move up and down simultaneously (should one not move forward and one stay back?) leaving a lot of space for the oppositions midfield. Here is a photo from Jaidi's twitter showing how deep they are, standing on our CB's toes leaving so much room in front of them and not having any influence other then to be another body to hopefully block the shot (or in our case deflect it in). We should be attempting to prevent the shot in the first place. Our midfield is too lightweight with the ball, not strong enough to win or hold onto 50/50s and sit too deep when the opposition have the ball. West Brom are the masters of the Universe....wait sorry got carried away, West Brom are a solid and very effective team. We had so much of the ball but did nothing with it, actually thats not true we passed it slowly from side to side in our half. We did make some good attacking moves but they were few and far between. West Brom were very comfortable and will probably not get an easier 3 points all season. How many shots did they have on target? I hope this hasn't come across as doom mongering, I actually don't think we played that badly, its just that we are far too easy to beat. It must be so frustrating for Nigel and for the players to put in so much effort (and it be wasted because it's not having an affect on the game). I may be naive but I don't think we are a million miles away from picking up some points on a more regular basis. We have no self belief, no confidence and that seems to be beating us at the moment as much as the opposition. I don't think we have been outplayed 8 times this season and yet we have lost 8 games. What can we do to turn the tide and stop loosing games where we are not being outplayed?
And here is a great little stat that just backs up why we caused West Brom so few problems. 'The 5 players who completed the most passes in the West Brom v Southampton game were all saints players: Schneiderlin, Yoshida, Davis, Fonte and Fox.' All defensive players. For all our possession we didn't get our creative players on the ball nearly enough.
I just think that at some point we need to seriously, SERIOUSLY buckle down in a game - no matter who it is against - and play it like it is the most important game of our lives. Swansea would be a good place to start. We are too casual, and no one concentrates or plays coordinatedly throughout the full 90+ minutes. When we do that, we will get our first point(s) on the board, and each game will get progressively easier for us. It is patently clear - as Gary Neville suggested - that there are a number of players who are not good enough, and are making mistakes at the foundation level - at the level of basic building blocks (defenders turning their backs etc.) To stop that, they need Derren Brown levels of concentration in just one game to secure the points, and to get that belief back, that they are not laughing stocks. I fear that soon, fingers of blame are going to get pointed (Nigel did seem to hint that he wasn't happy with Fox in his interview, saying that a defender had 15 yards on Odemwingie for their second goal, yet Odemwingie wanted it more), and the team is going to start eating itself from within. Chipping away at each other on a personal level to escape blame to themselves. The worrying thing for me is that these six pointers (Reading and QPR in the true sense of the phrase, but ostensibly Swansea and other bottom half teams) are actually going to be harder - not easier - than the games we're losing.
I don't even care any more. I'm just going to games to sing and have a piss-up. If we get relegated, so be it. The Championship was much more fun.
We played like a team such as Fulham - by which I mean, we seemed like a middle of the road team, who know they will finish mid-table, know points will come and go, and are just having a bad night, as they have travelled a long way and it's cold, and they can't be that bothered to. That's no disrespect to Fulham - I could name any number of teams - but is a luxury approach we cannot afford to take. We should have been playing for our lives out there, chasing down and trying to win every ball, fighting tooth and nail even if for a 0-0 draw to keep us away from the psychologically damaging bottom position. Not merely having a quiet night, being a bit unlucky, and at least not getting battered. Adam's lack of appeal for that penalty summed up our attitude, really.
By getting the ball up the pitch faster. I don't mean that we should start hoofing it, but we need to make that defense-to-attack transition with some urgency...and more composure than we've shown. Because right now we're bogging down, at which point the central mids and defenders end up passing the ball amongst themselves while the opposition presses them into making mistakes. That's where teams are killing us right now, at both ends; they're making the incisive pass to get their forward players isolated against our defenders, whereas we're left trying to play through packed midfields or launching forward to set defensive lines.
Possibly, though we've done a decent job of it in those instances where we had a creative player -- Lallana, Ramirez -- playing in a somewhat-advanced central position.
