We don't have a bottomless pit of money...being owned by the heirs of the man who saved us. They may have a mild fondness for us because of the happiness we gave him in his last year, but they are not football people. Money at the moment is being spent on the team...doubt we can afford to massively increase the wages of all the players. I am confident that most of the players know where their bread is buttered....we have made them all look good by having a team that plays in a successful way, but how many honestly would play every week for a top six side. Playing for Southampton is their best chance of success.
As clearly indicated by JR last night, money is the most important factor for most players so I don't expect AOC cares too much keeping the bench warm when he looks at his bank statement. It's a sad fact of footballing life, if we will only pay circa £40k a week we will never sustain a top place in the premiership as those that are prepared to pay double plus will simply take our best players and we will drop like a stone and be battling against religation. Simple fact of life.
In some sort of relation to this topic, this is worth a read if you want a laugh - http://oatcakefanzine.proboards.com/thread/221675/come-southampton Apparently Stoke are very similar to us, and would be where we are in the league if they had Wanyama and Osvaldo in their team...
Who says..? Where do you get your precise information from, Fran..? Is our bottomless pit any less deep than others..? Does nobody remember Cortese being asked the question..? Would you pay players £100K a week..? No, said Cortese, but I might if we were in the Champions League. To which everybody laughed hard. They're probably down to a slight chuckle, every now and then, by now.
Read through a few posts on there. One was interesting...a youth squad player said that Poch and his wife watched an U13 match despite appalling weather. Also said that we plan to let other sportsmen and women use our facilities at the new training ground for rehabilitation etc. Income stream presumably.
They also said that we spent £64m in the Summer[sup][citation needed][/sup] and our wage bill was double theirs[sup][citation needed][/sup]. Apart from that mostly ok.
That's the thing. I don't. I don't think he partakes in BS. He says very little, but everything he has said of the future has so far come to pass.
This is the key I think. Every player that pulls on the shirt seems to know exactly what's expected of them. This is especially evident with substitutions, and perhaps explains why Mauricio's changes seem to have the desired effect when Nige's sometimes didn't.
It was the "The problem for teams like us,Southampton,swansea etc is there is a ceiling to where you can get to. " bit that got me. Putting Stoke (barely hovering above the relegation zone) in the same bracket as us?
I agree. Said it before that if you watch that interview he is deadly serious when he says 'only if we are playing in the CL in a 50,000 stadium' I'm pretty sure it was that what he said, both the CL and 50,000 in the same sentence but it was a couple of years ago I watched it now. lol People need to notice how serious Nicola is I think. HE doesn't make 'off the cuff' remarks without meaning them.
I think Michael Laudrup said something similar in his post match interview after losing 2-0 to Saints. Sour grapes...? Perhaps, but what gets to me is how much other people are supposed to know about Saints when they have absolutely no evidence. On the other hand, I have no evidence in my positive outlook either except that I'm not putting down any pre-conditioned limits on my expectations of Saints. I am merely echoing the vision of Cortese and Pochettino. I still find it quite odd that a chairman and all his staff have more expectation and ambition than the average fan that supports them. It's traditionally the other way around. Have Saints been mediocre for that long that dreaming of success is a lost art on the South Coast..?
In the past, a lot of teams could and did win the league (or get into the top 2 or 3), but the idea has grown that no one can challenge the 'top sides' anymore. Forgetting that Man City have only recently stepped up to the plate. The very rich teams are seen as untouchable, so teams like us can never hope to rise above 5-6th. The Europa League being the holy grail for us. We have all subscribed to this. Cortese didn't, but he was a man considered to be delusional and sneered at for not being a 'football man.' When he first arrived, he was much more forthcoming with the media and he was ridiculed, so he virtually shut up. We are not there yet, but I am pleased for Nicola that the media are recognising him as a man with a plan and giving him credit. Odd mistakes have been made, but he has got a team together who are capable of carrying out Mauricio's system. As someone said above, the whole team have to be capable of playing this way or it falls apart.
I think the more puzzling question is why don't other teams stop us from playing like us? Fulham clearly just didn't have the players or will to do it. But other teams should at least be making better efforts. It seems like teams right now are in a bad trap (ironically we fell into this ourselves I think during Adkins' tenure). They don't like to play long ball, they want to play from the back. But they don't have the organization necessary to do it. Essentially, the back four dump it to a midfielder, who is then asked to dribble through the midfield or a fullback makes an overlapping run but it's still dribbling. No one really passes it through the midfield. If the midfielder gets cut off, he dumps it back and then they maybe reverse field and try again. It plays right into our hands because if you surround the dribbler, and/or hit him with wave after wave of challenges they will cough it up. If you get by the last man, he just fouls you. I think we will have trouble against Stoke because they don't care. They are perfectly happy to play long balls and bypass the midfield. I also think that while Liverpool got their tactics horribly wrong in some areas (and were missing Coutinho) they also had decent success breaking the press by having the midfielders immediately play long passes across the field. So when we tried to overload the right they passed it quickly out to the left. They're playing right into our hands. You have to keep the ball moving. But no, teams like to dork around with the ball while they wait for an attacker to make a run, or for the support that will never help because we will cover those guys, or for some kind of play to develop. If you try to move quickly, you'll make some mistakes but you're not going to play a pristine game against defensive pressure so accept it. If you force Saints to run around a lot, you can possibly wear us out. The other thing is, move your own back four up. Saints can't press deep in your end if the ball isn't there and they are in offside positions. I'm not saying it's easy to do. There's not a fatal flaw you can just exploit. But you can make it harder for Saints to dictate terms. Norwich did it. No one even seems to try.
Our style is not without risk, but Mauricio has already said that we will play every game like this. That means that the opposition will probably have to change their style...must be an advantage to us that the opponents aren't necessarily playing a style that suits them. Some teams are good enough that we will lose, but our method has worked against the top clubs as well. Even top players can donothing without the ball. At least every team that beats us will know they had to work hard for it.
The thing I don't get is this.... Yes you need excellent fitness, organisation and belief to play our system but Mo Po started to implement it after about 3 days when we played Everton at home last year. It was immediately noticable that we pressured higher up the pitch and, in turn, kept a higher line. Yes, we're much better at it now but No, it is not impossible to implement quickly. To answer the OP question...I don't know why other teams aren't playing like us! We showed ourselves last year that it can be done.
It comes down to personnel...we already had a young, talented squad who were willing to learn. Mauricio said that he knew we could play this style by watching DVDs before he took over. Not so sure it would be easy to implement (or rather carry out for a 90 min match) with a team including very talented but older players who have tasted success without busting a gut by running for every ball as if your life depended on it.
The offside trap makes it more difficult (but not impossible) to counter. Was great seeing manure get caught by it time and again. We will get breached but I don't see any team battering us for 90 mins.
