I'm usually quite pro-Saints, but it does astound me that MP said that he thought we were in control of the Chelsea game until their first goal, when they battered us for the last 15-20 minutes of the first half and then the opening 8 minutes of the second half before that goal even came. Hope to god he doesn't say he doesn't know where it went wrong tonight when it's so blatantly obvious.
We have officially entered meltdown phase code yellow. I had white hot fury within me after the Chelsea game, today I feel more numb. That kind of game happens in football but that's not to say it wasn't very avoidable. Our defending was poor but more disappointed with the naivety of how we started, once they got a goal it was a huge uphill battle as it only made their counter-attack gameplan more effective. Morgan was a huge miss for me, Vic's physical presence is great, Davis' experience and comfort in possession is valuable, Cork's usual consistency and solidity is worthy but Schneiderlin's intelligence and reading of the game is what we really needed, too many times did a ball bounce out of Villa's defensive third and straight to the feet of one of Villa's lonely attacking two.
I could stomach us losing 1-0 in a game like this but not 3-2. We got back in the game twice and then threw it away again. Completely inexcusable. The stats say we should have won about 5-0. To concede 3 goals when the opposition has 23% possession and 3 shots on target is frankly pathetic.
You'll always win some games you should have lost and loose some you should have won. Didn't deserve to loose that but sometimes everything goes right for the oposistion like it did today. Really isn't the end of the world, but yeh sack Mo Po!
Stats often lie or at the very least misrepresent but I think that's exaggerating, you can discount several of those shots as speculative but we easily had double the amount of strong goal-scoring chances as they did.
First time I've really felt that Pochettino got it wrong. That was with starting Yoshida. He did well to manipulate the tactics to get us scoring, which worked. But we put ourselves on the back foot and paid for it.
Yup. Would go along with that. But much like the players, the manager will learn from mistakes too. Hopefully.
I don't know whether I can blame Mauricio for that. A manager has to have confidence in all of his players. No one is to blame for Yoshida's performance except Yoshida. Though, admittedly, I don't understand why Fonte couldn't start.
I don't remember them. Their first two were gimmes of the sort we didn't get, and their third was made easy by the amount of space he had, which again we were not given. Stats are all well and good but we were ambushed today. Villa defended well and attacked efficiently, and we did neither.
We've actually suddenly got *really* unlucky with injuries. We can probably carry an injury to, for instance, JWP. We could even carry one to Rickie. But the likes of Morgan, Vic, Nat and Artur. That's a horror story for us.
I was never as big on Cork, Gazzaniga or Yoshida as others were, so I suppose I feel a little vindicated. Still, I assume they will play better. It's not easy to come back and play after a long spell. I don't see why MP is taking criticism. The way the team played looked a lot like how they played early last year. Then we started using Boruc. And added Wanyama and Lovren and suddenly the defense is up there with the best. To me, it just vindicates that MP or the scouts have been making the right decisions all along. We just don't have the depth to cover for injuries, which is unsurprising. This is only a bummer because I think we could be in for a rough spell over the next few games. And it would have been cool to sneak into Champions League. But realistically, I think we all suspected something like this was going to knock us down this year. We are not bad enough to relegated (and we have a huge cushion) even if we use this lineup all year. And it doesn't sound like anyone is hurt really badly so hopefully our squad is near 100% when Boruc gets back and we'll be on our way again. Everything is still on the right track. It was just a bad game due to an unfortunate series of injuries, plus maybe MP experimenting with a few things which now hopefully he knows don't work.
