I still don't quite get Poch. Sometimes he's keen to throw forwards on and chase the win when it's all square and sometimes he doesn't make any changes at all. At the moment we're relying mainly on balls into Stoke's box, which would seem to be a situation begging for JWP.
Anyone, really. I don't see a player on the pitch who looks likely to make a difference at the moment.
FT. Not good enough. We should be beating this shower of ****. There's no way we should have dropped points today. Really poor second half from Saints.
Well credit to Stoke there and (through gritted teeth) to Hughes as well. They were excellent. Credit to the ref as well, apart from that Maya tackle, he was excellent today too.
That is a huge bugbear of mine, 3 minutes of stoppage time announced at the exact moment as a free-kick is awarded to Stoke, Whelan spends 40 seconds rolling around on the floor then Begovic takes another 15 seconds to actually take the free-kick, and the ref blows the whistle at 93:02. Not saying we were going to score, we didn't even look close, but just makes absolutely no sense to me.
I didn't see a shower of **** out there today. I saw a very well drilled, pressing team who performed precisely as their manager set them up. The fact we couldn't break them down was a credit to them.
Disappointing - given we had pretty much a full team (except for Lovren) and they have one of the worst away records in the EPL - not forgetting they have not scored for 300+ mins away from home...
Frustrating result. But... 1 point behind Newcastle, who play Hull next and 9 points ahead of 10th place.
I would not go that far.yeah we were not on top form today,but credit to stoke for holding us to a draw
Their away form suggests they are a shower of **** when they play away. No excuses for not beating them.
Nor me, if Saints had done that away from home against a superior side, would we be a shower of ****? Some chill pills needed for a few, I think.
First half Stoke was extremely ambitious, and we were lucky to go in even. Second half, though, they sat back; if teams are going to let us walk the ball into the final third, we need to generate chances, yet I can't think of more than a couple situations where their back line was even under real pressure. Concerned about the midweek match against Hull...they're playing well and with our propensity to slow down when the fixtures start piling up, I'm not terribly confident that we'll get something.
That was a good defensive display unfortunately. Didn't seem like any of our players were really on there game. Only saw second half mind. Who's next?
Disappointing in the end - I feel we ran out of ideas and didn't have any real quality on the bench available to come on, which may have made a difference. Saying that, I would have brought on Ward-Prowse for Cork, as I feel he does offer us something different, but obviously Pochettino feels differently. Clearly dominated the second half as Stoke looked happy with a point after a surprisingly decent first half from them.
The poor half was the first one from our point of view, which is where we could really have been taking control of the game. The second half was just a tough battle against a well-drilled team defending deep, it still amuses me somewhat that some people are so amazed/infuriated that we struggle to score against these kinds of teams when they are playing like that.
