Was impressed with Jiminez, that was the first time I’ve seen him play and I know we were far more open as a team, but he gave Vestergaard a bigger headache than Salah did last week. Wolves were really impressive last season in the league cup and how they kept the ball and that’s obviously gone up a notch. They press really cleverly and capitalize on players who hesitate in possession and boy, did we do that a lot. We rightly all love Ralph here, but if bigger clubs do end up in the hunt for a manager, then Santo will likely rank higher
Thought Ings, Redmond & Sims were superb as a front-3. Let's keep that going (until Ings breaks down anyway)
Wolves away was the first time I saw, and he really impressed me then too. I couldn't help but feel that I was watching the ideal Pelle replacement.
Can't believe I'm reading people thought Ings didn't do well! Thought he did very well despite being provided with very little. Our game plan (which I laud Ralph for), was to cede the midfield and try and isolate their centre-backs man-for-man with our front three, allowing the pace of Sims and Redmond to expose them. Wolves played with their wingbacks pressing ours, so if we could draw them up the field room would be created. What allowed us to create even more space was that when Ings dropped deep, a centre-back would follow. For both our first two goals, Boly tracked Ings as he came back to contest for the ball. As soon as this happened Redmond and Sims were one-on-one, and not just with room behind the wingbacks, but in through the channels. As soon as this happened we looked to play the ball into those areas, Sims outran his coverage to receive the ball, and Redmond was able to run off the remaining stranded CB. So in terms of the gameplan and positionally, Ings was excellent. He also contested long-balls intelligently, knowing he would not win them outright and instead allowing us to contend for the second ball. That was the fundamentals he provided. He also provided a neat assist, an excellent through ball to Sims that created a massive chance, and should have been played in for a tap-in for Sims' other chance. He was vital to our gameplan, and did everything that could be reasonably asked of him.
Highlights from OS up already: https://southamptonfc.com/news/2019-04-13/highlights-southampton-wolves-premier-league-201819 Adam Blackmore distinctly credits Long’s goal to Shane Warne...
Exactly. Ings was very good today. And really, he has been doing this for us all season, so not sure what people were seeing. He has been quite adept and finding the gap between midfield and defense. He’s also pretty good at subtly overloading a side to further confuse things between CB’s and fullbacks. When he does this, it pulls out a CB and gives Redmond his chance to make one of those inside forward-ish diagonal runs. His interplay with Redmond has been great and a big part of Redmond’s resurgence. Although Redmond deserves credit to for learning how to time his runs and becoming a much better finisher, as he showed today. You can see Sims is not quite as adept at the timing and as a result sometimes gets steered outside. Although not criticizing him at all as he hasn’t had the same time in the side, plus he is young, plus he put in a few nice passes today so he was still effective. Nice thing about Ings is, he still has his scorer’s instinct. Basically he has been doing all the things Long supposedly does except Ings can actually score. Although Long scored today, so can’t say anything bad about him either. We just played really well today. I was really impressed. People are saying the defense was shaky but I thought they did quite well. Wolves were pretty good with the ball today and the CB’s were given a tough task because Bertrand and Valery were pushing upfield and JWP is not our best tackler in midfield. Wolves were smart and were able to get in behind the midfield and then tried to spread out the CB’s. At times the best the CB’s could do is try and stay compact, hold the center and wait until the rest of the team could get back. Which I thought they managed. Once they got some help in the form Romeu they were fine. No shame in needing an extra DM to help you out against a good attacking side. But they held things down long enough for us to grab a lead where we could then afford to take a more defensive posture.
Haven’t read the thread and haven’t seen any of the game so this is definitely ahead of myself, but Wolves are a very good side and to beat them 3-1 is a fantastic result.
In terms of what Long supposedly does - Long can do well at creating space too, but the key is that he creates it in different areas for the most part I think. Long struggles coming back to the ball, we all know that, his touch is wildly inconsistent and he can't pick a pass, you only really get luck from him dropping deep if he's coming back to try and flick it on with his head, and that's an inexact science. Shane can create space by stretching defences and creating spaces in the gap between midfield and defence but we don't have players like Tadic and Mane that thrive in that space anymore, and plus in just pure distance-to-goal terms the space is in less dangerous areas. What Ings did today was create space in incredibly threatening areas and areas in which direct pacey players like Redmond and Sims thrive. And most importantly, Ings can pick a pass as he did so today. I agreed we played pretty well, and I love the approach from Ralph to not try and mitigate Wolves' strengths, but rather attack their weaknesses and believe we can outpunch them. We may not have set out to dominate the game but God damn if that wasn't one of the most positive approaches I've seen from us in a while. And not just positive in a 'lets squeeze as many attacking players into the teamsheet with no real rhyme or reason because we haven't been able to score for **** recently' way. Positive in that we weren't afraid to allow them an inch in a belief that we could take a mile. Sure we've seen incredibly positive, pressing approaches against big teams under Ralph, but that felt almost still like pragmatism. Out-work them, limit them as best we can, and try and force mistakes or snatch something. Today we didn't care about limiting them, we just went to execute our gameplan that we believed would get us a win. And that's beautiful to see. Or I'm merely projecting it all and misreading our approach and that's just how the cards happened to fall... But **** it, we won.
I just put the stat out there. Didn't make a comment. To be honest it was supposed to be a compliment about Long, rather than a complaint about Ings. I'm a glass half full kind of guy.
Don't worry I know I was just making a joke of Shane being unfair competition because he's akin to Messi, otherworldly. But I never do too well with jokes so I don't know why I must keep trying to make them!
