Only caught the 1st half as I had a flight. Were we any better after moving to 433 and bringing on Fernandes & Archer at HT? And did Dibling have the same impact as against Forest?
3,4,5 we just don’t have the quality at this level, nor in midfield to support. This outcome was very obvious & I just can’t see RM / nor the team improving. Even if they do, the opposition will suss & we’ll still concede.
It work before with Poch. No way Martin will change. We gift a two goal lead to an established Prem team away and we got what we deserved.
No point tbh. Might as well back him as much as possible. He got us up so deserves some time. But yeah it’s painful. It’s so easy to beat us.
We're undoubtedly better defensively when we play with 3 CB's on the pitch imo but even then we're still not great in that regard. Last year we only kept 3 clean sheets against clubs in the top third of the league (top 8) and two of those came in the play offs with the back 3. Though you could argue Alex had an impact there too. We were poor defensively pretty much all season in the championship despite having some of the best defenders in the league. It's hardly a surprise that we're likely to struggle more when we've one of the worst squads in the PL. I know this is unpopular I still think the back 3 is the way to go. We looked pretty decent early in the second half when Fernandes and Archer came on going forward without looking worse defensively but fell apart completely after the Dibling sub and change to a back four.
There was improvement and we were having a good spell of possession in Brentford’s half, then we gave the ball away, conceded and lost the momentum that was building. Dibling was Saints MOTM for me. Pretty much everything he did moved the ball forward or into the box and his perfect chipped pass for Lallana, to head down to Yuki for our goal, was a thing of beauty. The commentator was waxing lyrical about him before he set foot on the pitch and the co-commentator was a convert by the end of the game.
Back 3 is still fine for me and it’s about having the right forward options. It was so disappointing to see that same midfield & attack start and I can’t behind Martin “resting” excuse. My biggest hope is that he has tried the sentimental approach, it’s worked how we expected and now it’s time to play players who can cope at this level
Umm. Give him at least 10 games before sacking him? I dunno. I don’t think he’s good enough to manage at this level. I think his tactics are not only boring but also suicidal. We also didn’t buy a striker that can hold the ball up. I genuinely don’t know what else we can do now but pray it improves. He seems to think he can reinvent football so I guess we have to hope he’s right. He’s earned some time.
Have to disagree there Libs, during the 24 match unbeaten run we conceded only 18 goals playing a virtually unchanged team in a 4-3-3 formation.
Selecting smallbone Aribo and Armstrong for sentimental reasons is worrying. There’s no place for sentimentality here in the PL, players who get you there get set aside if you suspect they’re not the best. Fair enough sticking with it for 2 games but every game is crucial.
Playing largely against teams who we had much much more quality than. Like I say we only kept 3 clean sheets against the top 8 (well top 9 actually) clubs across the entire season. And only one of those came during the normal season, with the other two coming during the play offs. So in 14 matches against teams in the top third of the division during the normal league campaign we managed a single clean sheet. That speaks volumes. To put it another way we kept double the amount of clean sheets in 4 matches against the better teams with a back 3 than we did in 14 matches against the better teams with a back 4. We've no chance this season if we can't keep clean sheets as we're not gonna be scoring anywhere near 2 goals a game.
Not sure if it’s sentimentality or just a belief that they know how we want to play and the new signings don’t yet Martin has always come across pretty arrogant about his football to me and how intricate and awesome it is, so wouldn’t surprise me if he thinks it would take a while for a player to come in and learn it. Feels like what he wants does take a lot of work on the training ground about exactly where to be in possession. Obviously Downes Aribo and Smallbone have all played it last year where as the new guys haven’t. Not sure if Ugochukwu or Fernandes are away with national teams but this seems like a good opportunity to try and drill all the creativity and positivity out of them and make them more robotic with their football
I just think that the more players we have at the back there is greater tendancy to faff about passing to each other and the mistakes come. It's a personal preference but i've never really liked 3 CBs as it takes away an attacking player.
I don’t really care about formations. The system isn’t changing. We need to play as many players with touch, awareness and the physicality for this league as possible. Which is why the players who came on today need to play and the likes of Smallbone shouldn’t be playing.
