Someone I was speaking to at the game today made a very good point, we lack any good Premier League experience. Arguably our most experienced Prem players are Stephens and Bednarak. 2 players who played in both 9-0 losses. So while it’s experience, it’s **** experience and shocking that we’re still so heavily reliant on those two players. When we were hitting our heights we had such a great mix of fresh blood and experienced club players. These all feel like players who are desperately looking for experience on the pitch to help them. Which is why Lallana was actually doing well because he was commanding things and telling a lot of the players where to be and what to do. But obviously Lallana has physical structure of a ****ing poppadum so he isn’t anyone to rely on either.
The main positive from today is that the skate Liverpool fan didn't come back for the second half. I reckon he worked out I clocked him
Got to agree with Libby in that it was one of the worst atmospheres at St Mary’s I've ever witnessed. Being out sung by plastic scousers is never a good look, but (and I appreciate this is a bit chicken and egg) there is very very little to cheer about these days, the fans have a collective PTSD on the go and seem to be beaten by it all. With regard to the actual football, I thought Macca made some good saves first half but the way Martin wants us to play makes the players and the fans very very nervous. It was totally obvious, as it has been all season, that tapping it across the defence would lead to errors and goals. It was a question of when, not if. Tall Paul played really well as did Fernandes and Dibling. I've absolutely no idea what RM was trying in either formation or tactics when he brought on big Les. Another bizarre substitution from the Martin play book. I'm sure you're all bored of me banging on about SR, because I'm even boring myself, but the longer those twats ignore this, the more managers we're going to miss out on. Granted we're not shopping at the same store United are, but we definitely are with Leicester and Coventry. Every day and game that passes weakens us. Why aren't they communicating with fans? What's their end goal here? If the plan is to go down with Martin in the hope he can get us back up then aren't we going to have the same issues next year? It's so ****ing amateur ad they're so lucky they took over us rather than the likes of West ham or Everton where they'd soon be shown the error of ther ways, but our fans are way too polite and accepting of this ****. We seriously need to protest these pricks. Sports Republic are twats.
Yeah said earlier Lesley coming on for Paul was beyond baffling. Really not sure of the logic behind that.
More than double the points. So it's clearly not just down to squad quality why we're performing poorly.
Can we please remove from our thinking that logic is a tool of thought and planning in current use at SMS. At every stage of pre/during/post match planning used by the present holder of Manager, he and his team do not subscribe to this mystical process of using logic. It’s just easier to have that assumption in mind in our analysis or comments on any game we play.
If today had been game no.1, rather than game no.12, I would be feeling a lot more positive right now. Some decent stuff, but ultimately yet more suicidal football.
Side note for today; after they scored first, I noticed RM swapped KWP & FF. I wondered whether that was a plan after they went 1-0 up (just assuming they would?) or whether it was just a 25min planned swap? I wondered why he thought KWP on left & Saga wouldn’t have been a better option from the start? RM, does tend to make me wonder quite a lot!?
Let's play, pass the grenade at the back! My feed over here is Jim Prowfoot and David Prutton. They are in despair in how we try and play out from the back. If RM doesn't change it, what's the ffing point of him remaining in charge!
Sports Rebuplic model is buy young talent, and sell at a profit. So that's Dibling, Fernandes gone at sometime soon! I am so ****ing jealous of the ownership Bournemouth have, (Bill Foley) let alone Brighton. They are not trying to re invent the wheel, unlike our idiots!
There’s been a lot of talk post match about atmosphere at St Mary’s being **** and I really think this has a lot to do with it too. There’s zero long term vision at the club. As you’ve said, as soon as we get anyone promising they will be sold. Unfortunately this isn’t a new thing with owners of our club. I can only speak for myself but I’m 30 and a lot of the people around me in Northam looked my age or younger. It used to be a joke but I feel like it’s genuinely become engrained in the Southampton DNA that we sell anyone who even remotely looks worth something. We never ever try to keep, maintain and build, it’s always sell and replace with slightly ****ter replacements each time. I know that is the life of a mid table Prem club and it might be bias or I can only see from a Saints perspective but I can’t help but feel like we really do it more than others, especially post Koeman where we basically saw a mass exodus. It seemed to be as soon as an offer came in it was just “Yes”. Poch and Koeman basically said that it was a key reason they left. The club never matched their ambition, thinking they could just replace and replace and replace. And now look where that has us. A club with seemingly zero ambition or long term future plans because all anyone thinks when someone is good is “they’ll be gone soon”. I know you can’t expect players to want to move on from a club like ours but it’s also on the owners and managers to convince the players there is a reason to stay but they seemingly either never did or failed every single time. So now while it’s absolutely lovely that Dibbling looks brilliant, the first thing that comes to mind when he does anything good is “he will be gone in the summer” and I literally heard fans say that in the stadium today. It’s just bleak. And if you’re my age and younger then that is all you’ve ever known of Southampton FC, a selling club that would rather sell for immediate profit than build a long term future. My first thought if we suddenly turned it around and let’s say players who we currently couldn’t sell for £1 like Sulemana, Archer, Manning and Fraser suddenly had the half season of their lives and carried us to safety, our board would sell them in the summer no questions asked and just replace them again. That’s another big factor as why it is hard to cheer for anything at the moment.
Very well written. You are correct, it's rinse and repeat. I am 55 so have seen it numerous times before. My main point is, why bother keeping RM, because he will have a team in the Championship worse than this one. We are clearly not good enough for his style. Get a new man in, who maybe able to get us through, and not be the embarrassment of world football.
I'm no football expert, as has been proved on here many times, but I don't understand this. We are bottom of the table, becoming more and more adrift, we keep losing, doesn't matter if we play well for a few games or not, we keep losing. Yet more than a few behave like we are fair-to-middling, and unfortunately, some of them appear to have important positions in the club.
