Spot on. The uncertainty of a career plagued by injuries is not a good one. I am friends with a guy who made a league cup appearance for Southampton, but injuries meant he never got that contract here - or anywhere - and he now has a regular job.
Never sign an injured player. But Ross didn't have a record before, while the subsequent injures seem unrelated to the achilles injury he had when signed. Unfortunate hamstring - again - can be added to this list.
Saturday will be when all the stars and stuff align and the team plays like men possessed, scoring for fun and all will be forgiven... for about 10 minutes
I reckon it's a bit of a moist towelette (looks alright but any rough stuff and it will tear) We aren't conceding as much as we did, but we just don't seem to be able to consolidate / capitalise on any pressure we put on the other teams and we have periods where we invite too much pressure on ourselves and that's just asking for a mistake from someone.
It’s infuriating. Why would they think he was a sensible signing? ****ing idiots. By the end of the season we will have paid him £3m in total.
I'm so long past being annoyed at the club for signing Stewart, that was 2 or 3 years ago. What I am annoyed at is the club once again thinking of him as anything but a bonus player for us for the season ahead, and compounding that by signing a striker who isn't ready for this level...leaving us once again without a suitable striker for the season. What I wouldn't give to have Che Adams back in the team...which is funny because we spent so much time lambasting his goalscoring prowess when he was here, and pining for the club to sign a goal scorer, but he is exactly what we need this season.
Not all of us. People think being the lone-striker is an easy position to play. It's not at all; so many things they need to do, and if they can't then the whole team falls apart. Che was a a good target man, and had a good pass on him. His composure in front of goal was his weakness, but if that had been better, then he would still be playing for one of the mid-table Prem teams now. Same with Shane Long: yes he had a pretty rough scoring record, but he had a lot of qualities too, as does Adam Armstrong. But a lot of fans just look at the numbers and nothing else. Archer is like the opposite of the names above. He's a great finisher, but he tends to do little else to help the rest of the team out. He's a bit of a passenger, but if our playmakers can feed him, he should finish chances more often than not.
Yep. At the very least, it was a ****ing very risky signing in the first place. The result has been financially horrendous & the affect it’s had in a detrimental way on the pitch / tactics has been just as bad, even worse.
From memory Martin was a huge fan of Stewart, I believe he mentioned around the time he signed that he had tried to sign him multiple times before and he was the perfect striker for his ****ball style, so I think he was the driving force behind the signing even though Stewart was injured. Can blame the medical team for not picking up that the injury was more severe than first thought (I believe when he signed the hope was he’d be back in a few weeks after the window closed), but as someone said his injury record wasn’t bad at all prior to the major injury he had when he signed. Downs scored double figure goals in the Bundesliga 2 which is low Championship quality so I’m not writing him off just yet and Archer will score if we give him the opportunities. The 3 behind the striker (combo of Armstrong/Scienza/Fellows/Azaz/Robinson) should also contribute a fair few goals and be able to provide chances at this level for whoever is up front. Another striker would be beneficial just for numbers sake more than anything else. I wasn’t bothered about signing a striker in the summer but I thought BBD would still be here and play centrally where he has done well at this level before. We have 3 central strikers, one who is injured for ages and one who has started his career here poorly and needs to get some confidence back whether that be via a loan or just starting him for the next 5 games to see if that kick starts his Saints career.
This 100%. While there was a lot of people who mocked his goalscoring record I think most fans appreciated that he was a very good footballer. Agree with Long too, he brought the best out of Danny Ings.
100% this. I liked Che ( and really happy for him doing well in Italy) and like Arma. Shane Long is one of my favourite Saints players of the last few years for a number of reasons too. And he wore No7.
Interestingly, the 2023 "muscle" injury was also his hamstring so that's now 5 hamstring injuries he's had. Another thing that needs to be taken into account is that it's not unusual for a major injury like an achilles or ACL to degenerate over time or for a major injury to lead to further injuries because the player slightly changes the way they move after they recover from the "main" injury and their body needs time to adapt. There's no way we'll ever know but why assume the medical team didn't pick that up? They wouldn't make the final decision on a signing. The video below with Gary Lewin (the ex Arsenal physio) is very interesting on medicals. Assuming he's talking about Overmars, that was close to 30 years ago so the technology will be much improved today. My guess is the medical team saw what was going on, gave our management/recruitment team that information and they decided to sign Stewart anyway. To be fair, from the little we've seen of him he does look like a good player but it's proved to be a dreadful signing.
