Article: West Ham v Saints match thread Football Southampton

Well.. Cortese does definitely insist on a short passing, Barca-esque style, so it wouldn't actually shock me.

Adkins: "There is a vision at the football club to play a certain brand of football by passing the ball."

 

Simon Peach on Twitter:

"Honest answer? I don't know," Nigel Adkins said when asked how long he has to turn things around at #SaintsFC: http://bit.ly/VfFBle

 

Passes over 25 yards
West Ham: 45
Southampton: 43

 

As I explained to one of your fellow West Ham fans very early in this thread, it's not about total long passes, it's about the ratio of long passes to short passes and long passes to possession. Yes the teams may have been similar on amount of long balls, but only because we controlled the majority of the game and controlled posession. You made 238 short passes to your 45 long passes, meaning you made 5.2 short passes for every long pass you made. We made 429 short passes for our 43 long balls, meaning obviously we made 9.9 short passes for every long ball we made. Simple maths shows you that you basically played the long ball almost twice as often as us. We made a long pass for every 1.4 percent of our possession, you made one for every 0.8% of yours.

But since you're clearly just a WUM, I'll summarise it simply for you: **** off.

 

This whole argument over long passing versus short passing is just snobbery in another form.

 

If I was you, I'd really only post one stat:

Goals

West Ham: 4
Saints : 1

The rest is just you wanting to wind us up. Go and enjoy your Saturday evening.

 

What happened with Oxo, only on for nine minutes?

 

What was the completion rate?

 

That is more worrying to me than his comments about the formation.
If a manager doesn't know how long they have then the chances are its very little if any.

 

Entirely agree and bear no grudges against West Ham's style of play or Big Sam, just as legitimate of an approach as our style of play, and in our club's situation it's a better way of getting results at this stage, it's just two clubs trying to achieve different things. But regardless, when I see these non-contextual stats like Real Madrid making more long passes than West Ham and Saints making almost the same amount of long balls in the game today, I feel compelled to correct the idea that these mean that West Ham don't play a large amount of long ball football, because they plainly do. I'm not stating negative connotations behind that, just stating facts.

Exactly, embrace your team for who they are and enjoy your success, don't pretend you're something you're not.

Each team completed 21, as far as I can tell.

 

Also surprised to see the daft comments about the way West Ham are playing this season. they are playing winning football, they balst it towards a target man because they can and it works. I'd rather see us do that and get stick from media and oppostion fans than play the way were trying now and getting battered. its dismal.

 

Took a kick to the hip area, tried to run it off but ended up having to get subbed off. Nothing serious just means he'll miss Arsenal's CL game against Schalke on Wednesday.

 

That had to hurt, pity, he could done some damage.

 

Well it would have needed to be one hell of a performance to put the team on his back and turn that game around, Arsenal were really abysmal. Would have been nice if they played like that against us!

 

Sorry, wasn't particularly aiming at your thread, just quoted it to maintain some kind of link to the conversation I was following at the time.

 

No point in picking on West Ham. They didn't win by cheating. Thy've won some games...now we have to learn how to do that.

Nigel probably doesn't know where to turn now. He had the international break to try things out without success. Not a disaster if we lost by one goal, but four shows there is no improvement in defence, though loss of Fox and richardson probably didn't help. I think he will be learning things, but he may not have have much chance to demonstrate this at Saints. However, a new manager won't improve the playing staff but may change playing style. I will be very sad if NA leaves after all he has achieved so far playing a style we all like, so let's hope for a few results soon starting next Sunday.

 

We are still making chances and playing reasonably well going forward but defensively mistakes that we got away with last season are now costing us goals. Worrying thing for me is that West Ham haven't strengthened significantly at he back but have coped overall much better than us!

 

Our defence was a bit scarey last year as well. We have played top sides which has affected our points tally, but whatever the reason team morale must be very low at the moment. I hope they still believe in Nigel. The sad things is that just holding on to even one of our leads would have changed everything round. Shame if that costs NA his job.

 

Well someone got their tactics wrong , I believe I said this before the game though and got slated for it by the armchairs non playing football fans .
I watch the highlights last night and it was obvious it was going to be counter attacking football with no real forwards and a 4-6-0 , this is why Rodriguez played over Lambert as he has more pace , the issue is Rodriguez can not score at the moment and does not look like it , why drop your goalscorer ?
The moment that team was announced we were 1-0 down as it showed far too much respect to the opposition , sure we had the ball more but where did we have it ?
This learning curve bollocks is exactly that , bollocks , an excuse , a smokescreen , you do or you dont and we aint doing .