I am no great fan of Reed or Krueger, but ultimately it is Gao who holds the purse strings - and he is not about to finance a more ambitious approach. Hughes seemed happy with the transfers and with his squad (but he wouldn't be if we had set him a European target!), so I guess we just accept that Southampton is back to being Southampton, and dreams of breaking (or getting close to) the glass ceiling are off for the time being. As long as the football is better than the dross we have had to watch for two years and we score over 40 points, I am happy enough, You could argue he is a victim of club hype. Don't tell the fans he is the next Henry if you want the fans to be patient. It doesn't justify the bad reception it gets, but it does help to explain a little of the frustration. I quite like him myself, but his decision making does not match his fantastic control.
Nah, the cause and effect is the wrong way round there. Puel was asked to compare in a presser, "fans" deliberately misinterpreted what he said about Redmond moving from playing wide to centrally because they already didn't like him.
I can distinctly remember Les Reed saying that the target was back to being top half of the top half. No pressure then, Mark!
I don't think the fan consciousness is nearly as devious as that. Go back further and we were told he was the replacement for a certain Mane...
Well it seems like a long time to still be talking about Puel's (fairly successful) tactical decision to play Redmond more centrally otherwise.
I don't think I did mention Puel's decision to ply him centrally (though I don't think it really suits him), as I am really talking about the keyword in my first post "hype". I think Redmond suffered due to unfortunate comparisons and who he replaced.
I’ve got incredibly frustrated with Redmond as a player(especially last season) and I’ve vocalised those frustrations during the games at times. My criticism though is that he doesn’t take enough risks. So often last season he was happy to drop deep and collect the ball in safe non threatening areas of the pitch. He made hardly any attempts to make runs in behind defenses and would often hide behind overlapping full backs. We saw how annoyed Guardiola got with him and that’s from only watching a handful of games.
Thing with Redmond is I think that if he ran at players now he would get past them 3 out of 10 times. If he carried doing it for a few games I think he would get past them 8 out of 10 times. We just need to give him that confidence and he needs to believe in himself more.
Absolutely, but that was down to ****ty tactics mixed with a snowballing confidence. You can see what he *could* do, given license (and being correctly played on the right wing - he’s a right winger) in the second half against Burnley. I think he was meant to be the Mane replacement. He’s just not as good (very few are), and he’s been utilised dreadfully.
If Nathan gets back to his *form under Puel consistantly then I will be happy and he will be an asset to the squad. *He showed signs of it in the second half against Burnley.
