Southampton boss Mauricio Pochettino says he felt that his side put in a performance worthy of taking a positive result in the 2-1 defeat to Everton. Romelu Lukaku's strike proved to be the difference at Goodison Park after second-half substitute Gaston Ramirez had cancelled out Seamus Coleman's ninth-minute opener. The result left the Saints ninth in the Premier League table after just one win in December, but Pochettino believes that there were positives to take from the loss on Merseyside. "I think overall the game was a very good game with both teams proposing attacking football. It was good going forward football," he said. "It is a shame because we leave with nothing and I think we deserved a lot more from this game. "I think overall the team played very well and there were many phases of the game where we were superior to Everton. "It's clear that we are a young team but it's a team that has a personality, it has a certain attacking style that it tries to always impose that attacking style wherever it's playing. "It always tries to go for the three points, to go for the win." The Christmas period now sees Southampton face Chelsea on New Year's Day and Pochettino acknowledged the need to make sure that his players are fit enough as the hectic schedule draws to a close. "It's very important also that we try to recover the players who are missing and that will make us a lot stronger than we already are," he said. "We all saw what happened in this game and I think we deserved a lot more from this game. "From the three shots they had on goal they scored twice. "We created a lot of chances for ourselves but in the end we came away with nothing."
I don't see the importance of that distinction. Deliberate or not, it has the same effect. Tough luck if you didn't mean to play the ball, but the effect is the same as if you did it deliberately. And it should be the only thing important; the effect, not the intention.
Yes, and that was a bad call as well. It just got kind of lost amidst the overall despair at Fox's ineptitude.
Cork played well, but he struggled marking Barkley. If Wanyama was playing, Barkley wouldn't get a sniff of the ball.
Except that's not what the rules say. It has to be a deliberate attempt to play the ball with your hand or it's not an infraction. I realize that no one actually ever calls it that way, but still.
If you stand in front of a player with both your arms out stretched and it hits your arm from two yards at pace it's a penalty regardless of whether you make a movement toward the ball. The deliberate action is putting your arms in an obstructive position in order to gain an advantage.
and since when the "Rules of the Game" have anything to do with what a Referee gets up to during a match?
Didn't realise Everton only had three shots on target and scored 2. This is getting ridiculous now. That's happened in too many games recently.
The major thing that we are lacking in at the moment is that little bit of good luck, the odd run of the ball, those occasional breaks which go our way, the Referee making a gaff in our favour, I was watching the Chelsea game, from what I saw they are overdrawn at the Bank of Good Luck and must have a sizeable overdraft.
I've not seen much of them, however I did watch their game v Arsenal and from that, I would say they are excellent in possession; a trait of Martinez' sides, or how he likes them to play.
They play the ball side to side a lot, but they don't get the ball in the box that much. I think they'd really struggle for goals at times without Lukaku.
I was a little disappointed in MP's comments about that. It's not like we are losing on bad bounces and fluke wonderstrikes. Teams are hitting us on the counter and our defense has coughed up some soft goals. I think you could make an strong argument that we deserved a draw, but really our goal was luckier than theirs and came on an error from their backup GK. I'm guessing MP gave things a positive spin to keep morale up, as the players are giving their all and we do have injuries. But hopefully he's seeing that there are some problems here, and some of them go beyond bad luck or even just that we have a lot of players out.
Maybe, but they do have Lukaku. The Araenal game they had far more possession than Arsenal and had more passes than them. In a way, they are a little like us.
