Ralph Krueger Interview Incoming

Perhaps Hughes isn't the second coming, but it may have taken a few games to get his message over and for him to get to know the players. And we had some pretty tough games in there.

 

.we took a grand total of 8 points in 8.
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We did. But, we should and could have had more. We were robbed at Everton. We did really well against Chelsea for 70 mins, but were not strong enough when we needed to be. Leicester was a cluster of nothingness, and Toon was a nightmare. If Mark had started the season, then we would not have been that weak and lacking confidence by then, Maybe its just my opinion, but I really think not? Two wins out of 8, rather than 5 out of 30. But no comparison for me. One lost the plot, the other stopped the clot.

 

Lost against West Ham (A), Chelsea, Man City and Arsenal. Not exactly the easiest of opponents.

 

There's no question that Hughes made us better. I'm just really leery of the "we're too good to be in this position" narrative. We threw points away against Chelsea, Everton and Arsenal for the same reason we were throwing games away for months: our defense is really, really bad. If we do not make a concerted effort to fix that, it's not going to matter who our manager might be, we're going to ship a lot of goals.

 

We've put more pressure on our back line by not pushing on, not being united and having no confidence,. A half decent coach will sort that.
And maybe recruit well......

 

Sure, but a lot of the errors came under minimal pressure. Again, I really don't buy the narrative that we're secretly really good. We're going to enter next season as one of the favourites to get relegated, and deservedly so.

 

Really good, just who was really good in the bottom 13? Hard to tell.

 

No one, which lays bare how genuinely not-good we were. In a year when there were an awfully large number of mediocre-or-worse teams, we couldn't stop those teams from scoring, nor score against them, and we were a scruffy late goal from being relegated. That should be a warning sign that we need more than just a decent-ish manager and some good feeling in the dressing room.

 

A full season of him and good striker worth an extra 18 or so points from there? I really doubt it.

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All speculation, so we will never truly know. But, if we had scored just six more goals and turned six of our 15 draws into wins (remember our domination against Brighton, B;mouth, Hudders* .......that's a possible 5 right there) then that would make up the 18 points pretty quickly. I think you give MP2 far too much credit. He cost us big, for three damn quarters of the season. We are not great, but when we play together as a team we are better than what we have witnessed for the majority of this season and a match for any of the clubs from 7th down. Just my opinion.

 

We can talk about the few that got away, but every team can point to a half-dozen matches like that. If we took 54 points on a goal differential of -13, we'd have been stupendously lucky.

That's actually what happened with Stoke a couple years back: they took 51 points, but they had one of the worse goal differentials in the league. It was a false position, and they plummeted from there to lower mid-table, before falling further out of the league.

 

We can, but you say we couldn't make up 18 points. I say we could and state games we dominated. You site individual errors, I say MP is the catalyst of failure. Remember, we had Virgil at our disposal while drawing and losing these games. We are not as bad as the table suggests, just mismanaged to the max.

 

We were 2 away at minimum. No way given the final results that we could have been relegated with a single goal.

We were 2 away from relegation and 4 from 11th.

Minimum of 6 scruffy goals from our beloved 8th.

 

Steady on, Ian. This sounds like a reasoned debate. The rule on this board if you disagree with me is to call me a complete knobhead, and ask how I dare continue to breathe the same air as you. But, if you insist on a reasoned debate let's continue in that vein.

Your points about entertainment are interesting. Are Everton fans, who have been served a fair bit of dross over the years, really rebelling in the way you suggest? Maybe they are, but equally there seems to be a feeling that something has to be changed because whatever is currently happening isn't working. A view that perhaps belongs on the politics thread is the thought that this was the Brexit motivation. Forget immigration etc, just simple "things are ****, let's change something" thinking.

The job of the board is to rise above this populist outcry and play the longer game. They haven't. I don't think Claude Puel was a perfect fit, but like Poch and unlike Koeman he did bring kids through. Given that this was seen as a significant part of the Southampton way we should at least give the man credit for this. The Pellegrino appointment will remain as one the most bizarre in the history of football. Your evidence about player dissatisfaction may be open to question, but I can see the sense in it.

Interesting debate, but now for blue lines and sensible thinking. Get the chairman to cut the crap, and let's hope that Hughes, if it is to be Hughes, is given the resources to re-build. Otherwise we'll be resurrecting the debate again this time next year.

 

Well, Swansea probably doesn't lose on the final day if not for the fact that they were basically done.

 

Same could be said for us in various circumstances. We may not have switched off against city had we conceeded or had the confidence to score in one of our other draws if we scored one etc

But you're still talking more than one goal.

 

Stoke were done and they won.

 

Possibly. In any event, the net result was that we finished with 36 points, a really bad goal differential, and one of the lowest win totals of any team ever to evade relegation. My fear is that we're going to write it off as a blip owing to a terrible manager (and make no mistake, Pellegrino was terrible), only to find out that our problems go far deeper than that. And next time, we may not be so lucky. We really shouldn't be gambling in the hope that maybe if we keep doing the same thing, we'll get different results.

 

A good point. A decent manager isn't the only requirement. Our board need to do things right this summer, no excuses.

 

Most of it is bollocks that come from the board. The only difference from West Brom and the like is that we had players to sell for £75m etc. Unfortunately our cupboard is now bare and we haven’t got the players left to sell for £20-30m+. That has been frittered away on players like Carrillo.

We talk about the Southampton way, I don’t even know what that is. I was prophesising two seasons ago that things will go wrong and don’t really add up with what we were being told. Sadly it’s happening

 

What did Virgil do that could distract the team so much. I don’t get it. It’s an excuse that’s all