I agree. For ages I've been an advocate of awarding a penalty/ red card for shirt pulling and sh*thousery in corner/free-kick situations it could stop it at a stroke but referees consistently ignore it. Will Stevens red card be the defining moment to end it? No of course not we'll see it continue this weekend. Stevens was in the wrong but he hardly swung Cucurella around by his hair it looked like a stupid tweak (and it was stupid) but Cucurella went down like a bag of sh*t. Players over reacting to relatively inocculous fouls are cheats. In this respect I can see that Stevens feels hard done by. Move on, if we expect an apology for each player's misdemeanours we'd have a catalogue of apologies each week. Stevens is no big miss.
But it wouldn't mean anything. In the same way as taking the knee doesn't really mean anything. It is just PR crap. Why are we talking as if he has done something awful? He got sent off a couple of times
People pull shirts every week sure, but not hair. Pulling hair is violent conduct and rightly so. It very rarely happens because most players aren't that stupid with VAR around to spot everything.
Our old PL CBs havent done too badly for themselves (some of these were before Saints). Jose Fonte - European International Champion, French Champion. Jos Hooiveld - Finnish Champion, Swedish Champion, Danish Champion. Maya Yoshida - Asian International Champion, US Champion. Toby Alderweireld - Dutch Champion, Spanish Champion, Belgian Champion. Virgil Van Dijk - Scottish Champion, English Champion, European Club Champion.
Its interesting that he seems to be replicating the form streaks he had here, they had a poor initial start and then just started winning back to back. I can't remember a time we were average under Ralph, it was either a huge losing streak or a huge winning streak.
Quality manager. He’d reached the end of his tether here but in hindsight we should have just fully backed him with dragans cash. The decisions since him leaving have been catastrophic. Glad he’s doing well, but I thought he would tbh.
Let's be honest, Ralph with money would've been okay and he might've made it work better, but he still would have been lumbered with the dross that SR like to sign ...
