Actually, I came on the board to say, firstly, "Well done!", and secondly. "I told you so!" Stop fretting about your defence (leave that to Lawrenson and Hansen), you just need to play the football that's got you here and keep scoring goals. I thought the post about Villa being a poor team of Championship, lower league and third world football country players was a bit rich. That's worthy of any MOTD pundit. They can't get their heads round the idea that a player who hasn't cost the earth and never played in the top flight can be any good. As Paul Lambert says, if players are never given the chance, how do you know what they are capable of? I respect managers prepared to back their own judgement rather than the size of the transfer fee. Rickie Lambert, Grant Holt and plenty of others are proof of the pudding.
Mark Lawrenson just made me angry. Lambert is nothing like Holt. He also said that Villa "dominated the first half". Where did he get that from!?? I'm not so blindly biased that I would say saints were the better side, however at best it was a scrappy fairly even first half seperated by a lucky goal. At no point were Villa in control.
Yes, they did. And they are both rightly favourites to their supporters. But if anyone thinks that Grant Holt isn't a patch on Rickie Lambert, go take a look at their respective career stats, in particular the goals-per-game ratio for total games played.
Be more accurate to check the stats from the last 4-5 seasons or so tbh. Lambert only really peaked recently imho
Yeah like Lambert, Lallana, Schneiderlin and Fonte. They don't sound like league 1 footballers though.
So it is fair to weight the stats by selecting the best part of a player's career? Come off it! They've both had their ups and downs, their poor spells and their better spells. Don't get me wrong, I admire Lambert every bit as much as I admire Holt. What gets me are unjustified negative comments about Holt from people who clearly haven't looked at his career stats or studied his play.
Not sure where Lawro got that from to be honest. Thought we were in control of the game from the start just got the breaks and upped the pressure in the 2nd half. We also looked solid at the back!!! Yoshida / Fonte looks like a premiership partnership already
A mate of mine is a villa fan and he felt that they dominated the first half. Does anyone agree? Anybody know where I might be able to find first half statistics for the match?
On Sky Thompson was watching and until our equaliser we hadn't been in the game according to him. Plus we weren't going to score and our defence was dire. Love it when a plan comes together!
fair enough, i respect the opinions of fellow Saints fans over him. I was more fixated and infuriated with the number of errors we made on the offensive but still thought we had control of the football, just looked toothless up top.
In the first half we had a lot of the play but were trying only long range shots which mostly went off target, the mid-field was being controlled mostly by Stephen Ireland, it was after he went off that their midfield lost the plot and we took over, Spider suddenly found he had room to do what he does best and of course Ramirez started to do what he is good at. If we had scored first early doors things may have been different, it is a confidence thing, but that is hypothetical and the rest as they say is history, the best team on the day, won.
