Match Day Thread Southampton v Swansea - Saturday 12/08/2017 3pm

My head isn't in the clouds at all. I just seem
to have a more controlled understanding of the happening and am not at all angry about the situation. I am happy to look at the negatives but they don't engulf my feelings, like some.

Most the time you don't explain things, you just sound off.

 

Yeah, right

 

Regarding the stat about how any hours since we scored at home, I have drawn a line under last season and it's a clean slate for me. Someone paid with their job for the lack of performance, we now march on. 90 minutes without a goal and a good performance. You don't have to wear sandals to reject feeling down or angry about that.

 

This is how it should be treated...a new start, so few conclusions to be drawn from one match apart from the fact that we look a pretty handy side with some real talent. MP2 has said it is a long job and we aren't his team yet. Give the man some time...we are not going to be relegated and patience is needed. So what if we are middle of the table as long as we show a return to our real selves.

 

Exactly right. Last season (which was far from being all bad anyway) is, like Liverpool's glory days, now history.

 

On the bright side, SFC got a letter from the queen this morning, thanking us for not slaughtering any swans.

 

Are football clubs notorious for swanacide?

Just got it

 

Places far, far too much emphasis on the manager. It's hard to state that last year is irrelevant when the team is virtually unchanged: 13 of the 14 players who saw the pitch in yesterday's game played in the season finale.

 

Given their ages, I have every faith that Redmond and JWP will improve further this year. And a full season of Gabbi is clearly better than half a season of Gabbi. There is also hope, although not necessarily strong hope, that Boufal will find things easier after a pre-season behind him and a year of PL experience. So lots of promise throughout there.

But anyone who is just putting last season's issues to one side is somewhat living in cloud cuckoo land in my view. (And I mean the entire season, not just the last few games when there was nothing to play for and summer holidays to look forward to)

 

We are in a strange situation at the present. We jettisoned the gaffer, rather than him bailing on us. When his achievements were pretty good all things considered (very similar to the guy we hired). His failings were not all his own, as we missed so many chances before he tightened up the formation, that its hard to pin point the negative tactics directly to CP. But, now he has gone, and I wish him well, MP gets my full backing. And as first games go, yesterday was pretty decent. We controlled the game, but frustratingly didn't put any chances away. If we had a good AM we could be very dangerous. But like I said, from what I've seen, looks good for the coming games. The board had a tough decision on CP, but I think they made the right call in the end. I blame players like Virgil & Ryan for getting him sacked, don't think they helped his cause at all.

 

Yeah, I was just too lazy to go through the totality. For the sake of completeness, the Redmond-Tadic-Romeu-JWP-Davis grouping also started the first match: the only differences in the starting lineup for that game and the one this season are Long for Gabbiadini, and two defenders.

 

It's nice in cloud cuckoo land. If you tell me how it will benefit the team if I predict doom and calamity I will certainly do so.

 

Don't think either myself or Brendy are predicting doom and calamity. Rather, that we need to make some additions: we have a team that can often create chances, but if we want to finish them with any regularity, we're going to need to have more than one player capable of doing so on the pitch at any time.

We're also likely going to need to be less reliant on high crosses...Gabbiadini appears to be a decent header of the ball, but it's not his greatest strength. And I'm rather dubious that pinging the ball toward the heads of the other attacking players we started yesterday will produce much joy; no one will ever confuse JWP and Davis with Rickie Lambert in the air.

 

I think additions are always welcome....we are definitely weaker and less exciting than in our Mane and Wanyama days. However, we underperformed last season....that implies that we can play better. And I hope we do with a new manager....but this isn't his team yet (as he admitted himself), so I will be interested to see how it turns out over next couple of seasons. Just hope he breaks our managerial record and stays for at least 2 years.

 

Too early to judge much. All the complaints we are hearing would have vanished if Tadic has popped in that easy chance on 5 minutes. However, he IS the most wasteful finisher in the league*. We played a well-rounded game which offered everything, except goals, and if looked at without the context of last season, would be seen as an impressive (or at least peomising) start. The boys just need to get that goal monkey off their backs.


*statistically proven

 

I see some on Saintsweb are saying how dead the stadium was yesterday....were they even there? I thought it was noisier than it has been for ages....those clapper things help. Do you think the board are trying to tell us something.

 

The reason that I put it behind me is that the performance was so much more positive in approach. This was the same team, you are right, but the manager has instilled a different approach from what I saw. There were hardly any sideways passes for no reason. I get the impression that Puel's approach was don't lose possession at all costs. Yesterday was much more move to give an option for a fwd pass. I think that this is all about the manager- that's what has changed and it looks encouraging.

 

Woah there, there's a bit more to it than that, and it wasn't an unmissable chance, but it did turn out to be our second best one. But yeah, you're right, if he scored it was game over.

 

He put in a great thunderbolt shot from 25 yards in the second half too. That one was our only other "on target" shot apart from JWP in the first half.