If I use my head then I can't see us scoring more than 1 against West Ham. They are generally solid and hard to break down away from home, and we struggle to break teams down. That being said our defence has looked pretty solid this year and their attacking options don't look great on paper, so if we can get 1 I think we can win 1-0
Well we exorcised our West Brom demons and it would be very nice to put West Ham to the sword in this one, unfortunately they will come and play in their own half and it will probably end in a scrappy draw or a narrow win in either direction.
We'll be sure not to use any of the Polish players who allowed a freaking bank teller to have four yards of space to himself, at the very least.
Yeah it was bloody atrocious defending. I think Poland spent to long watching past San Marino games they picked up thier habits!
Our defending from set pieces is of a similar standard. That goal was no worse than the sunderland goal we conceded, make no mistake both were abysmal defending. and our woeful set piece piece marking cost us a goal last time we played west ham when Jos stood in front of carrol and didn't mark him at all. I don't know what pochettino has in mind for set pieces but the zonal horizontal line has been an abject failure for the 20 or so games of his time here. And our defense of corners isn't much better. However it must be said that we were poor at defending set pieces under Adkins as well, I would have expected to see some improvement though. One thing Adkins did better than pochettino was he seemed to have a few ideas for varying attacking corners and set pieces. They didn't quite come off but I remember seeing a low cross from a corner coming straight to lallana in a great position. We also saw Fonte swing round to the back post unmarked a few times that looked like a really dangerous move. Under pochettino we don't seem to create any space from set pieces or from open play for that matter.
I have not seen it mentioned so Referee is Andre Marriner (hope he is not all at sea on Sunday). Linesmen S Ledger (good for a booking or two?), M Perry (noted for being drunk) and fourth official M Oliver (we want more)
If you've got saints player watch the free kick at 2 minutes on the Norwich extended highlights. Clear example of zonal marking and Norwich had 2 great oppurtunites to score as a result. When the ball is wide we adopt a horizontal line of zonal marking. its a terrible tactic and will cost us points. Even the u21s are doing as you can see in this game at 3:44 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkQFPywUQuM.
