Over two years Southampton have totally lost their footballing identity on the pitch. Discuss. Extension Task: if you were to rebuild a Southampton footballing identity, what would you aim for and how would you do it?
For me The New Southampton Way needs to come from the top of the club, the new owners need to build the new dream that we can buy into. It will start by major boardroom change with Les R and Ralph K moving on and being replaced by new experienced and energetic directors to inject new life into the club. If not we will simply start next season hoping to avoid relegation
Lock the whole squad in a room with a video of the 1980-84 Lawrie Mac era to show them how to play proper winning, attractive, entertaining footy...
I am probably in the minority but I don't think 1 under performing season outweighs 5 (?) good seasons and one average one. I'd still be sticking to the same plan of buying talent from the smaller leagues abroad and probably getting a manager as well, but I wouldn't be too fussed if Hughes got the job, just wouldn't be hoping/expecting much.
That's not what I mean. The selling is unavoidable. I purely mean the footballing approach on the field.
That is dictated by the players we have though. I am still convinced that Puel played such a negative style because of the amount of fixtures and that we were far better defensively than we were attacking, Pellegrino was just a very strange choice if we wanted to go attacking so I think that as a club we realised we needed a defensive manager because of the squad we have. What needs a shake up this summer for me is the recruitment, but that has been the case for about 2 years so I am not holding my breath.
Having seen what has happened to Leicester, I am not convinced it is wholly a bad squad that led to Puel's tedious fottballing fare...
It is lazy nonsense from the media that the southampton way has finally caught up with us. It is not the strategy, it is how well you execute it.
A disappointing season....... while I think getting most of the board to step down would help, another part of me is saying that is not the answer. Without naming names there is very little doubt that quite a few of the players really lost form under Puel and mopo. From the style of play to the lack of planning a game it has gone crazily wrong for most games. Even with Sparky, although you have to give the guy credit for the recent improvements we still seem to be missing something. In two of the last three games we have dropped 4 points in the dying seconds. A trait that has been apparent for quite a while although not always so dramatic. The pundits were saying we need a good clear out. I’m not necessarily convinced although what would they consider a good clear out I wonder. Maybe a couple of proven strikers in so maybe some of ours need to go. Tadic, Romero, Lemina and ward Prowse to stay the rest can go and get in some goal scoring midfielders to replace them. I think we also need a proven centre back. Would that be a good enough clear out for the pundits I wonder? Edit ...........I forgot to say I’m not convinced our new owners are going to be all that keen to lay out any more money either. I’ll also wait for seperate debate about the managerial position.
Don't think we can even begin to guess what the new owners made of it all....I guess they found out how scary football can be. Kreuger is more likely to leave because something else comes his way than because he is sacked is my guess. As for Reed...he may want to try something new as well....but his position surely depends on them thinking they can find someone else who can do the job. Let's just hope it isn't some cousin who knows nothing about the game. Mark Hughes should get the manager's job but we have to accept that he isn't the second coming of Poch, though given the right support he could surprise us. The Southampton Way is a thing of the past now the Leihberr era is all but over.
If you stop recruiting well (and there is a difference between "buying players" and "recruiting well"), then amazingly things will take a turn for the worst. And very quickly. That will apply to any team, but is particularly dangerous for sides outside the top six. Things were made even worse in our case, due to (in my view) two awful managerial appointments during that same time. Rafa has shown that a good manager can help you overcome poor recruitment - at least temporarily. But it's not ideal; you want a good manager and good recruitment. Continuing to get the latter right allows you to deal then with later losing those good managers and players, as we have shown in the past. Our strategy itself of recent years, I'm still not seeing much a problem with. But it's execution has been awful, and it's time to put someone else in charge of such execution. The only thing I would change about the strategy is to stop with this (what appears to be an) obsession with finding the next Poch. We didn't try it when we appointed Ron, and that worked. So why have we introduced it more recently?
The selling probably is unavoidable; the Van Dijk saga proves that; but no club has sold the amount of talent we have and that needs to change imo. We can't go on selling all our best players every summer and hoping to get lucky with replacements.
One bad season, one season that really was ok. We have had a bad season on the pitch. That can happen to Man Utd... they had three bad seasons recently. No real issues for me. Some bad decisions by he Board, a couple of signings that didn’t work, still some that did. The jigsaw pieces didn’t quite fit but could quite easily again. Nothing major to discuss other than to hope we have/get the right coach, the right new signings and everything clicks. Pretty much the same for every club at every level, every season. We were just spoiled for about 6-7 seasons.
The only way to get round that is to have players the top 6 don't want. I don't think selling players is the issue, it is the replacements. Since Paul Mitchell left the recruitment has been on a downward spiral and our "big" signings have usually been pretty well known players who are at big clubs but not getting much gametime (Lemina, Hojbjerg, Carillo) where as before we would go to the smaller leagues and target the better players (Mane, Tadic, Pelle, Wanyama, VVD). It seems from the outside looking in that we have tried to go safer with our recruitment (oh he played for Juve? He must be good) rather than taking risks on players from smaller leagues who haven't got the top level experience, but we have scouted them enough to feel confident in signing them. If only one thing happens this summer I would hope it is a revamp of our scouting team. I think for our long term future that is more important than who is the manager, which players stay/go and who is the chairman coming out to give pointless PR interviews on Youtube
For me the club has to abandon this idea about half the team coming from youth, only Chelsea could do this (if they wanted) and they attract top young players from around the world and pay them big money. We all like to see youth players doing well, but youth players will have to be superstars to get into PL teams these days, we may once in a while finish a game with 4 or even 5 young'uns on the pitch, but to try and build a team around youth would be asking for trouble
I do agree with you (though, personally, the ok season was only ok in terms of results, not in terms of "style"). My only caveat is that it is very dangerous to accept that success was being "spoiled". We need, as a club, as players, as fans, to believe we can build towards more success. 6 years of doing well was earned, not given to us. It can be earned again, if we go back to making good choices.
I want to see us playing quicker football and being far more decisive. Under MP2 we have been sooooo slooooow and easy to play against. Our most exciting play over the last few years has always come down the left with Tadic and Bertrand overlapping. We need this out on the right as well so that we're no so predictable. Lemina, PEH in mid could form a formidable partnership and I could see goals coming from there not just defensive shielding and we have been desperately in need of a goal scoring mid since Lallana went which was years ago. That needs fixed so badly. Boufal has the potential to trump this if his mental game can be sorted out. I want to see us playing to the strengths of players like Gabbi who started the season with so much obvious drive and was making runs constantly to disrupt the back line with barely a forward pass in his direction. And we have missed VVD running the ball out from the back. When we do this, it completely changes the play, suddenly the opposition aren't able to close the door on us in the same way so whoever comes in at the back needs to be able to carry the ball out and distribute it. Losing is nothing to be ashamed of if you play to win. Losing after playing timid predictable and boring football just erodes everything we have come to represent since the promotion.
