Southampton – Finding New Ways To Let Shit Goals in Since 1885

Burnley at home in what promises to be a fun fixture as it
always is against Burnley RFC. It’s a game where a shit footballing spectacle
can be guaranteed, usually ending in a 0-0 draw or a 1-0 win for Sean AllarDyche’s
men. I make no apology from the fact that I would gladly see the back of them
from the Premier League but every year they do okay and you have to have some
sort of grudging respect for that.  At
some point in the season they always have a massive slump and you think for
about half an hour that this might be the year but they always sort themselves
out in plenty of time to guarantee another season in the top flight. There is
lots to admire about what Dyche has achieved but there is a lot to dislike as
well.  I guess the crunch will come, like
it did at Stoke under Tony Pulis, when the long serving manager leaves for
whatever reason and the club has to decide to either carry on in the same way
or try and change their style a bit.  It
didn’t work for Stoke. Mind you, getting Mark Hughes to implement a change of
style was probably not the best of ideas.

On the positive side, Jay Rodriguez is back at Burnley who are of course his
hometown club. He has had to wait patiently for a chance in the team whilst the
Bruise Brothers of Wood and Barnes started off the season but Jay has gotten
the team recently with an injury to Barnes and has done pretty well including
scoring an absolutely amazing goal at Old Trafford.  Jay is one of football is genuinely nice guys
and I wish him every success. He is living proof of how football can be such a
cruel game as he was on his way to great things with us when he got that injury
at Manchester City which killed his chances of going to the World Cup and
killed three of the prime years of his career. Also firmly in nice guy
territory is Jack Cork who left Saints, like Rodriguez, for the right reasons
in that he wanted to play more and he has been a mainstay in the midfield for a
few years now and good luck to him. Elsewhere they have Nick Pope in goal who
started the season poorly but has shown a massive recent improvement and is
heading for a place in the England squad for the upcoming Euro 2020 tournament.  On the negative side, they have some horrible
fucking players, chief of which is of course Ashley Barnes who goes into a
bulldog-licking-piss-off-a-stingling-nettle faced rage whenever a decision goes
against him and virtually always manages to not get booked or sent off. They
also Phil Bardsley who is a horrible fucker, Erik Pieters who they signed from
the remains of Stoke City and Ashley Westwood.

Consternation all round as the team is announced and
Vestergaard is in the starting line-up and Bednarek is on the bench.  I’m assuming that it’s to combat the long
balls that we are going to be showered with and that’s fine but word comes
through that Ralph thinks Jannik is better on the ball and ‘adds more in the
red zone’.   Sound like more
over-clever-over-thinking to me. 
Elsewhere, Redmond is out presumed injured and Boufal starts with Kyle
Walker-Peters coming in at right back as we try to bump his price up so Daniel
Levy can sell him to someone else.

Away we go and we send it down the left and Hendrick wraps
his arms around Long and shoves him out of play.  Good fair tackle and we’ll have a line out.  Oh hang on, it’s not rugby.  The referee Simon Hooper clearly thinks it’s
the 6 Nations because he sees nothing wrong in that.

I’m rolling my eyes into my head as Burnley go straight up
our end and win a corner on the left hand side.  Over it comes from Westwood and …. what the
fuck has happened here? Everyone has stopped and then Ben mee has stuck in the
net whilst the Saints defenders are all standing around looking at each other.
What the fuck is happened here?   The 30
or so Burnley fans present don’t make much noise but the ref is pointing to the
middle so it’s a goal.  What the
fuck?  What in fact happened was that
Westwood curled in an absolutely shite corner about 3 foot off the ground and
Danny Ings left it and it looks like he and McCarthy might exactly the same
misjudgement and expected it to curl into the side netting but it went straight
in. McCarthy was stood in the fucking goal behind the line. Absolutely
ridiculous and just what you do not want to do against opposition like this.

Saints actually respond quite well and take control of the game with it taking
about 15 minutes to sort things out.  Ings tried to back-heel a ball through to
Armstrong but it bounced back to him and he skipped around one player and
smashed it low to the keepers left and it skimmed into the corner for a quite
brilliant finish from the King of the Scummers to make it 1-1.

We respond with fuck all really.  Burnley are still winning all the second
balls and when they do get possession, we’re making them look like Man
City.  They have more energy and desire
about them than we do.  Ralph takes off
KWP and puts on Obafemi and we go 3-5-2 with Djenepo and Armstring in the wide
positions.  Doesn’t matter what formation
you play if you play like we are though. 
Nothing much has changed and we’re not creating anything. J Rod who has
had a quiet game so far then has a little dive over a non-challenge from
Vestergaard to try and get him sent off but a little fat twat with the whistle
doesn’t give it.

Our most creative player is Jack Stephens who comes rampaging forward, beating
about three players down the right hand side and eventually he crosses it and
it hits Mee on the arm and bounces down. It’s a clear handball and should definitely
be a penalty but the little fat bald twat of course doesn’t give it and even
though it goes to VAR, you just fucking know they’re not going to overturn it,
such is the way things are going for us at the moment. Here comes the decision,
no handball. What a fucking joke.  Hits
his arm, not really down by his side, so therefore he made himself bigger,
killed the attack stone dead.  Wank.

The last move Ralph makes is to give up. 
Shane Long has been crap today as he always is when there is no space behind
the defence but as far as I’m concerned, we’ve officially given up when we take
him off and bring Che Adams on. We are playing with absolutely no urgency for a
team that is to one down at home with five minutes to go and we do not remotely
look like scoring. Eventually the ball works its way out To Bertrand who
crosses and it goes all the way to Hojbjerg on the right hand side he smashes
it straight at the fucking goalkeeper for our first shot on target since the
goal, 75 minutes ago.  Whistle blown, game
over, cold, raining and we’ve lost at home to fucking Burnley again.  It was predictable in the extreme.

If Sean Dyche could choose what he wanted in terms of conditions to help him
win a game as Burnley manager, he would choose absolutely shit conditions,
preferably including wind and pissing rain and he would also choose an absolute
soft touch lenient/incompetent referee/VAR set up. He got all those things and
that undoubtedly helped them get the result. We, as Southampton fans can moan
about all this, all we like but it doesn’t change the fact that we were fucking
dreadful,  pretty much from the first
minute. The first minute was when Danny Ings ridiculously left that corner
instead of kicking it anywhere like the guy on the front post is supposed to do
but once he’d done that, what the fuck was McCarthy doing 6 foot behind the
line in the goal?

It was actually before that the Burnley’s rugby tactics came to the fore for the first time.  It was actually from the kickoff as mentioned earlier. The fact
the Burnley played rugby the entire game did not come as a surprise to me and
it certainly shouldn’t of come as a surprise to the Saints players but we
didn’t deal with it. We didn’t fight fire with fire and we didn’t concentrate
on playing football. We got drawn into the game at the Burnley wanted to play
which was scrappy as fuck and just did not suit us. There were a couple of
patches of play in the first half where we did actually play some proper
football and that was when we scored and looked like scoring again but other
than that there didn’t seem to be any real game plan or intelligence in dealing
with the opposition, the referee and the conditions.

We even had the gift of Wood having to go off so we didn’t have to deal with
the physicality upfront that you normally have to deal with but Burnley kept on
playing the same way and we just didn’t deal with it. Having convinced myself
at the start of the game that I thought that playing Vestergaard might be a
good move, I saw the error of my ways pretty quickly because he was fucking
useless pretty much all game and with us trying to press forward, always looked
like a liability. JWP and Hojbjerg didn’t win the midfield battle because there
was no usual midfield battle to win because it was all about winnind second
balls off the Burnley strikers.  The ball
in the main bypassed the midfield which again should have come as no surprise.
Burnley do actually play some football once they are within about 40 yards from
the oppositions goal but deeper than that and they just belt it forwards and
compete and if the ball does have to drop to them they do try and play.  Also, it was a brilliant winning goal I have
to say.

This went in at the near post and the keeper had no chance.

We again showed our absolute cluelessness in how to attack
against a deep defence. This is one thing that hasn’t changed from the start of
the season and it is what is going to derail any fanciful notion anyone has of
us finishing in the top half. Shane Long did next to nothing today and goal
aside, Danny Ings was had one of those game where nothing really came off.  Boufal looks quite lively in the first half
until he got injured but his replacement Moussa Djenepo did absolutely nothing.
I can’t even remember him taking a player on once as he seem to be content just
knock it sideways and backwards which is not what he was brought to the club to
do. He now keeps the ball and plays it safe so all the attacking intent and
flair that we bought him for seems to have been coached out of him. The loss of
Redmond wasn’t such a huge deal with Boufal on the pitch but we really noticed
it in the second half.

KWP had a solid enough debut I thought.  Not brilliant but not bad as he tried to do
the right things and showed a couple of nice touches. On the couple of times he
got forward far enough to make a cross, he showed Cedric levels of crossing
quality (I don’t mean that in a good way) but defensively he looks solid enough
even though he was targeted by Burnley because of his lack of height. As a full-back
though he will be judged on what he does in terms of crossing the ball and
defending. Just being a neat and tidy footballer isn’t enough to stand out as a
Premier League full-back so let’s hope there is more to come from him.

Ralph didn’t have a good day. The Vestergaard thing didn’t work overall and any
‘red zone’ gain was not as great as the ‘defence zone’ loss.  The change of formation at the end didn’t
make us look any more like we were going to score.  First sub Djenepo did very little and though
they didn’t have long, both Obafemi and Adams didn’t add anything and our lack
of second ball wins cried out for Romeu for the last half an hour. There seemed
to be no game plan whatsoever to do to deal with what we knew was going to come
from Burnley and what we knew was going to come from the weather. You’re not
going to be able to win the ball up front against Burnley because they don’t pass
the ball at the back. You might get a block in place for when they try and
smashed the ball at the park but it’s just gonna fly after throw-in. The only
reason they pass the ball in their own half is to try and manoeuvre space to woof
it up the pitch.  Aside from Jack Stephens occasionally slaloming forward
with the ball, we had next to no creativity from anyone on the pitch,
especially after Boufal went off.  There
seemed very little attacking intent from us and this is borne out by the fact
that we managed a whole two shots on target all fucking game.

We may as well talk about the referee. Simon Hooper was fucking useless and as
per the Dyche perfect scenario wish list, he was ideal.   Doing nothing for Cork’s scissor tackle on
JWP from behind was a highlight. The repeated holding and pulling by the likes
of Hendrick, Bardsley, Westwood and Tarkowski went virtually completely
unpunished. Then of course you have the penalty shout. For the third game
running on wondering what the fucking point is of VAR.  Today’s shout was less of a penalty than the
ones we had at home against Spurs recently but in all three cases, for me, they
all should have been given as the defenders have gained clear advantages by
having their hands and arms in unnatural positions and making themselves
bigger. It’s a fucking joke. It would help if the referees actually made some
fucking decisions instead of preferring to give nothing and then have VAR back
them up because the player hasn’t actually caught the ball with two hands and
run off with it so it’s not a clear and obvious error. It’s not just the way
that VAR is used that is the problem, it is also the absolutely horrific
standards of refereeing in the Premier League. None of this is helped by the
fact that as an attacker, you can’t even get away with the ball brushing your
arm but as a defender you can seemingly do whatever the fuck you like.  The referees will no doubt have a conference
about it now and decide to give handballs again and we’ll concede one next
week.

When I got to the ground today, there was a guy sat behind me talking about the
possibility of us maybe sneaking into Europe with Manchester City getting
banned from the Champions League.  Let me
ponder that one for a moment… we are still looking over our shoulders at the
bottom three and I hope that no one who has anything to do with the club,
thinks otherwise.

Next up – Villa at home.