West Ham always seem to roll us over recently, mainly using the physicality of
players like Rice, Antonio, Ogbonna and Diop. They’ve outrun us and outfought
us and generally been more athletic around the park than we have been and our
last two performances at the Dildo Bowl have been excruciatingly bad. Players
like Mario Lemina and Wesley Hoedt have shown their true colours here and been
absolutely dreadful. Bearing in mind that we have an effective way of playing
away games now, this should be a decent chance for us to give them a better
game than we have done recently and maybe even come away with three points.
Let’s face it, the toxicity of the situation is never far beneath the surface
here,  so a good start with an early goal
could really put the cat about the pigeons here.  However, we have to deal with the long ball
bombardment that will no doubt come our way. 
Today’s referee has been announced and it’s Mark Noble, same as the last
seven fixtures against West Ham.

West Ham are coming into this game after a creditable performance at Anfield
when they lost 3-2, courtesy of a horrific mistake by the usually reliable Lukas
Fabianski.  Hopefully their eventual
defeat took some of the wind out of their sales but this is one game where for
once, the result is a far more important to the opposition than it is to us. I
can’t imagine that when West Ham had the Champions League aspirations at the
start of the season, they ever considered that at any point of the season they’d
be 10 points behind Southampton.

A bit of news from Saints was that Lawrie McMenemy has been made a Club Ambassador.  I have to admit that I thought he already was but either way, it’s richly deserved.  He was the manager when I first became interested in football and he gave us the greatest day in our history, followed by promotion to Division 1 and regularly being right up near the top of the table, finishing 2nd one year.  He’s a great man as far as I’m concerned and so any honour given to him is richly deserved.  So from one story from when football was great, we now move to the present day and the news that Pierre Hojbjerg has announced he has a new agent in ‘super’ agent Pini Zahavi.  Zahavi is one of those agents you’ve heard of, which means he’s not to be trusted along with the Mino Raiola’s and Kia Joorabchian’s of this world.  To me this only means one thing and that’s that we’ll be looking to replace the skipper in the summer.  This fills me with dread, not because he’s irreplaceable but because we have yet to prove that we’re not still monumentally shit at replacing first team players, given Gao’s financial straitjacket and the ZX Spectrum engine in the black box.

As the players come out I noticed they have they crushingly embarrassing “The
Academy of Football“ slogan emblazoned on the fucking massive carpet they have
around the pitch on the 400 metre track and the water jump for the
steeplechase. I’m glad that we don’t have “The Southampton Way“ written
anywhere at St Mary‘s… well I hope we fucking don’t anyway. How can you call
yourself The Academy of Football when your Manager is David Moyes and your game
plan is going to be to bang it up the pitch to the big guys.

We start the game reasonably well with a little bit of possession and Armstrong
goes up for a header and gets a forearm smash/elbow in the back of the head
from Aaron Cresswell. Fucks sake, that’s got to be a yellow card at least but
we just seem to stroll around accepting it and the referee does nothing about
it and all we get is a free-kick.

Nothing much happens for 10 minutes or so but then West Ham attack and it’s a
long diagonal ball from right to left which JWP deals with and knocks it to
McCarthy who gives it back to him. I don’t know if JWP is trying to clear the
ball or drop it into the feet of a midfielder but either way, it’s shit and he
just gives it to Declan Rice. On it goes to Fornals and he plays a simple pass
into the penalty area where Bowen has come in untracked from the right wing and
he slots it past McCarthy with ease as Bednarek stands there with his mouth
open, seemingly surprised that anyone has made a run. Fucks sake. What an
utterly preventable goal and 1-0 down.

It’s not looking good as you can already see that we have no way of dealing
with Antonio as he burst past a lightweight Smallbone challenge and then
outpaces JWP down the left wing before crossing and Haller shows why he’s been
somewhat disappointing for the £40 million that West Ham paid for him and heads
it straight at McCarthy.

Its looking like a long afternoon and then Bertrand chips a ball down the left
wing to Long who surprisingly controls it and feeds inside to Hojbjerg and we
have a promising looking break as Armstrong carries forward and finds JWP on
the right. His cutback finds Obafemi on the penalty spot and he, maybe by
accident or maybe by design, lofts it over Fabianski and into the roof of the
net.. Either way, it’s a brilliant team goal and stick that in your Academy of
football. 1-1.

West Ham really should go back in front pretty soon afterwards as they win a
corner in Cresswell’s delivery from the right is met by Diop with a free header
from about 5 yards but it’s skimmed off his head and goes wide. It was going wide
anyway but the ref didn’t spot it hit JWP on the way out so we got lucky in not
having to face another corner with all of West Ham is 6 foot 4 giants piling in
on the goal.

Long ball, headed away by Stephens and then another long ball which is not dealt
with by Bednarek and it drops down to Antonio on the left hand side of the
penalty area and he hooks and across, high and handsome. It looks harmless
enough but McCarthy, for reasons only known to himself, doesn’t get off the
fucking ground and actually gets out jumped by Haller who then manages to force
into the net from an narrow angle. Fuck me, another absolutely shit goal.

Half time And I’m not confident of getting back into this. We just don’t look
ready for the battle today.

We start the second half really well and pin West Ham back with Bertrand getting
down the left and whipping in a superb crossing between the goalkeeper in the
defenders but Shane Long shows all the strikers instincts he hasn’t got to not
get on the end of it. The ball gets returned into the penalty area by Hojbjerg
and Obafemi misses the ball when unmarked. Bertrand tried again after picked it
up and it flies across the face of the goal again without any of our strikers
being anywhere near it and the fourth cross of the move is easily caught by
Fabianski. I’m just feeling that in a relatively open game like this one, there
is no way that we are going to outscore the opposition.

Like Burnley did a few weeks ago, West Ham are literally just creaming the ball
up the middle towards their strikers and whether we head it all they head it,
they are picking up all the balls in midfield in that large Romeu shaped hole
in between our midfield and defence. Fornals is the latest recipient of the
benefits of this manoeuvre and wastes an opening from the left hand side by
drilling it straight at the goalkeeper.

Just before the hour mark, we make our first change with Danny Ings coming on
for Boufal who to be fair, has been pretty hopeless. Whilst we’re wondering
who’s gonna go out the left wing, it’s another long ball creamed down the
middle towards Haller and the ball drops to Fornals who chips over the
flat-footed Bednarek and Antonio is clean through and from the penalty spot
makes no mistakes whatsoever. That is absolute fucking gash from us. Hopeless.

We respond with some pretty football that doesn’t go anywhere and when that
breaks down one pass along the ground to Haller in the centre circle and he
pulls out a ridiculous rabona flick to put Antonio clean through and this time,
McCarthy stands up well to deflect it wide and stop us going 4-1 down.

Shane Long bursts away down the right hand side and Cresswell pulls out some
sort of hybrid rugby/MMA tackle to get the booking to add to the yellow/red
that he should’ve got after 30 seconds. In comes the free kick from JWP and it
breaks to Bertrand whose shot is on target, only our second one but Fabianski
saves it easily.

Ralph makes a change with Vestergaard coming on in place of Obafemi and we go
to 3 at the back and surprise surprise, we start winning headers at the back.
Romeu eventually comes on for Smallbone with about 10 minutes to go and we now
have a team on the pitch to deal with the opposition that we are playing. A bit
too fucking late really.  Full time and
what a load of shit.

Well that was fucking predictable crap. West Ham basically played the same
tactics as they played at St Mary’s and we responded by playing exactly the
same way as we did at St Mary’s by making it so incredibly fucking easy for
them to do what they wanted.

So, bearing in mind that West Ham employed exactly the same tactics as they had
at St Mary‘s, it was always going to be a physical battle and there is no
getting away from this, Ralph fucked up. Smallbone was always going to get
found wanting defensively against this West Ham midfield and so it proved. He
was once again, neat and tidy on the ball and one of our best players in
possession but out of possession he may as well not have been there.  He was better than Hojbjerg though, who made his new agents job very difficult today.  If JWP was
forced to play right back then if ever there was a day for Romeu to play then
it was today. But whilst Ralph can be blamed for not putting JWP or Romeu in
midfield, he can’t be blamed for the central defenders who were absolutely
dreadful.  Surely KWP and Valery could have managed the game between them.  Start one and bring the other one on?

Ralph’s in play substitutions weren’t too bad in my opinion. Boufal had to come
off because he was pretty useless and the switch to 3 central defenders
possibly provided the blueprint of how we should play against teams like West
Ham and Burnley. As soon as Vestergaard came on, we started winning some aerial
challenges which Stephens and Bednarek did not do all game up until that point.
It also gave us a spare man if we didn’t win the initial challenge. I do think
that Ralph left it too late though. There should’ve been a change made at
half-time because West Ham were finding it so easy to break through us and we
were continually playing right into their hands.

All three goals that we conceded are appalling and even Ralph described it as
an absolute joke. The first goal stems with us having the ball in the right
back spot and JWP not getting any distance on a clearance. Bednarek is then
caught ball watching as Bowen nips in front of him to score. For the second
goal, someone has clearly dug two big holes in the penalty area and put the
dirt back in on top of Alex McCarthy‘s feet because he just didn’t get off the
ground and it’s an embarrassing goal for a goalkeeper to concede, especially
one who is 6 foot 4. The third goal is an under 12’s goal. Long ball, we don’t
win the header, chipped ball over the last defender, more ball watching from
Bednarek, goal. Easy and pathetic in equal measure.

Tactically today, Ralph was done by David fucking Moyes – who admitted that he
got today’s tactics from what the players said about the St.Mary’s game. Defend
deep, hit it long and compete with the Southampton central defenders, pick up the 2nd balls. Must’ve
taken him all week to dream that up. Not exactly rocket science but we had no
answer – again.  In Ralph’s defence, he said he knew how West Ham were going to play and
we prepared or wait for it but the players didn’t execute whatever was
practiced.

Up front we were pretty clueless with Shane Long having one of those games
where you despair at the fact that he is in our first choice starting at 11. We
had loads of possession and only mustered two shots on target which kind of
tells you all you need to know. Yet again, we have one way of playing and if a
team doesn’t give us space then we are really going to struggle.

We were lightweight today and once it went 3-1 we never remotely look like
getting back into it even though there was half an hour to go. A disappointing
performance all round from the team selection to the final whistle. We just
didn’t look up for it as much as West Ham did.

The warning signs were there for me from the first minute when Cresswell deliberately
threw his elbow into the back of Armstrong‘s head. Why the fuck are we not all
round the referee trying to get the West Ham player sent off. I’ve seen a
player sent off for that challenge before so why not stop being so fucking nice
about everything and make the referee make a decision. Maybe he goes and checks
the challenge on the pitch side monitor, or maybe he actually asks the VAR
fuckwit room if there is any serious foul play.  Likewise on the second goal,
where you can at least look annoyed and try and plant a seed of doubt in the
referees mind that McCarthy might of been fouled. I mean, he wasn’t but you
could at least make the referee think that there might have been an issue and
you never know, the way things are this season, that might actually get
disallowed. Instead of that though we just do fuck all and go back to the
centre circle to kick off again.

It was a real nothing performance from us today and we deserve to lose. It
seems that we went there expecting to lose and we created a scenario where the
only result was that we were going to lose. Quite frankly, it was bollocks. I
have no complaints about the referee or VAR or the way West Ham played. They
played exactly how we suspected they were going to play.   The are seriously in a relegation battle and
sod pretty football, they need the points. 
I have complaints about Southampton though because we were fucking
awful. Ralph is in danger of overthinking things again as there was no question
that the ghost of George Burley had appeared again today with two right backs
on the bench and our best midfielder playing at right back. Pick a right back
to play at right back, even if they can only play half a game each and go from
there.

Next time we have another limited, physical team in Newcastle visiting St
Mary’s. If you think that they’re going to be open and leave us with lots of
space then you are mad. A bit like Sebastian Haller, they haven’t scored a goal
for months so they will certainly be looking forward to playing us.