Semmens: This is Looking Dodgy
Solak: Where is My Money Going?
Kraft:  You Kept To Your Motto Rasmus
Ankersen: If It Isn’t Broken, Consider Breaking It

For a club the size of
Southampton, it literally only takes one bad season and you can go down.  This can be triggered by a bad transfer
window, a few injuries, a bad managerial appointment or all of the above and
much more besides.  Like we proved in 2004/05,
it can also be impossible to just pin it on one or two things – sometimes it
can be an endless number of things that cause the relegation and it’s just a
colossal omnishambles from start to finish. 
Such is the case with Southampton 2022/23.  I’ve tried to put these roughly in order but
it’s difficult because they all overlap but it does paint a picture of a club
acting like a bad gambler, chasing his losses with a succession of ever more
desperate decisions.

Firstly, let’s deal with what has gone on before this season…

The lack of investment during Chairman Gao’s regime
This meant that basically the squad got weaker and weaker every season. If you
stand still in football at Premier League level, you inevitably go backwards,
and we did until he left. 

And then of course, the new owners…

Sport Republic getting very heavily involved in the day-to-day running of
the football club
They of course, said they would never get involved too much, which is probably
why they were chosen as the preferred owners. 
So many senior staff leaving tells you that the Sport Republic way must
be questioned massively.  The exiting
staff can’t all be wrong.  Sport Republic
have tried to do too much too quickly and it’s backfired massively.

So – to this season

Ralph not being replaced in the summer
Ralph Hasenhuttl should have been replaced in the summer and not left hanging
on until the World Cup. It was obvious at the tail end of last season that he
didn’t have the energy for it anymore.  Sport Republic dithered and had a kind of
“lets see how it goes” attitude, which is pathetic for top level sport.

The Summer transfer window
This window focused mainly on bringing young players with resale value and very
little attention was given to what was actually needed to give us a functioning
football team on the pitch.  Signing no
striker of any pedigree was the biggest glaring omission but no one also faced
up to the fact that our creative players just weren’t good enough.  Some players, like Joe Aribo, were signed
seemingly because we could (the Joe Shields connection) rather than because it
was what we needed. With Ralph still in charge and the playbook still being adhered
to, we signed players like Aribo, who didn’t fit anywhere into the 4-2-2-2
formation.  Maybe he could have fitted
into the 3-5-2 that Ralph was attempting to transition to…

Ralph’s Summer Reset
Ralph attempted to change his system in pre-season despite having proved over
time that he was not really an effective coach with anything that wasn’t his
trademark 4-2-2-2 high- pressing style.  Going
to a 3-5-2 formation all seemed very last minute, even though it had been
spectacularly unsuccessful at the end of the 2021/22 season.  Having played all pre-season with it, it was
then abandoned after a game and a half of the season starting.

We let go the more experienced battle-hardened players.
This is hindsight of course but if Fraser Forster, our first-choice goalkeeper
for the previous season, had been in goal this season then we would undoubtedly
have been better.  Gavin Bazunu is
promising but there is no way he should’ve remained in goal virtually all
season.  Forster apparently was
difficult, mainly because he wouldn’t accept being second choice behind
McCarthy, a player who has virtually had an entire career being happy to be
second choice.  Selling Oriol Romeu was
calamitous.  Whilst it was good of us to
respect his wishes to leave out of respect for his years of service, it took
away so much.  Romeo Lavia had already
got injured and like idiots, we believed Ainsley Maitland-Niles could fill the
void that we already knew Ibrahima Diallo couldn’t fill.  This is one example of experienced players
that we have not being good enough to pick up the slack of having youngsters in
the team.

Ralph
getting burnt out with the difficulty of being Saints manager.
Ralph Hasenhuttl – a Champions League experienced manager – lest we forget,
needed replacing because he had no more miracles left, having kept us up with
an ever-weakening squad. The playbook wasn’t working any more and he became too
obsessed with our work against the ball and basically, got rid of the things we
were previously good at.  Do you remember
when the buzzword was ‘bravery’?  – well
that all disappeared completely and all we heard about was ‘rest defence’.  When he was finally removed from his post, I
thought that in time that people would realise what a good job he had done over
the previous four years but I didn’t really think that it’d be so obvious, so
quickly.

Metrics vs Football Knowledge and Common Sense
Sport Republic and Rasmus Ankersen’s first chance to put their principles and
philosophy in place in a really noticeable way, came when it was time to choose
a new manager.  Solely trusting metrics
rather than looking at the situation we found ourselves in and using
conventional football wisdom (and common sense), was a complete disaster.
Appointing Nathan Jones was the most ridiculous idea and the single biggest
reason why we got relegated. The assertion from Rasmus Ankersen that stats
built up in the Championship we’re going to translate to our Premier League
team in the situation we were in, was laughable at the time and it’s laughable
now.  Meeting Nathan Jones for 5 minutes
would tell you that it was never going to work but metrics trumped everything.

The Wasted World Cup Break
You could tell after the first game after the World Cup break, the League Cup
game against Lincoln, that Nathan Jones had completely wasted the World Cup
break.  We had just two players away but
nothing had changed and we looked no better in any aspect of the game.  Giving everyone two weeks off at the start of
the break said it all.  Whoever signed
off on that alone needs to be made accountable.

Beating Man City and Palace in the Cups
These wins kept Jones in a job too long. 
They kept him there long enough to waste a very favourable run of fixtures
after the wasted World Cup break, in which we won 1 and lost 6.  Losing to Brighton, Fulham, Forest, Villa,
Brentford and Wolves.

Philosophy
Changes and the January Window
The appointment of Nathan Jones diverged completely from what the still lauded SFC
Playbook was all about.  In the January
window, with no Head of Recruitment, Ankersen changed focus away from ‘players
for the future’ and acknowledged we needed players for the here and now.  Paul Onuachu was obviously signed because he
fitted Nathan Jones‘s style of play and we signed James Bree from Jones’
previous club.  We also signed two
wingers in Sulemana and Orsic who didn’t fit Jones’ way of playing at all.  Of course, we sacked Jones soon after.  So much for the ‘aligned departments’ that Henrik
Kraft talked about.  Also, despite saying
that we wanted players for the here and now and we weren’t after young players
for their development and resale, two of the players signed, Sulemana and
Alcaraz, were raw 20 year olds.  . 

Key staff especially in recruitment, not being replaced in time
When you have no Head of Recruitment in place in time for transfer windows, it
leaves you with Rasmus Ankersen overseeing recruitment.  When data and stats doesn’t work – what else
has he got?  Who oversaw that the players
being recruited were actually going to make us a better team or at least, fit
in with the philosophy of the club or make us a better team in the short term.  See previous point. 

Allowing Nathan Jones to make decisions
Not recalling Nathan Tella in January on the say-so of Nathan Jones, is another
classic decision. Instead of recalling him, we went out and signed Kamaldeen
Sulemana and Mislav Orsic, neither of whom have performed any better than Tella
would’ve done.  Not really a reason for
relegation but another example of not thinking and not having departments
aligned and as a result, wasting a load of money.

The Goalkeeper Situation
Bazunu is 20 years old and was beginning to badly struggle around
Christmas.  In fairness, Nathan Jones
would probably have brought McCarthy in but he got injured.  He still had Caballero but didn’t use him.  Bazunu just carried on losing confidence and that
spread.  Dreadful mismanagement.

Sport Republic Still Trying to be Clever With Managerial Appointments
Having ballsed the appointment of Jones with his metrics, we then went with
Selles, who had zero experience as a manager. 
In everything he’s done in his career, results have been secondary to
player improvement, yet here we were, with a manager with zero experience of
‘having’ to get results and signing players to make an immediate difference now
as results were all that mattered.  Why
does a Premier League team in the situation we were in, appoint someone like
that and expect it to work?  Why are we
as a Premier League club, taking a massive punt.  Selles still talks like he’s a development
coach.  He’s been useless.  In some ways, Selles is actually worse than
Nathan Jones.  Trying to be too clever
when we can’t even manage the basics. 
There’s a reason no one else does it… and it’s usually because it’s
already been proven that it won’t work.

Managerial Appointments to End Up Worse Off
We sacked Ralph because his tactics weren’t working anymore. We then paid
millions in compensation to Luton for Nathan Jones.  We then kept Nathan Jones too long because he
won a couple of cup games and then we sacked him and had to pay off his
contract. Then we appointed Ruben Selles who is mainly employing the tactics
from the end of Ralph’s reign that weren’t working anymore.  Managers 2 and 3 have been completely useless
and out of their depth but it has cost us millions to find that out and having
two of your worst ever managers in the same season is never going to work out
well.  More money down the drain to end
up back worse than where we were.

Selles not using January signings
We signed players in January to fix the short-term goal scoring issue. The
players brought in specifically for this purpose and for the now, were Mislav
Orsic and Paul Onuachu. The latest manager has not played either of them,
instead reverting to the tried and failed and repeating it until we ran out of
games. Rasmus Ankersen was responsible for the recruitment in January so I find
it very strange that the players brought in to solve the lack of goals have not
been used, especially when we still aren’t scoring any goals.

The Selles Delusion Part 1 – Front Footed
Ruben Selles describes this as a front footed team. When the pressing
is working on the opposition have the ball then you could argue that but when
we’ve got the ball we are not a front footed team because we don’t know what to
do and we just pass sideways and backwards which is not a definition of front
footed that I would use.  How about
making runs ahead of the ball?  Can’t
possibly do that as we have the ‘rest defence’ to worry about.  Maybe if we attacked the crap sides, we might
score some goals.  Just a thought.  If you delude yourself about what your team
is, how are you going to correct it?

The Selles Delusion Part 2 – Over being in a relegation battle
Not just a Selles thing but a club thing. 
A general lack of awareness of the situation that we are in. We have
been battling relegation ever since Ralph got sacked. We don’t seem to have
realised this at any point aside from Ankersen saying we were signing players
for the here and now. Ruben Selles kept going on about trusting the process and
the process clearly wasn’t working and the process was clearly not going to get
us enough points to survive this season.   He kept going on about performances being
good when we were losing every week and not scoring any goals.  Who are you trying to convince and what good
will it do?  There was a point where I
thought that Selles had actually been given a free pass to get us relegated and
he was the man for the rebuild.  Selles
lack of urgency about the situation has translated to the players who just
don’t look that bothered, with a couple of exceptions.  After the Forest defeat, it was like everyone
finally realised we were in trouble.

The Selles Delusion Part 3 – You Can’t Play Like Pep with Inferior Players
False 9’s, No Strikers, Full-Backs in midfield in possession etc.  All of these things are tactical innovations
brought in at the top levels of the game, by elite managers like Pep, working
with elite players.  That list of elite
managers and players does not include Ruben Selles and Ainsley Maitland-Niles.

The Goalkeeper… Still
Selles persevered with Bazunu, who was shot by this stage, until we were
virtually dead and buried.  Selles had
seen every game this season and not deemed it worthy of rectifying.

Having no Bravery… Still
Selles continued the theme of playing risk averse football when we were playing
fellow strugglers, even though he’d been there seeing this not work, all season
and even though we were in ‘must win’ territory for virtually the whole of his
tenure. So many times this season we have played teams around us or teams on
rotten runs of form and who needed to be hit hard and early to give us the
upper hand in again but instead of that we just passively let them grow into
the game, score and win 1-0, with us doing nothing at all.

On a similar theme… Selles not interested in attacking
Occasionally we went in front in games and Selles response was always to try
and defend the hell out of it for the second half.  He failed to realise that whilst our defence
is not the weakest part of the team, if it is put under pressure for 45 minutes
with no respite, it will crack.  We need
to attack, keep the ball and have a goal threat to take the pressure off as
much as anything.

and Generally…

The Playbook is out of date.
The playbook, which we have been not using under Ralph, using under Ralph, not
using again under Jone and then using again under Selles – is all about high
energy pressing and as we have seen, it can’t be maintained endlessly and
eventually before there is a drop off because the energy level of the players
drops off.  Experienced players seem to
become weary of it.  If you take the
departed Nathan Redmond as an example, he went from player of the season to a
player that most fans couldn’t wait to get out the door over the course of
Ralph’s reign and he cited on a couple of occasions how hard it was to do the
pressing all the time. The whole thing needs adapting. Stuart Armstrong at 27
was probably fit enough to do it but it’s 31 he certainly isn’t, so that’s
another underperforming senior player.  The playbook relies solely on winning the ball
high up the pitch as your attacking weapon. 
Once other teams negate that you have to have something else and we
don’t have it. The playbook has to be adapted or binned as in the Championship
you have to go out and win over half of your games. Just staying in games it’s
not enough.  It needs to be possession
based and playing with pace.

Really poor players
My definition of a good Premier League footballer is one who can put in 3
decent performances in a row in the Premier League.   Not a particularly high bar but one which a
vast majority of our squad can’t reach. 
Youngsters by definition are inconsistent, but who over the age of 23
can honestly say they can put in three decent performances in a row – KWP, JWP,
Adams (just about), Bednarek (just about). 
You can add Lavia and Charly Alcaraz to that list as well as youngsters
who are good enough now.

That leaves the following experienced players who don’t cut it to varying
degrees: Maitland-Niles, Stuart Armstrong, Lyanco, Salisu, Djenepo, Diallo,
Caleta-Car, Adam Armstrong, McCarthy, Perraud, Orsic, Onuachu, Aribo,
Elyounoussi, Walcott, Bree

And the following youngsters who aren’t quite there yet but may be in the
future: Bazunu, ABK, Larios, Edozie, Sulemana, Mara

Lack of Leaders
As has been mentioned already, experienced players leaving has shorn the squad
of important figures.  Not just Oriol
Romeu and Fraser Forster but also to a lesser extent Jack Stephens and Nathan
Redmond who were looked up to by the younger lads.  Every successful squad in history as a core
of experienced senior players but Rasmus knew best and they weren’t suitably
replaced.

Home Form
Two home wins all season.  You don’t stay
up with two home wins all season.  You don’t
sell many season tickets for next year either. 
The atmosphere at St.Mary’s is dire as there is no belief from the fans
at all due to about 3 years of being poor at home. 

Form Against the Other 12
Here’s the points we got against the teams not in the Super League 6 and
Newcastle.  We have to pick up the
majority of our points against these sides, especially at home, where we have
picked up 5 points out of 36.  9 points
out of 33 away from home (at time of writing) is better but still dreadful.

	Home	Away	Points
Brighton	Lost 1-3 Bazunu masterclass	Irrelevant as we were already relegated	0
Aston Villa	Lost 0-1 in the drone game. Drone was more exciting than our efforts	Lost 0-1 against a Steven Gerrard team who had lost previous 6.  Pathetic lack of intent from Ralph.	0
Brentford	Lost 0-2 pathetically	Lost 0-3 but worth it for Nathan Jones press conference	0
Fulham	Lost 0-2 pathetically to confirm relegation	Lost 1-2 conceding a basic set piece goal in the 90th minute.	0
Crystal Palace	Lost 0-2 when Selles picked Aribo to start and no striker.	Lost 0-1 and barely had a shot.	0
Wolves	Lost 1-2 against 10 men, having been 1-0 up.  Jones masterclass.	Lost 0-1 thanks to Che’s handball from six inches out	0
Bournemouth	Lost 0-1 pathetic surrender	Won 1-0 quite comfortably because Bournemouth were shocking.	3
West Ham	Drew 1-1 which was fortunate.  Perraud’s judo move not given as a penalty.	Lost 0-1 pathetically after international break where Selles came up with picking 11 defenders.	1
Nottingham Forest	Lost 0-1 in the worst game ever.  Jones should have been sacked that evening.	Lost 3-4 when we had a go but threw in 4 soft goals.	0
Everton	Lost 1-2 to a Frank Lampard team.	Won 2-1 because Lampard that day, was worse than Jones.	3
Leicester	Won 1-0 because Brendan Rodgers was clueless and Leicester’s forwards missed everything	Won 2-1 when Che was clinical.	6
Leeds United	Drew 2-2 when we abandoned 3 at the back for 20 minutes when we were 2-0 down.	Lost 0-1 and did nothing.  Pathetic Selles masterclass.	1

And Finally….This Years’ kits

This year‘s kits are all absolute honking and we deserved to get relegated for
the away kit alone, which would have been more apt if it was in various shades
of brown.  It’s some comfort that in the
future, these will be known as the relegation disaster kits.  I am being facetious… as kits made no
difference.

Summary

So, there’s not one overriding reason we got relegated (unless you count ‘dreadful
results’ as a catch-all).  We’ve
basically made every mistake in the book. 
It wasn’t so long ago that we were the model club if you were of similar
size to ourselves and of course, Brighton chairman Tony Bloom held us up as a
shining light that he learned from.  For
his sake I hope he stops taking notes from us, unless he wants a blueprint of
how to wipe millions off of your turnover at a stroke.
 

In short, we totally deserve to get relegated and bring on the Championship!

PS…

An
important thing to remember is that this is all written based largely on my
opinion on events that I could actually see. There are of course things that
happen behind the scenes that I was not aware of. In the aftermath of the
game against Fulham, it became apparent that there was another reason to add to
the list.

The general dropping of standards
James Ward-Prowse, our longest serving player and captain was interviewed after the
Fulham game had squarely laid the blame on the fact that standards have dropped
around the training ground. It’s another indication of how beaten down Ralph
had become that he allowed this to happen.  It’s another indication of how useless Jones
was because he didn’t recognise it and I’m sure that it wasn’t this way at his perfectly oiled machine at Luton Town. Selles with his extensive training ground
experience, which is the only experience he had, has been there all season and
didn’t recognise it either or do anything about it. You could argue why JWP was
unable to do anything about it bearing in mind he is the captain. I guess
though that if you lead by example and players choose not to follow your example, that is an indication of how rotten some of the apples in the barrel must be and it also points at recruitment and whether enough research was done into the character of some players.  I’ve certainly felt this season that some are here purely for the pay day and are not particularly interested in doing the work.