When Tonda Eckert took over from Will Still as the interim manager, we of course went on a four game winning run but the fifth game was away at Millwall. We knew at that point with the Tonda was going to be appointed and it was just a matter of time, but that game at The Den provided a bit of a reality check as Millwall basically beat us up for 97 minutes and dealt our new manager his first experience of defeat. The defeat highlighted that Millwall’s physicality was something that we couldn’t deal with and our inability to deal with balls into the box was apparent and of course it’s still apparent now.

Alex Neil was the first manager to suss out how to stop us progressing freely up the pitch, which is of course something that has been copied by other teams, notably Oxford on Boxing Day. We have to find a way to be better of course and will you have a chance of being better against normal this time around because for starters, Leo Scienza will be playing, having missed the game at The Den through illness. The right back he’ll be playing against the answer today is Tristan Crama and it was he who popped up with a 97th minute winner. With any luck, he will be more concerned about defending with Leo on the pitch, rather than spending the whole game roaming down the right flank, which is what he did last time. Maybe attack will be our best form of defence.

Also in that earlier Millwall game, we had a bit of an injury crisis in central midfield and so had to pitch in Cam Bragg and Caspar Jander, which turned out to be a bit lightweight against the physicality of the opposition. One of Millwall’s goals was a 30 yarder from a centre back when Joe Aribo perfectly demonstrated why he doesn’t play any anymore, as he managed to make himself smaller as he turned his back on the effort.

Millwall currently occupy one of the playoff spots, where we would of course like to be, and have been pretty consistent in that part of the table all season, so whilst today is not going be easy, it should also be remembered that there are absolutely no teams that we should fear and we are not capable of beating, especially at home at the moment.

What I want to see from Saints is a commitment to playing forward quickly. When we had our run of games where we were winning and blowing teams away, we were perfectly happy to take risks and potentially lose the ball in the opposition half and if the opposition had the ball, then we dropped back, won it back and then tried to break again. Against Birmingham in particular, we seemed afraid to take the handbrake off and there was too much safety first possession which ultimately didn’t go anywhere.

Team news is a bit weird with Matsuki coming in from nowhere and Cam Archer getting given a go in place of Azaz and Arma. We look a bit light on the goal threat. Where there is Leo there is hope, however.

Away we go and… it’s boring. Nothing is happening for either team but the ref and linesman are giving incompetence vibes. The ball goes off over the goal line in our left back area and they both look at eachother for 5 seconds before one of them (the ref) moves and gives a corner, closely followed by the lino backing him up. Well they’ve vlearly fucking guessed that and if you’re not sure then it has to be a goal kick.

Nothing much happens apart from a brief flicker of danger when Azzez gets in behind Manning and pulls the ball back to Ballo, whose effort is straight at Baz who holds it comfortably. Our first threat predictably comes from a set-piece, in this case a corner as a Scienza inswinger is met by THB and blocked by Crocombe and back out to Scienza and he tries to curl one to the far corner but gets too much on it and it flies high and wide.

We’ve got some weird tactical stuff going on with THB in the middle of the three and Woody on the right, looking about as uncomfortable as he could possibly be, feeding a succession of shite into Jelert’s feet which he then has to deal with whilst facing his own goal with two players up his arse.

As the half draws to a close, Kuryu Matsuki seems to accept the fact that he’s getting battered every time he gets the ball and makes enough space for himself to put a ball in behind the defence for Archer to run onto but overwhelmed with actually getting a touch of the ball, Archer wellies it into a block / row and seat in teh Northam End which is nowhere near the goal. There is one remaining piece of ‘excitement’ before half time as Matsuki again finds a bit of space and has a pop from 20 yards but it’s always going well wide.

Half time and I’m so bored. It’s crap football by two crap teams. Millwall are all physicality and the smallest amount of quality from Azeez and Saints are slow and ponderous as fuck. The handbrake that was on in Birmingham is still on and unless Scienza does something magical, it’s not happening. Blowing teams away in the first half seems like a long time ago.

Tonda’s fucking spreadsheet has determined that Leo has to come off again and so on comes Azaz. I’d enjoyed half time, chatting to a couple of people about how shit it had been and then I went for a piss, which at least achieved a purpose.

Away we go with nothing much going on in terms of there being any tempo in the game or anything. Matsuki again looked the most likely catalyst, skinning the full back before rolling the cross staright to the goalkeeper.

One positional change we have made at half time is to switch Jack Stephens and Nathan Wood over so that they can both show their range of passing skills and creativity to the max. Jack attempts a couple of Steven Gerrard crossfield pings and they do create a goalscoring opportunity… for Millwall as Ballo puts it wide.

Fellows and Armstrong are on for Jelert and Archer but Captain Jack again gives the ball away and danger man Azeez fires the ball over and Ballo looks certain to score but Baz comes flying across as Ballo connects and brilliantly pushes the ball away from danger with his face. Joking aside it’s a great save.

With ten minutes of sod all to go, Robinson and Jander are on for Matsuki and Downes and all we manage before 90 is an effort from Fellows which is deflected wide. The board goes up and it’s seven fucking minutes of boring shite to go but hang on… we’ve woken up and it gets all exciting with THB feeding a ball into Armstrong, who crosses low and Azaz connects but it’s bloked in front of the goal by a defender. In a defiant last gurgle before the game disappears downt he plug hole, Manning crosses from the right and THB rises at the back post and should score…. but his header drops wide and the game ends up with the scoreline it deserves, 0-0.

It’s kind of hard to know where to start with that game. Basically, as far as Saints are concerned, it was absolute toss until we had a little flurry for about five minutes at the end when we vaguely looked like we might cause the goalkeeper some difficulty. Other than that, it was absolute soporific boring shite and I honestly struggle to see how you are going to beat any team in the Championship playing like that, unless they make a big mistake in defence or we score from set piece. So slow, so lacking in dynamism and intent. I guess the tactic today was to win the game in the second half by bringing on Fellows, Armstrong and Azaz, but to counteract that, Scienza gets taken off at half time. Leaving most of the firepower on the bench basically means you’re giving up the first 60 minutes of the game in terms of scoring a goal. Armstrong and Azaz are our two top scorers and you’ve replaced them today with Matsuki and Archer, who with all due respect, are not the same level in terms of providing goal threat.

There was a bizarre tactical switch today at the back where THB was moved into the central defence and Nathan Wood on the right. The weakest part of Nathan Wood’s game is passing so we put him in a position where he had more responsibility to pass the ball over longer distances and all it seemed to do was shut down the right hand side as any sort of attacking outlet. It got better on the right when the switch was made at halftime to move Captain Jack to the right and Woody to the left. I’m sure there was a very good tactical reason why we played THB in the middle, but I can’t really see what it was and the negatives probably balanced out any positives, though we did keep a clean sheet. You can’t read too much into the clean sheet however because Millwall were almost as bad as us when it came to lack of attacking threat. They had the one effort in the second half which was an excellent save by Baz but other than that, they offered virtually nothing.

As a game of football, it was honestly one of the worst I’ve ever seen in terms of quality in the final third. It was so boring. There were numerous times, especially in the second half where I looked up at the clock and six minutes or seven minutes had gone by since I last looked and nothing had happened and it was like being in some sort of weird back to the future vortex, fractures in the space time continuum or rather the space time tedium.

The tactic of playing Leo Scienza almost as an inside forward and trying to get him on the ball in a deeper position again added a little bit when he did manage to pick it up and turn and run but it took away us stretching the play and seemed to allow Millwall’s defenders to line him up as we funnelled everything down the middle. When you are attacking in the Championship, the space is always out wide and when you don’t use it you’re relying on quick first time passing and physicality, neither of which we possessed today or in the case of physicality, at all. If you look at the height/weight of our attacking players then it tells you all you need to know, Scienza, Archer, Matsuki, Jelert – all tiny. Bragg and Manning not much bigger. So, the advantage of having small players is by playing quicker but we didn’t do that until we brought on Tiny Adam and Tiny Tom in the second half.

Tonda’s post match comments were a little bit concerning. I appreciate that you can’t barbecue everyone and say what was utterly shit about the game but even so…. Firstly, there was the insistence that this was a good game, when it very clearly was anything but. We have eyes and we’ve seen good games before and this fucking well wasn’t one of them. Don’t attempt to gaslight me into thinking that was a good game or in any way a good performance. It fucking wasn’t. It was back to the bad old days of looking like we were breaking the lines and then turning back and ultimately ending up with the ball with one of our three central defenders and all eleven of the opposition players back behind the ball. Apparently we had twice as much possession as Millwall, but they had significantly more touches in our penalty area. The number of shots and the number of shots on target for both teams was the same, showing that we achieved very very little with the ball that we had.

Personally, I have a natural sitting position when I’m watching football matches in the I am sat on the front half of the seat almost getting as close to the pitch as I can. After about 20 minutes today, I was slumped back in the seat as far as I could go because it was my body‘s natural way of telling me that this game was absolutely shit and there was gonna be no excitement in it whatsoever. So Tonda, who are you trying to convince? Most fans would be happier if you said it wasn’t the best because at least then you were admitting to a problem and admitting that that wasn’t quite good enough and you recognize a problem. Maybe Tonda wants to keep his real thoughts to himself but showing any signs of being deluded when it’s as plain as the nose on your face, doesn’t get anyone on your side.

Also, there was the admission once again that Scienza was taken off to manage his minutes in the last three games, Leo has played about half of the minutes available and we have not won any of the games and have two points out of nine. Leo is easily our most important player. In terms of how much better he is than the other players, it’s similar to the scenario we had in the mid-90s with Matt le Tissier where basically, if he didn’t play we never looked like winning because he was our only real difference maker.

I’m also beginning to wonder about Tonda’s meticulous planning that everyone keeps talking about. At the moment it’s reminding me a little bit of a Claude Puel in the Europa league when it was clear, he was planning out ten games in advance on a spreadsheet.

He also said something slightly strange regarding drawing this game, along the lines of “you can only tell how good a point it is when you’ve played the next game“. What he’s getting at is that four points out of six from two games is a good return. I would say that four points out of six is an acceptable return in a season where the expectations are to be challenging for the playoffs. Two points out of the last six, against teams who weren’t particularly good, I would say is not a good return. Three points out of the last fifteen is definitely not an acceptable return. The performances in the last five games, namely Norwich, Coventry with 10 men, Oxford, Birmingham and Millwall are definitely not acceptable in the grand scheme of things. Stop chatting shit.

On the plus side there were a couple of improved performances by players who have not covered themselves in glory recently. Gavin Bazunu came up with the most important action of the game with the save he made from Ballo in the second half. It was an excellent example of reading where the danger was going to come from and making yourself as big as possible. It hit him in the face but happy days. There was also a marginally improved performance by Jack Stephens (without the pings) in the second half when switched to the right hand side of the back three which I guess is something we may persevere with, with Woody on the left. Against that I would say that once swallow does not make a summer and that in Baz’s case for example, having one game where he makes a very good save and doesn’t do anything shit against the team that barely attacked, does not suddenly mean that he is suddenly a good goalkeeper. With goalkeepers and defenders especially, it is all about consistency over a number of games.

Once again, though there is no time to dwell on it with Middlesbrough away coming up in just three days time. They haven’t scored for over seven hours of football – watch this space.

Up the fucking gaslighting Saints