In the aftermath of the breathless last-minute win against Swansea, we now have the visit of Bristol City to St Mary’s, as the automatic promotion bandwagon gathers ever more pace.

City seem to have it all together at the start of the season and under Gerhard Struber, were up near the top of the League for the first couple of months before it started falling away a little bit until they got to January and sold two of their best players, causing Struber to kick off against the board and as we have seen thousands of times before, not just at Bristol City but other clubs as well, that only ends one way and the manager departed.

Their answer to this problem was to go for the safe pair of hands approach and the safe pair of hands couldn’t be much safer than those of Roy Hodgson, who certainly has the experience, being 78 years old. I am considerably younger than Roy Hodgson and it’s a lesson to us all in how to maintain enthusiasm for your work. Tonda Eckert is considerably younger than me and therefore considerably younger than Roy Hodgson, and he has pointed out that there is 45 years between the two. Tonda clearly has much respect for Roy and what he has achieved in his career. In his Bristol City career this time around he has presided over four games, winning the first two, then drawing one and most recently losing 4-2 at home to Norwich.

Whenever we’ve played a Bristol City in the recent past than Anaïs Mehmeti was always a big player for them and caused us a lot of problems. He won’t be a problem today because they sold him in January, but he will be a problem next week because they sold him to Ipswich. Talking about Ipswich, Sam Morsy is in the Bristol City midfield. He can’t get about the park much and is a bit of a fouling machine but is best known to us anyway for scoring a last-minute deflected equaliser at St Mary’s last season. None of that today please. One of our former players is in the Bristol City squad but the chances of seeing Joe Lumley on the pitch or about as likely as Damion Downs scoring the winning goal for the USA in the World Cup final in the summer and then providing a return on the £7 million investment we made in him.

Earlier on this season, Will Still’s Saints travel to Ashton Gate to take on Struber’s Bristol City and lost 3-1. We went ahead through a nice dinked to finish from Adam Armstrong before totally going to shit in the second half, giving two goals away and conceding a ridiculously unlucky one. Scott Twine scored twice and the aforementioned Damion Downs got minutes in that game and I think you can deduce from that that we are in a much better place now than we were then Will Still lost that game, then the next one away at Blackburn, then the next one at home to Preston and that was the end of him. With the writing on the wall for Will Still at Ashton Gate, the camera is all turned to the familiar face of Ralph Hasenhuttl., who was in the crowd as Struber‘s guest. The media got their calculators out, typed in 2+2 and got 5 and many articles were written about Ralph coming back.

As we approach the end of the season, there has been some interesting manager of the season/team of the season type reveals, from the EFL. That’s all we need to say about it really because there’s not a single Southampton representative anywhere, whilst the managers of Middlesbrough and Hull are nominated, despite managing their teams in a downward trajectory since Christmas. There are some very strange players in the team of the season, which basically give it no credibility whatsoever and therefore it ends up just being rage bait. My suggestion is to not give a fuck about it.

Today, our side is more or less exactly as expected and included Jack Stephens coming back in for Woody, but I clearly wasn’t paying attention if any announcement was made but then I noticed that THB was the captain and Nathan Wood was in the side. Turns out that Captain Jack had pulled out after the warm-up.

Away we go and it was immediately obvious that we were a little bit disrupted as we lost the ball on the left and one ball hooked forward by Bell, sent Burgzorg clean through behind Wood. Peretz decided to go back to his goal rather than meet him way outside the penlty area and Bergzorg shoots, with Peretz kicking the ball away. Great save but not a great fucking start.

The Robins were playing well through our midfield which seemed kind of non-existent. There was some tactical strangeness going on, where we kind of looked like we were in a kind of 4-4-2 shape but no one really wanted to be out on the left and everything looked very narrow. The ball got played to Twine out on the City left and under no pressure from anybody, he was allowed to swing the ball in with his right foot, over Wood and Manning got up with Bell and the ball flew into the net off of the Saints left back. Fuck sake.

Saints are looking a bit of a shambles to be honest with no one seemingly sure where they should be. Is Azaz on the left or is Archer on the left. Either way it’s pretty obvious that neither of them want to be out there. There doesn’t seem to be any structure in our play and the ball breaks in midfield and Charles goes flying in to a challenge which he wins cleanly but the Bristol City players are all round the referee trying to get him sent off and ultimately the referee shows a yellow.

With us not building any decent attacks we then go for a bit of route one with Charles lobbing the ball up in the sky and it coming down on top of Archer who gets his body in the right position forcing their defender to haul him over. It’s in prime Manning crossing territory and he swings it in with his left foot and from all of 3 yards, in bundles big Cyle and it flies sideways off his boot hits the post and nestles in the net. Get in.

There’s a couple of half chances as Morsy drives over the bar from about 35 yards at one end and then Saints butcher a break with Matsuki holding onto the ball too long and then finding Larin who should’ve stepped over it to allow it to run to Bree, but instead, Cyle had a go with a left foot swingert foot and straight against a defender.

Half-time and to be honest that’s been pretty ropey. The tactical weirdness has not abated and we have not got any better as the half is going on. Bristol City are winning a vast majority of the second balls and we don’t appear to have anyone in midfield apart from Flynn Downes. It all looks a bit tired and off the pace and this is certainly going to be a very difficult game to win unless we can up things and put them away with our strength off of the bench.

No changes at half time though and there’s an early chance as Larin fights for the ball before feeding Archer on the edge of the box and though he slips when he hits it, it skids off the ground and the keeper Vitek has to shovel it wide for a corner.

Nothing much happens for the next 10 minutes and so Archer and Matsuki are taken off to be replaced by Scienza and Fellows so we now have gone from no width to genuine width. Larin tries to find Scienza in the box with a low cross but unfortunately it’s behind Leo who can do nothing but fall over.

Though they are not creating many chances, City are building up to the edge of the box without too many problems through our vacant midfield and win a corner off a tackle by the retreating Downes. In it comes and there is Bell rising at the near post in front of Charles to simply flick it into the net. Fuck off. Soft.

Another roll of the dice with the non-existent Azaz and Bree replaced by Stewart and Jander. With both Ross and Cyle on the pitch now, we have gone full Mike Bassett 4-4-fucking-2, no fucking about, belt it up to the striker. The ball comes down on top of Larin who superbly holds off a defender and controls it before knocking it back to Charles. One decent pass finds Fellows on the right and his superb chipped cross is met in the middle by Ross Stewart who simply heads it into the net to bring us level again and with about twenty minutes to find a winner.

Saints are pinning City back now and win a free kick on the right after Larin is fouled. In it comes from Scienza and flicked onto the back post where Stewart brings it down and forces Vitek into a decent save but the flag has gone up for fuck all. Downes breaks through midfield and find Scienza and he chips it into the mixer where it’s headed away as far as Jander, who cranes his neck to head it back into the middle and there is Shea Charles, all on his own, 6 yards out with just to keeper to beat and with a swing of his left foot he hits it straight to the keeper who parries it out and City clear it. That was “the” chance.

Unperturbed, Saints are trying to build up ahead of steam but are being stopped at every turn by the linesman who gives one against Scienza after the ball has been switched out to him, which is complete bullshit from every angle in the ground. I wonder if the linesman is from Ipswich.

Bragg is on for Downes and he has a dig from the edge of the box which is blocked before Saints eventually recycle it to Jander on the edge of the box and his chip into the middle is headed across by THB and Ross Stewart attempts an overhead kick which sends the ball straight up in the air and the keeper flaps it away before it gets cleared.

The 97 minutes are up and we win a corner out on the right and over trots Ryan Manning. It’s Automatic Promotion Last Chance Saloon and Peretz has come up into the box to write a new chapter to his story. Manning swings in the corner and it’s over everyone and now the other side and that’s enough for the referee to blow the final whistle. Fuck.

Well bollocks…. and the Automatic Door closes a little. It’s tough to be too critical because after all, we are 20 games unbeaten but there’s no getting away from the fact that that was disappointing tonight if you look at the game in isolation. Bristol City were decent as they came here to play rather than defend and they knocked the ball around nicely when they got in our half and they got stuck in and always seem to be first to every loose ball. They thoroughly deserved their point and though we could’ve snatched it at the end, it would’ve been completely undeserved. We definitely could have nicked it though and it just shows how it goes sometimes. We have been finding ways to win and Shea Charles has been finding ways to score an important goal but the rub of the green was not for us today.

Earlier on in the season, you take this result and just move on but the disappointment comes for having worked ourselves into such a good position and then tripping up here. As far as we are concerned, there wasn’t enough energy there, tactically it was weird, too many players were under par, too much standing off, not enough in intensity and not enough second balls won. That last observation is key for me. You maintain pressure by winning second balls and we just didn’t do that throughout.

So many individual players were not up to their normal levels today. You could point a finger at Wood, Manning, Bree, Azaz, Charles as all having average or below average games. Some were running on empty, some fell foul of the tactical weirdness and some just didn’t have particularly good games. The midfield was an absolute wasteland, especially for the first hour where Flynn Downes seem to be the only one getting close to any Bristol City players. Charles seem to be away with the fairies and Finn Azaz is clearly not fit. Both full backs were poor. Bree was all over the place but it looked like he been given some strange tactical instruction, especially in the second half and Ryan Manning, dead ball delivery aside, had a game where he kept half going for things and selling himself rather than smashing into a tackle or standing off.

I haven’t really worked out what was going on tactically but whatever it was, it didn’t work. It seemed like a 442 formation in the first half but the trouble was, no one wanted to play on the left. Archer was kind of over there a bit and Azaz was over there when we didn’t have the ball but when we had the ball, everything went up the middle, including on the right where Matsuki was in field as well. Strange the second half was even weirder. When we made the substitutions, we had the players on the pitch to play 4-4-2, but the trouble was that James Bree wasn’t it right back. Tom Fellows was there and Bree was somewhere in midfield and I don’t know what the hell was going on, but whatever it was, it didn’t work and they didn’t seem to be anyone to pass to and progress the ball down the right hand side.

For the dream of automatic promotion to become a reality, we need the other teams near us to drop points, regardless of what we do. Millwall beat Stoke tonight by three goals to one. Gavin Bazunu again demonstrated how we’ve done well to recover from him being in goal for the first 15 games of the season by letting in an absolute shocker as Femi Azeez shot from over by the touchline somewhere and Baz tried to punch it but succeeded in only fumbling it in his own net. He is the worst goalkeeper in the Championship, bar none. People only shoot from there if they know that the goalkeeper is shit.

Wednesday evening saw Ipswich lose an early goal to a Nathan Jones Masterclass at Charlton but annoyingly, Stone Island boy couldn’t work a miracle and be an opposition manager when Ipswich didn’t get given a penalty. Just the ten now, five more than the team that’s had the second most.

Anyhow, we probably could and should just put today down to playing one match too many but onto the next and the next is at Wembley on Saturday where we absolutely have to bring the energy, which I don’t think will be a problem with nearly 40,000 Saints fans at the national stadium. For Tonda Eckert it’s a journey from Roy Hodgson to Pep Guardiola and I bet he’s loving it.

Not the result we wanted or needed today but 20 games unbeaten and Up the fucking Saints.