FA Cup third round day
and we are off to Wales to play Swansea at what used to be known as the Liberty
stadium and is now known as the Swansea.com Stadium, which sounds really shit.
Also shit, due to the Mark Drakeford wanting to be different to England, there
will be no fans in the ground, an unwelcome throwback to last season, when
football was shit.
Swansea are in what can be termed a transitional season,
having lost their manager five minutes before the season started and appointing
a virtual rookie in Russell Martin, who has been fairly impressive so far. They
are kind of loitering in lower mid-table but with the Championship being the
beast it is, a decent run of wins can catapult you into the play-off places and
that will be their aim for the season. They shouldn’t have too many surprises
for us because Martin tries to get them playing in a decent way, playing out
from the back and being comfortable in possession. It will be interesting to see what Swansea‘s
attitude is towards the game. I imagine that Russell Martin will put our
mix-and-match side, not least because they haven’t played for about three weeks
because of Covid cancellations.
Today has been jokingly labelled the Michael Obafemi Derby,
so I’m going to talk about him. The
striker broke into the Saints team at 18, scored a goal straight away and showed
some ability. Over the next three years
he showed a complete inability to keep himself fit or be professional (Ralph
Hasenhuttl’s words, not mine) and eventually we couldn’t wait to get rid of
him, being happy with the £1.5 million we got from Swansea. He should have been the ready-made academy
replacement for Danny Ings and saved us £15 million but in the end, he wasn’t
even seen as the replacement for Shane Long. Since he has been at Swansea, surprise
surprise, injured again, being unprofessional again (Russell Martin’s words,
not mine) and I’m sure they would want to get rid of him as soon as they can.
You wonder where he is going to end up next if he doesn’t sort himself out. If he fails at Championship level then in
these days of belt tightening, especially lower down the leagues, it’s unlikely
he’s going to get anything higher than League 1. When he was at St Mary‘s,
Michael was built like a middleweight boxer with his top half looking
considerably bigger than his bottom half and one theory was that he used so
much energy powering all his muscles, he could never recover properly after
games. Whether that’s true or not, it’s a plausible explanation for why he
could never produce two decent appearances in a row. If he played well one
game, then he ended up getting substituted in the second game at half-time
because he was blowing out his arse after 20 minutes. If you can’t play
consecutive games, then you are never going to become a first team regular, are
you?
The kid is clearly an arsehole of the worst kind, mainly
because he has the ability to be a half decent player. He is an insult to
everyone who wanted to be a professional footballer but didn’t have the natural
ability. He’s certainly got a goal in him though so it wouldn’t surprise me at
all if he scored today.
After the Newcastle postponement shambles, Saints will be
looking ahead so I imagine we will be mix-and-match as well, as after this game
we have Brentford on Tuesday followed by another game on the Saturday. After the takeover there was more good news
with Nathan Tella signing a new deal taking him up to the end of the 2024/25
season. It’s up to him now to kick on and build it on his undoubted promise, in
the exact way that Michael Obafemi was never going to do.
Yan Valery at right back is the only real headline in a strong looking Saints
side. The centre backs are the slow combination of Stephens and Bednarek, last
seen being dreadful at Arsenal.
Hopefully, Swansea won’t be as good as Arsenal…. And Obafemi starts, as
does Joel Piroe, their main goalscorer which tells you that Martin is not
really prioritising upcoming league games at the expense of the FA Cup.
Away we go with Swansea passing a ball around nicely from the
kick-off but it always looks kind of clunky when you see Championship players
trying to zip the ball about. The first incident is a booking for Yan Valery
after about three minutes as he launches into a tackle on the right-hand side
and arrives about 10 minutes after the ball has gone. The referee, the normally
pretty good Simon Hooper, has no choice but to book him.
With our first real chance, we take the lead on eight minutes
as Swansea’s passing from deep takes a dump as someone plays a horrendous pass
across the midfield, straight to Nathan Tella and he slides it through for
Nathan Redmond to pass into the corner of the net from the edge of the box.
Very efficient and 1-0 up.
For the next 20 minutes it all looks very easy and a matter
of how many goals we will win by. Swansea are struggling as soon as they turn
over possession and it looks like it’s going to be a comfortable afternoons
work but then of course, it never is and it all goes to shit. One long ball pinged
over our defence finds Obafemi on the left wing and though his first touch is shit,
Yan Valery feels the need to put his hand over his shoulder. Party Boy throws
himself to the ground and though it’s soft and though he’s thrown himself, that
is always going to be a second booking and off he goes. Balls.
We re-shuffle with JWP going to right back, Stuart Armstrong
to the centre of midfield, and Nathan Redmond to right wing leaving Armando Broja
upfront on his own and we get to half-time comfortably enough with no real
alarms but suddenly the game has got a lot more difficult.
No changes at half time and there really isn’t much to say for the next half an hour as
Swansea pass the ball around in front of us and create no chances at all. There’s an incident involving Ryan Bennett
when he pulls back Tella. Having already
been booked it really looked like it should have been 10v10 but nothing doing. A
couple of times on the break we should do a lot better. A heavy touch by Broja means that what should
have been a chance either for himself or for Nathan Tella is butchered and then
JWP puts in a free-kick from the right hand side which finds Jack Stephens at
the back post with a free header at an open goal but he picked out the wrong
side of the post in truly dreadful fashion. In the 65th Ralph brings on Adam
Armstrong and Diallo for Stuart Armstrong and Redmond.
On 77 minutes, as they were always going to, Swansea create
an opportunity with a nice ball in between the lines by Grimes, a cross ball
which skims off of Stephens and breaks nicely for Piroe to smash it high into
the net. Fuck.
With Elyounoussi and Long on for Broja and Tella, we have a
proper go at losing it in the 90th minute as Elyounoussi loses the ball and
Swansea break on us and suddenly Piroe is clean through in the right-hand
channel but he shits himself as Fraser Forster comes out and smashes his shot
too close to him and it hits one of
Fraser’s size 15s and bounces away.
In a surprise development, for me anyway, there is extra time
because for some reason, I thought all the games were straight to penalties. I
bet Ralph is absolutely loving the fact that we’ve got a play and another half
an hour with 10 men. Michael Obafemi has miraculously lasted 90 minutes of
doing nothing much but that’s his lot. Don’t expect him to be able to play the
next game Russell.
And then it happens on 94 minutes, Swansea get wide with a
ball floated over to Ntcham on the right wing and his low fizzer across the box
is turned into his own net by Bednarek who is doing some sort of shit dance
trying to get his feet in the right position. Fucks sake.
Straight from the kick-off, we knock it back to Jack Stephens he gets his head up and pings one over the top of Swansea left back Manning who is not concentrating and Shane Long takes what must be the best first touch of his career and bundles past him before sending the ball across and finding Elyounoussi at the back post and he takes a very good first touch before passing it into the net past Hamer who pulls a face at his defenders like a bulldog licking piss off a stinging nettle. It’s the substitutes who are involved again as Elyounoussi picks up the ball on the left hand side and spreads out to the overlapping JWP on the right and he gets his head up and plays over a lovely low first time cross which picks out Shane and he doesn’t even have to take a touch, just sweep it into the net to make it 3-2. Get in. Shane Long has scored and he’s not offside. This is not a drill. We’ve responded brilliantly to going behind and now it’s Swansea turns and what have they got? Nothing. The second half of extra time plays out in relative comfort. Job done. Well, we got there. You have to remember that any cup game and in particular the FA Cup game it’s just about the result and the performance doesn’t really matter as long as you are in the hat for the next round. We overcame quite a lot of adversity today and there have been plenty of times over the last couple of years where this has not been the case. For starters, we’ve played 90 minutes out of 120 with 10 men. With Valery being sent off, we had to take our best player out of central midfield and put him right back because our other to right backs who we could’ve put on were unavailable. Then, you add in the fact that we were away from home, plus we were 2-1 down in extra time having conceded a crappy own goal. To still come out on the right end of the result is what it’s all about.
Party Boy Chases His First Touch
It’s always nice when you have an unlikely hero to talk about. Shane Long isn’t going to have many more days in the sun and whatever you think of him as a player, you can’t be anything but pleased for the guy to bag the winning goal. For once he managed to stay onside and it was very obliging of Swansea to defend like we have done recently and all stand there ball-watching and not marking the man. Like everybody else, I was watching the BBC Wales coverage which was as biased as it comes in an amusing way. I don’t know who the woman was who was adding insight during the game but she was actually very good with her comments until Swansea equalised to make it 1-1, when she made a very strange squealing giggling noise with the excitement of it all. She also laughed at Bednarek over the own goal – can’t blame her for that as I was laughing as well, sort of. As a commentary team they all seemed to lose sight of the fact that we were playing with 10 men which is why Swansea were having possession and were “the better side”. Also, losing sight of the fact that if we had kept 11 on the pitch then they probably would’ve got battered about 5-0. For all Swansea’s possession, the bottom line is that we scored twice from them trying to play out from the back and giving the ball away. The winning goal was hilarious in that regard – some really sharp passing to get to the half-way line and some commentary masturbation, we win it back, 4 passes, goal, see ya later. We missed a few chances today to make it more comfortable, but the worst miss was the crowd. It was a reminder of how shit football is with no fans in the stadium.
On Sunday a miracle happened – we got a home draw in the 4th Round against Coventry City from the Championship. It’s our first home draw since Lawrie McMenemy was the manager, nearly.
Next up we have Brentford on Tuesday in a game that has been rearranged because they had some players missing when it was originally supposed to be played. Ironically and predictably, it’s now us with players missing because as far as I can work out, we have one right back who is injured, one who has Covid and one who is suspended. We will turn up though. We will not pretend we have an epidemic and then declare that they were all False Positives after we’ve got what we wanted.
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