Premier League Match 35 - Southampton 1 Crystal Palace 2

 

Ralph Rages as The Team He Picked Is Predictably Shit

The second last home game of the season is against Crystal Palace who have had a decent first season under Patrick Viera.  It might not seem like it on the face of it because they are in the just below halfway position that they are always in but they’ve been considerably better this season for a few reasons.

One is that they actually play football now and they have moved away from the more prosaic talents of the likes of Milivojević and McArthur and have replaced them with more quality like Conor Gallagher, Eberechi Eze, Michael Olise and Jean-Phillippe Mateta. They also still of course have Wilfried Zaha so it’s a much more attacking mindset that they have with better players in the front half of the pitch for the Palace fans it must feel a world away from Roy Hodgson football. They also reached an FA Cup semi-final this season, which every mid table team would take at the start of the year but it has to be said that they didn’t really turn up in the semi-final against Chelsea. Another marker of improvement is the fact that they have not been anywhere near the bottom three all season, so they can certainly look forward to building and improving next season.

They lost a lot of players at the end of last season out of contract but they have replaced them well, especially in defence where Marc Guehi and Joakim Andersen have formed a good partnership. They also have Nathaniel Clyne at right back, a player quite often missed off the list of ex-Saints in the Premier League but he was a very good player for us and his replacement was Cedric fucking Soares.  It has to be remembered that Clyne wasn’t a dick when he left either.

After a decent second-half performance against Brighton last time out, Ralph will surely be expecting more of the same but he’s picked the team that started the Brighton game, apart from the obvious exception of Tino Livramento, who is replaced with Romain Perraud.

That means that Shane Long is again mystifyingly prefer to a striker who might actually score a goal and Nathan Redmond is given another opportunity which his performance and Brighton didn’t really merit. Vieira has left Zaha on the bench but in Mateta, Ayew and Eze, they still have plenty to keep us busy at the back.

Away we go and Saints win an early free-kick as a ball over the top looks comfortable enough for Guehi but he reckons without Shane being a pain in the arse and closing him down and he eventually falls on the ball and give us a free kick, I assume for handball.  JWP whips it in and it’s headed away for a corner at the near post. In comes the corner from JWP and up goes Oriol Romeu who puts the memory of his to shit headers against Burnley behind him, and the ball flies in the right direction off his bald head and Guaita can only push it into the roof of the net.  9 minutes, 1-0, Get in.

The next five minutes are all Palace as they show that they are not going to fold following the setback and some worrying issues are emerging in that their midfield three of McArthur, Gallagher and Schlupp are dominating.  JWP and Romeu are struggling to get a foothold and Tell and Redmond are not helping.  Redmond falls over Guehi on the halfway line as if he is going to get free kick for basically running into someone and Palace build down the left with Schlupp putting a cross in and Conor Gallagher arrives with a free header in the middle of the penalty area and puts it wide.  Alarm bells should be ringing at this point but there seems to be no real inquest along the lines of “who the fuck was supposed to be marking him?”.  We got away with it purely because it was a piss poor header as I’m sure Gallagher will agree.

Eze causes problems by driving past us on the left hand side and a powderpuff challenge by Bednarek means Matata gets free and smashes it at the near post but Fraser sticks out a big size 15 to give them a corner. In comes the corner, headed out by Salisu and Adams to Gallagher on the edge of the box but he again is wildly off target smashing it hide to the Chapel stand.

Saints have a chance of a break as McArthur gives the ball away to Tella on the edge of the box and whilst he initially sprints away, all the momentum goes out of the move thanks to a lack of desire to support from others and Palace get back and eventually Tella tries a 30 yard backpass.

It’s a short respite anyway from waves of Palace attacks and in comes another corner, another obligatory free header, this time from Ayew, which Forster has to be alert to claw out and the ball comes down to McArthur on the edge of the box he tries a long range header which Fraser catches.

Half-time and 1-0 up, which on the face of it that’s good but we’ve been pretty dreadful and it’s only thanks for lack of cutting edge from Palace that we are still in front. Again, like most recent games, there has been no fluidity in our attacking play and we are just standing off and allowing the opposition to pass the ball round us. Not good at all.

The half time team talk was obviously “more of the same lads” as the second half starts with the same predictable procession towards our goal as we fall asleep from a throw on our left and Clyne smashes a low cross in, which Fraser claws out and it looks for all the world that someone’s just gonna smash it into the net but a combination of Bednarek and JWP manage to block it.  More alarm bells but is anyone listening?

Our attempts to build play are laughable and then the joke has a punchline as Che Adams, who is having an absolute shocker, gives the ball away in midfield which sets Palace away again with Clyne firing over a cross and Eze drills it first time through Forster and into the net.  What a surprise.

At this point Ralph decides to make a substitution with Long predictably going off to be replaced by Broja. Che Adams has been taken off and been replaced by Stuart Armstrong which basically means that one of Tella or Redmond is going to play up front and Ralph makes the in unbelievable decision to put Redmond up there.  I predict now that he will be shit.  Palace meanwhile have taken off the donkey Mateta and put Zaha on.

Palace are still the better side of course with Vieira making another change, replacing midfielder Schlupp with winger Olise.  Meanwhile, we’re doing like-for-likes with Tella off and Elyounoussi on, which is not going to change anything but we do create a chance as Palace fall asleep at a throw and Stuart Armstrong hammers it well over the bar. Stu has another chance not long after as he picks up the ball well in midfield and exchanges password with Broja before trying over ambitious shot from 25 yards which screws well wide.  AT least he has tried to play some football, get the ball down and pass it.

Hey Siri, Show Me Something Predictable

92 minutes and it looks like we might hold out for an undeserved point but we chuck them another opportunity as no pressure on the ball in midfield allows a straight ball into Zaha’s feet.  Bednarek is right up his arse but suddenly he isn’t and Zaha turns away from him and drills it low and in off the post on Fraser’s right. Brilliant finish, shit, piss-weak defending and the match finally has the result that it deserves.

Don’t let this performance be spun in any other way other than that it was absolute dog shit from start to finish. 38% possession against Crystal Palace at home.  Fuck off.  The whole game featured a lethargy and a complete lack of desire to do the hard work off the ball when both attacking and defending. We hardly did any attacking because no one wanted to come short for the ball and no one was making any runs so invariably we just ended up belting the ball forward which was meat and drink to the Palace defenders for the majority of the time. Occasionally we got in behind but you can’t play like that for the whole 90 minutes and then be surprised that you hardly create anything. We scored a goal from the set piece as usual and other than that, I don’t think we got a shot on target and I certainly don’t remember Guaita making a save.

Defensively, whilst the back four weren’t too bad as a group (though both goals were poor), what was in front of them was shocking. The 4-2-2-2 formation only works if everyone is at it and the spaces between the lines are correct. If you have players who don’t play to the system properly then it all falls apart because the spaces are too big and you are therefore too easy to play through and you end up with our two central midfielders isolated against three usually. If the wide players don’t help out defensively infield, then the whole formation completely falls apart. In simple terms, it relies on effort and concentration and we didn’t have that today. Our wide players didn’t connect with the central midfield players whatsoever when we didn’t have the ball so consequently, the three Palace players in midfield, especially Gallagher and Schlupp found themselves in a acres of space. It was the most unsurprising thing ever when Palace equalised, until the moment that they actually won the game which was frustrating because it came so late but you cannot possibly argue that they didn’t deserve to win.  They were the more enterprising team throughout and their manager made substitutions to try and win the game at the end.

Talking of managers, in my opinion Ralph has to take a long hard look at himself about today. There is still the argument that it wouldn’t have mattered what formation he played with the relative lack of effort from all the players but come on! Who could’ve predicted that 35-year-old Shane Long would’ve performed like 35-year old Shane Long?  He contributed exactly nothing and who would’ve predicted that Nathan Redmond would do exactly the same. Those two players are what they are and we should not remotely be surprised or even annoyed at them any more. We know what they are going to do and not do. We know they are not good enough for the Premier League and we know they never will be but here they are starting Premier League games. It’s the predictability of it that gets me. What did anyone think was gonna happen?

There needs to be a conversation about Adam Armstrong at some point. We paid £15 million quid for him in the summer and since he dropped out of the team around November, he has barely been seen since.  The fact that he is behind Shane Long in the pecking order for what are basically dead rubber games is one thing. Today was a further kick in the bollocks because Nathan Redmond was preferred up front and he is even worse there than he is on the wing. There also needs to be a conversation about what Southampton FC is supposed to represent. We pride ourselves on giving youngsters a chance - that’s our mission statement as it were. Instead of that, we are playing a 35-year-old striker who is out of contract at the end of the year and we are playing Nathan Redmond instead of, for example, Will Smallbone. This is as perfect a game as you will ever get in the Premier League to give someone a chance but instead, Ralph picked these experienced players who you know are not going to add anything and here we are at the end of the game and surprise surprise, we’ve lost and we’ve been crap. Once again it’s not the fault of the players in question, it’s the fault of the manager who selected them.  Would we have done worse with Smallbone and Adam Armstrong in the side – of course not… and you never know – we might have learned something.

Another bugbear, we know that Shane Long is not gonna last 90 minutes so we have to make a like for like substitution. Ralph waited until Palace equalised before he made the first change. Hindsight perhaps but taking Long off when we were at 1-0 in front and replacing him with a footballer, might have actually stopped Palace committing so many men forward in search of the equaliser because they might have actually thought that there was a goal threat in our team. Che Adams came off because, in all fairness, he was having a complete shocker but then Ralph pushed Redmond up front for the last 20 minutes and I think he touched the ball once. Again, completely predictable. Definition of madness stuff. Trying the same thing and expecting a different result.

Like the game against Burnley, we should not be playing at home to Crystal Palace and just hoping to nick something on very little possession but that’s what we did and we got the defeat that we deserved for our negative tactics and mindset. What of the other players? Nathan Tella did next to nothing, Che Adams was several levels below what he showed at Brighton last week and Oriol Romeu played like he was running through quicksand for the entire game. He did at least get a header on target though to give us the false dawn of being in front.

Of the back four, KWP went missing for the first goal though he was picking up an unmarked player in the middle, Bednarek tried to outmuscle Mateta in the first half and that was embarrassing and his piss-weak defening agasints Zaha cost us a point.  Only Perraud and Salisu can really hold their hand up as having a decent-ish game.

Playing like this we won’t get another point for the rest of the season with Brentford away, Liverpool at home and Leicester away being our last three. Results elsewhere today and wins for Brighton and Aston Villa probably means that we will be looking at finishing 15^th or 16th unless we somehow turn it around and actually pull a result out of the bag somewhere.

Next up is a trip to Brentford which is probably our best possibility of getting a point between now and the end of the season. After that it’s the final game at St Mary‘s which is against Liverpool. There was talk a while ago about us doing what Crystal Palace did to them and denying them the title. Absolutely no fucking chance of Manchester City getting any help from us.