Saturday, May 20, 2017

Premier League Match 37 - Southampton 0 Manchester United 0


Mourinho Illustrartes How Many Billions His Squad Cost

Jose Mourinho brings his Manchester United side to St.Mary’s for the penultimate game of the season and boy is he pissed off about it.  Every interview is full of moaning about fixture congestion which he says is a problem for the biggest club in England.  Having reached the final of the Europa League, he decided to put all his eggs regarding Champions League qualification in that basket, rather than in trying to finish in the top 4 so basically they’ve tanked their last couple of games, playing weakened sides.  What with shelling out £90 million for a player whilst having about £400m in leveraged debt and having such a nice bloke as a manager, it’s enough to make you feel sorry for them.  Wankers.

Some have tried to make out that this is some sort of revenge mission for the EFL Cup Final – it isn’t.  We just want to score a fucking goal at home.  The Middlesbrough win has lifted a bit of the cloud over Claude Puel but not all off it.  0-2, 0-0 and 0-3 have been our last three home results and in all three of those games we hardly had a shot or made the opponents work particularly hard to get a clean sheet. 

Virgil van Dijk and Claude’s future has been under the microscope this week as Motivational Hockey Guy Ralph Krueger gave a long overdue interview, the main points of which were that this summer we didn’t have to sell any players out of financial necessity and that the takeover happening or not makes no difference to future plans.   Whilst it’s nice to know that we don’t have to sell, that does not for one second mean that we won’t.  A hypothetical figure of £60 million was put on Virgil van Dijk and Ralph said that we could turn that down.  There’s a big difference between ‘could’ and ‘would’.  We ‘could’ turn down £100 million but it doesn’t mean we ‘would’.  The bottom line that if the player wants to go and enough money is offered then he will go.  Also, if we got offered an incredible deal, for example a cash plaus player deal then we’d sell for ‘football’ reasons. 

By £60 million being quoted in the interview, it kind of tells you that any article with ‘£50m’ in it was made up bollocks, as if you didn’t know that anyway.  What also caught my eye is that as with most players, Virgil uses Twitter.  The hard working and insightful have been looking down his list of ‘likes’ and making news out of it.  He like a few tweets regarding Chelsea winning the league and also one by Gini Wijnaldum (Liverpool and Holland) so the same robots writing for these clubs both carried stories saying that van Dijk had indicated via Twitter that he was joining them.  If that’s true then he’s also signing for Feyenoord because of Dirk Kuyt, Swansea (Leroy Fer) and Everton (Honest Ron Koeman), Juventus (Bonucci), Spurs (Wanyama) and Celtic (former club).  So, when it comes to Twitter, Virgil sprays it around.  If I was going out of the Twitter like profile, it would have to be Chelsea or Juventus as everything else is covered by the Dutch friend, former team mate / club angle.

Ralph was non-committal about Claude’s future – dropping the shoulder big time and giving a politicians answer saying he wasn’t involved in the football side.  Yes Ralph, I know Les Reed is the main man on the football but you’re the man he reports to.

To tonights game and I’ve got 0-0 in the family score prediction.  I went first and nabbed it and after I had, no one else bothered to predict a score.  So, my stance on Claude had softened a bit after Boro but then I saw tonight’s team.  FUCK OFF…. Having one our first game in five, the players that made the difference were on the bench again as Claude went back to the line up he’d obviously planned weeks ago.  Tadic and Davis were back having done absolutely nothing to deserve starting.  Likewise Clasie and J-Rod were binned.  Caceres and Pied were out but that was easier to understand after both playing their first games for months on Saturday.  In short – no one got rewarded for playing well on Saturday.  One other change was Matt Targett starting his first game in months in place of the presumably injured Ryan Bertrand.  To make matters worse with Claude’s selection, as we lined up for the kick off, it was obvious we were returning to the 4-3-3 formation where no one gets forward from midfield and the striker has half of the pitch to himself as the wingers don’t get close enough to him either.  The ‘desperately’ weakened United team had internationals from Argentina in goal, Ivory Coast, England x2 and Italy in defence, Belgium, Spain and one kid in midfield and France, Armenia and England’s record goalscorer up front.  Tough life – that side probably cost about five times what ours cost.

As the game is about to start I notice that there’s a couple of new people next to me (possibly United fans) and the 20 or so seats the other side of them to the aisle are all empty.  The game is about to start, the fucking My Way abomination has finished and there are empty seats all over the place.  Not good.

There is the unmistakable smell of ‘end of season’ about the game as Saints dominate the early exchanges with United not looking to get out of second gear.  Targett has a ball break to his right foot on the edge of the box and lashes it into Row Z.  The game is ‘OK’ without being anything special and then an aimless kind of ball is punted diagonally from our right to left by Cedric and no one is near it apart from Eric Bailly and for no reason whatsoever, he brings the ball down with his arm.  For the other end where I am it just looks bizarre and then the ref takes a second and points to the spot.  Bloody hell, what a gift, oh shit, who’s gonna take this?  I’m expecting JWP but it’s Gabbiadini who has the ball.  Hmmm, Italy are traditionally not very good at penalties and images are in my head of Graziano making a knob of himself at the Euro’s.  Up he steps, stutters, left foot to bottom left corner but Romero has read it and got down well to push it away.  For fuck sake.  It’s not a great penalty, similar to the Tadic miss against Hull.  Balls.  During the next break in play I get a text from a mate watching at home “Never a penalty – outside the box”.  Justice is done then… hurrah!

United are just sitting in a holding pattern but then Redmond takes a poor touch and loses the ball to Bailly.  He rumbles forward from right back and cuts in and manages to dummy both Yoshida and Stephens out of the way.  It looks for all the world like he’s going to walk it into the net but he shoots and Fraser stands tall and sticks out a big arm to save.  There’s another chance for United as a big boom out of defence is wonderfully brought down by Rooney as it drops out of the sky over his shoulder and he spins and plays Martial in but he shanks it wide in piss poor fashion.  It’s a reminder of how good Rooney used to be.

The last 20 of the first half is instantly forgettable, the closes to a goal not being very close at all as we get a free kick to the left of centre about 25 yards out and free kick expert – sorry, free kick taker JWP curls it over the wall and wide in shit fashion.  It started outside the line of the post and curled wider.  Never going in.  Rubbish.

Christ this is fucking boring again.  At half time there’s a video played on the big screen which has J-Rod and Steve Davis showing some kids how to take a penalty.  Irony overload as we’ve missed our last three.  There are some kids on the pitch raising money for the Scope Charity by scoring penalties and they all score.  Maybe that’s the secret – get the players practicing against a mascot dog.

There is a bit more life to the start of the second half, from us anyway with Cedric bursting onto a loose ball and getting cynically taken out by jones on the edge of the box.  JWP knocks the free kick to Tadic and he blasts it well but pretty much straight at Romero who fists it away.  A minute later a ball in from the left is met by a sidefoot from Romeu but again it’s straight at the keeper and comfortably pushed away but Romero has to earn his money staright after with JWP trying a curler from the edge of the box which is towards the top corner but the keeper sees it all the way, takes off and pushes it wide.

For once, Gabbiadini being removed doesn’t cause too much protest and J-Rod is on.  It’s a straight swap of course and Smalling charges up the right and crosses it.  There’s a complete shambles from Stephens as he stops the ball but keeps on running and Rooney picks it up, laboriously plays it to Mata to lashes well over.

Cedric has been kicked all over the place, finally gives up and it off to be replaced with Pied which limits the tactical master strokes that Claude will be able to pull with his last substitution as no doubt this replacement wasn’t on his fucking spreadsheet that he wrote a month ago.  Stephens is getting all Beckenbauer as he brings the ball out from the back and he finds Redmond on the left wh pisses past Bailly and JWP’s volley is blocked and loops up in the air for Romero to catch.

I’m beginning to think that we’re going to get done 1-0 here and it nearly comes true as Fellaini and Martial play 1-2’s through our midfield before Martial opens hi body up and curls round Fraser and it bounces off the far post.  The last throw from us is to being Boufal on for JWP and the crowd boos the decision by Claude.  I’ve seen it written that Boufal was booed – that’s utter shit.  It’s nice to see that the recent examples of us falling apart when this substitution was made, do not happen again and Boufal causes lots of problems but there’s no end product, there never seems to be any fucking end product with us in home games.  The one final chance is created by Romeu poking a ball through to J-Rod.  The world seems to stop waiting for an offside but he turns and shoots wide of the far post and the lino, who is clearly asleep, doesn’t give it.  I wish we’d had this guy at Wembley.

Full time and another pretty dull 0-0.  This time at least we had a go in the second half but once again we leave with zero goals at home.  In isolation, a 0-0 at home to United its not a bad result and we were the better side so Saints fans would normally be happy enough with that but a 4th home game in a row without scoring?

OK, it’s not Claude’s fault that no fucker can take a penalty and it’s not his fault that the United goalkeeper had a good game and it wasn’t his fault that he was stood too close when the ball slid off of Bailly’s head and hit him in the face.  It is his fault that we reverted to the tried and failed 4-3-3 formation where the striker is completely isolated and none of our midfielders get into the box.  It is his fault that he picked the same old tired underperforming team again after winning the game when it changed.  Tadic had a semi-decent second half but in the first he was dreadful and just slowed down every attack either by checking back or just giving the ball away.  Steve Davis – another who didn’t really deserve to be starting, kept giving the ball away and taking backwards as the default option.  Claude obviously picks his teams for the next three matches on paper and how people perform makes no difference.  Hypothetically, If J-Rod played game 1 and got a hat-trick, he’d be out for game 2 because it’s Shane Long’s turn to play.  A better, real world example is that of Jordy Clasie, who has been left out for 3 months apart from 2 games – the last 2 games that we won.  I’m not saying he was solely responsible but in the West Brom and Middlesbrough away games, he was really good, scoring in the Baggies game and setting up a goal in the Boro game and has been straight out of the side for the next game.  Clasie isn’t my favourite player but based on performances he deserved to start tonight.  If good performances are not rewarded then what’s the point?

I was wavering on the Claude question after the Boro game because of the position in the league we are likely to finish in.  However, I realised that 8th is achievable, solely because of the crap standard outside the top 7 this season.  Last year, Liverpool came 8th and got 60 points.  Look at the points compared to last season… last year we got 63, this year it’s 46-49, probably 47 after a 0-0 against Stoke.  Last year we were 3 points off a Champions League place, this year it’s 31.  Last year we were 26 points off relegation, this season it’s 18.  Another blank at home leaves me once again thinking that I couldn’t care less if he left.  Ok, we got a point against a top 6 side which is a bit of rarity this season but come on, United rested loads and there's no way that those playing were giving it 100%.

Today there were good performances from a few like Stephens, Romeu and JWP.  Stephens looked really composed again for 95% of the game and brought the ball out of defence well, a sure sign that his confidence is rising.  A small caveat though is the fact that he was playing against a bloke in a Wayne Rooney fat suit.  There was some good link up play from Rooney but it’s as if he can’t raise more than a jog.  There was an incident in the second half when the ball was loose around the penalty spot and Rooney turned with the speed of a 90 year old on a mobility scooter.  He used to be so dynamic and deadly but then you realise that that was 10 years ago.

Romeu was a tank in midfield again and JWP was having a pretty decent game until he got substituted to his visible annoyance.  Taking him off annoyed the crowd too.  Not only has removing him been bad for us in a couple of recent games (it wasn’t today oddly enough) but it’s baffling that it always seems to be the player doing the most who gets taken off.  Tadic had been diabolical in the first half and only average in the second whereas Redmond had had a great first half but was fading.  As it happens, Boufal was really good when he came on so that’s progress I guess.  Like the team selection at the start, it’s all done by numbers.

Gabbiadini up front had a shocker – missed the penalty after 5 minutes and then went downhill from there, though once again was suffering from a chronic lack of support and decent service.  Again, I thought that at half time Claude could have stuck either J-Rod or Austin on with him and done a Mike Bassett and gone 4-4-fucking-2.  No – that would be a bit too progressive.


So, one more home game to go on Sunday against Stoke.  0-0 anyone?  Ironically, that’ll probably mean we limp into an 8th place finish but regardless of where we finish, the season, especially at home, has been piss boring but then the summer starts and as a Saints fan, you know that the summer is never, ever boring.

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