Premier League Match 17 - Southampton 1 Leicester City 4

Claude is The Man

Leicester at home and one of the games that was marked as winnable in our nightmare run of fixtures in December.  As unbelievable as it may sound though, Leicester have had a ‘new manager bounce’ under Claude Puel of all people.  He who was not inspiring in the slightest but he’s undoubtedly a decent guy so fair play to him.  I winder why he’s doing better with Leicester… Jamie Vardy or Shane Long… Riyad Mahrez or Dusan Tadic… Demerai Gray or Nathan Redmond…. Charlie Austin or Leanardo Ulloa…. We win that one but Ulloa is about 8^th choice for them.

So, Claude is in the house and the wider footballing world wants us to get beat because Claude finished 8^th and got us to a cup final and ‘who do they think they are’ Southampton sacked him, in what was Ralph Krueger’s last public act before he disappeared along with Les Reed to their Magic Bunker where all the evil deeds are plotted and they stick pins in very little voodoo dolls of Nicola Cortese.

The only thing of note sine the last game was what appeared to be a social media tantrum by Wesley Hoedt.  I can guess what’s happened – he was not picked against Arsenal and the three centre backs that were all played ok in the main.  We’re going to two centre backs tonight and Pellegrino now has him 4^th in the pecking order and he’s not on the bench.  Sure enough, when the team is revealed it’s a back 4 with Cedric returning for JWP, Jack Stephens has been left out in the change of formation but most ridiculously of all, there is no place for Pierre Hojbjerg.  Boufal is in for Redmond, Lemina for Hojbjerg and Steve Davis starts as well.  So, it looks like Tadic on the right where he is shite and both he and Davis in the same starting Xi means ‘one paced’ central.  So, overall it’s a formation change and 4 changes from a team that played well, including the two best players from the last game.

Claude Puel has rotated a few as well with Gray left out and Okazaki coming in.  Also Albrighton isn’t playing which I feel is a good thing.  Both Vardy and Mahrez are there though and so is Harry Maguire whose name caused much horror when he was touted for Saints in the summer but has joined Leicester, looked worth every penny of the £17m they paid for him and now has a good chance of going to the World Cup.  In hindsight, would have been a good replacement for Virgil and we’d have had about £50 million left over.

Away we go and we immediately put Leicester under pressure with quick counter attacking and win a corner.  Davis’ kick causes confusion, Yoshida takes a swing at it and it squirts wide.  We have started well and Lemina has a shot which is blocked before it goes anywhere.  When Leicester break on us however, the ball goes to Okazaki who has a 50-50 with Virgil but Virgil decides, with the January window approaching , not to go for it and stands off allowing the ball to move to Mahrez who falls over and with no challenge is allowed to get up and carry on.  He heads across the pitch and towards goal as Lemina falls over and Tadic jogs beside him and he gets to about 25 yards out, Yoshida doesn’t close him down and he just hits it, no chance for Fraser, 1-0 and what the fuck was that?

Having started well, we are now deflating like a punctured tyre and Leicester sense a chance to put the game to bed.  Okazaki again finds himself running at goal as defenders back off.  When he shoots, Virgil can eventually be arsed to stick out a foot and it deflects and Fraser makes a decent save by the post.  We’ve completely gone.  Vardy gets away, on it goes to Chilwell and Okazaki and his shot is cleared off the line by Lemina who has at least shown the desire to get back.  Out of nowhere we string together a bit of one touch and Austin has a dig from 20 yards which is a decent effort but straight at the keeper.

The next Leicester attack is set up by Kasper Schmeichel as he drills a long ball forward straight to Vardy and on it goes to Mahrez and we manage to get a foot in and hoof it for a corner.  From the corner, Mahrez has spotted Fuchs creeping up from left back on the edge of the penalty area.  I’ve spotted it too because Mahrez is clearly looking at him but none of our players get to the unmarked Fuchs as Mahrez drills the corner straight to him.  A volley into the box, it hits someone and goes loose and unsurprisingly, Leicester players react and we don’t, Okazaki, 2-0.

The reaction from Saints and the manager is non-existent and on the next foray it’s 3-0.  Maguire refuses to give up on a loose ball in our box and reacts whilst Bertrand and Virgil watch on and he fizzes it across the goal to where King is unmarked 3 yards out.  Lemina and Cedric are in the vicinity it you coult being 10 yards away as in the vicinity.  Fucking useless.

We try and keep a bit of possession which at laest means that despite us knocking it around in our own half, Leicester haven’t got the ball so they can’t score again.  We end the half with a semi-decent move with Cedric crossing, Bertrand heading down and Virgil volleying over the bar.  All defenders you notice.   That’s because the front half of the team have been wank.  That decent move doesn’t stop the players being booed off.  Totally deserved the gutless sacks of shite,

Our resident managerial genius takes off Romeu and puts on Gabbiadini at the start of the second half which basically says to me that he’s given up and saving players for Saturday.  We now appear to be lining up in a 4-4-2 with Davis in a midfield two.  Jesus wept.  The half starts fairly evenly but Leicester have done the hard work so you can tell they’re just sat in a holding pattern and playing the game out.  We geta  free kick in a decent area when Tadic feels a touch in the air from Simpson and flings himself.  Bertrand gets the free kick up and over the wall and under the bar but it’s staright at Schmeichel who shovels it over.  Bertrand swings over the corner and Yoshida rises highest to head down and it bounces down through a ruck of players and bounces in with Schmeichel being distracted by Tadic swinging a big airshot at it.  Maya’s goal, 3-1 and plenty of time to go.

Redmond is on for Boufal who hasn’t done much at all and out of nowhere, the team in red and white remembers how to play football and the ball goes from Lemina to Tadic, across to Redmond who finds the overlapping Bertrand and his perfect low first time cross is right into the path of Austin and we all shout ‘Goaaaaaa-fuckofffffff’ as he slides in but can only direct it into Schmeichel and wide.  Has to score – absolutely has to score.  What happens in this game if you don’t take your chances?

Well in this game, Leicester wake up and realise that they are having a go at fucking up a game that they’ve already won once and they start playing again, given a helping hand by Saints of course.  Cedric is trying to get an attack going out to Bertrand but he shanks his pass horribly straight to Okazaki, leaving Bertrand stranded upfield, on it goes to Vardy on our left and Virgil is over there but he doesn’t lift a leg to stop him and the ball is knocked back to Okazaki who gets in front of Yoshida and smashes it in.

A mass exodus of people with 15 minutes to go and that’s it really.  The second half has been shit and a non-event apart from the two goals and Austin’s miss.  I reckon there are about 10% of the Saints fans left in the ground when the final whistle goes.  What a load of shit.  They could have won by more if they needed to and the final whistle goes and Virgil has the ball so he lashes it into the crowd – it looks like the only time he’s done anything with intent all game and the only thing he’s really meant.

Apart from a couple of exceptions, that was as stinking a shithouse of a performance that you could ever hope to imagine from top to bottom from the manager down. Credit where it’s due, Leicester City and Claude Puel were absolutely excellent from the first minute to the last with the slight exception of the five minutes from when we scored to when we should’ve made it 3-2. Other than those five minutes they were absolutely superb and totally deserve to win and you can see that they are a really good team. They didn’t even have to be a really good team to beat us, they just had to be organised like Watford were  and like Burnley were. Most importantly, they played like a team that was carrying out instructions and they all worked for each other and for their manager who had been playing in a shape and in a style that suited them.

Needless to say, our manager Mauricio Pellegrino didn’t do any of that and he looks like he hasn’t got a fucking clue what sort of team we are, hasn’t got a clue about how to set the team up, is tactically inept and has no fucking idea what is best team is. Other than that, he is fantastic. Our little three-game bubble of optimism where fans (me included) were thinking “oh maybe we are not that shit after all and maybe this manager does know what he’s doing”, was all completely shot away within about 15 minutes of the start of today’s game. We didn’t have a fucking clue and deserved what we got. No ability on display, no guts and no effort.

The team he packed was questionable but on paper at least you can see that it was supposed to be a 4-2-3-1 with Steve ‘Lampard’ Davis as an attacking midfielder. On paper it looked like Tadic would be on the right (where he’s proven shit) and Boufal the left.  In reality, Steve Davis played far too far forward on the shoulder of Austin and Tadic seem to want to play in the middle and only occasionally found himself out on the right hand side. The net result of this was that Mahrez on the right and Chilwell on the left had the freedom of the fucking park to do whatever they wanted. One thing you don’t do is give Mahrez the freedom of the park.   There’s a reason he was the Premier League Player of the Season two seasons ago.  The first goal is fucking criminal – there is so much space for Okazaki because Van Dijk decides not to go and close him down and Mahrez can afford to fall on his arse, have a bath and put new kit on still no one gets anywhere near him.  He is a brilliant player but then anyone would be with no one closing them down, he is not going to miss, he scores goals like that every fucking week.  Pathetic.

Having conceded that goal, Pellegrino makes absolutely no tweaks tactically and five minutes later the game is dead. We had absolutely no belief once the first goal went in.  I think we have a set of players crying out for a leadership and they know they are going to get absolutely none from Pellegrino and the bench and we have no one on the pitch to do that either. So, we get to half-time 3-0 down and he takes off the one midfielder who is running around putting tackles in (yes Romeu was shit but at least he was trying) and drops Steve Davis back to position where he is consistently been proven to be useless.   So Pellegrino’s best tactic for approaching the second half is to go for the 4-4-2 approach which he admitted, we don’t have the players to play after the Burnley defeat when we tried it then.  OK, we have a little rally and get a goal back, due to Leicester just trying to see the game out but all it takes is for us to have a sniff of 3-2 and then they up a gear and score again easily.

The fourth goal sums us up and sadly, it sums up certain individual players. I didn’t realise the full horror of it until I saw it on TV later.  Firstly, Cedric plays a horrific ball across the park which gets intercepted. Steve Davis is marking Okazaki but he just lets him run like he always does. The ball goes wide to Vardy and Virgil is the nearest defender but he just can’t be fucking bothered to get close to him or to put in a tackle so Vardy rolls it into the middle we’re Okazaki is now being picked up by Yoshida, only he isn’t because Yoshida is stationary and Okazaki darts in front of him and smashes it in the net.  Crap from all four players but in the case of the last three, typical.  Davis never tracks runners which is the primary role of the defensive midfielder, Virgil can’t be arsed and Yoshida isn’t very good.  There is clearly an issue at the moment with Wesley Hoedt who seems to have been made a scapegoat for the goal he gave away against Bournemouth. Yoshida coughed up a goal against Arsenal which he does virtually every game so I can understand Hoedt getting the right arse over double standards.  I repeat that I have no time for pathetic social media statements from players.

As for the players who did play, well fucking hell. I’ll start with Virgil van Dijk because he is the easiest one to deal with. He is playing at roughly 70% and he’s good enough to still stand out at 70% when compared to the rest of our team. However, his attitude is fucking disgusting and poisonous and if Pellegrino was to show any sign of being a leader he needs to drop the fucker from this point onwards.   It looks like Manchester City are interested so that’s good news – we get rid of the fucker, get a load of money for him and he doesn’t go to Liverpool.  He couldn’t be arsed today because it was Leicester so comparatively few will be watching.  He’ll be great next week against Chelsea.

Cedric did not look fit to me and Yoshida was just like he always is, decent at times but can’t go 90 minutes without chucking a goal in.  In midfield, Mario Lemina was absolute dog shit in the first half. What the fuck has happened to him? He actually improved in the second half mainly because he couldn’t get any fucking worse. Romeu I thought was doing a manful job on his own in midfield in the first half but here course got substituted by the twat of a manager who basically gave up on this game at half time to save ourselves for the much more winnable trip away at Chelsea at the weekend.  I assume that’s what he’s saving Pierre Hojbjerg for as he has been the best player on the pitch in the last three games that he’s played so of course he gets dropped. Then we have Steve Davis who cannot have played that badly in any single game in his entire life.  He was absolutely useless but it’s nothing that we should be surprised too much about. Whenever he plays against athletic physical midfielders on the opposition, like Ndidi was for Leicester, he just disappears and might as well not be out there. I could not believe that he was still on the pitch after half-time.

On the wings, Tadic after his brief holiday from Bollocksville against Arsenal was right back there today, pathetically throwing himself to the ground or giving the ball away. Boufal hardly got the ball in the right areas but when he did invariably dribbled into the nearest player and lost it. Boufal is a good player but when you compare him to someone like Mahrez, you realise how much of an unpolished diamond he is. Mahrez is on a different level altogether.  Pellegrino stuck Redmond on the left where he is proved to be not very good and that he tried his best, he was unable to make a difference.

Austin tried his best with absolutely fuck all service and had to take a booking from the team when Lemina fucked up and lost the ball in midfield.  He has to score that chance at 3-1 though.

That leaves, Ryan Bertrand who was decent and has put away is obvious disappointment at not moving in the summer and is turning into a consistently high level of performance. The obvious stand out again today was Fraser. Who was in no way at fault with any of the four goals and made some good saves to keep the score down.

How ironic that Claude’s team scored four goals at St Mary’s which would’ve taken him about 10 games to do when he was Saints manager. Fair play to him and hopefully he can keep his good players in the transfer window and continue to do well for Leicester, unless he fancies selling a few of them to us.

There’s not much more to say really. Absolutely everything was wrong, the selection, the performance of the manager tactically, the performance of the players and even the weather was shite.  I’m sure it has happened in the past but I can’t recall ever seeing as many empty seats at the final whistle as I saw last night. For once it’s hard to blame people for leaving early.  Lots of players don’t seem to give a fuck so why should the supporters. After a little three game break, reality is back and we are struggling this season with an average manager, some average players and some piss poor attitudes.

I guess  the Claude thing will bite us today.  Hindsight is wonderful of course but I still stand by the decision to replace him at the end of last season.  The Pellegrino appointment is brought into sharp focus by today's result though and you can hardly say that he's an upgrade on any level.  Good luck to Claude, a decent guy.

Chelsea away next.  We’ll play better because the players will care.  We’ll park the bus and it’ll be like the City game.  We may get a point but I doubt it.