Nordic Saint

After our game, I just caught the final 15 minutes of the Leicester v Chelsea game, and I can't see anyone stopping Leicester this season. They obviously have a team of very good, experienced pros who know how to totally intimidate the opposition: a bit like the Leeds side of the early 70s. Chelsea just looked scared of them at the end.

We should have enough to beat them but Shrewsbury are fielding their first team and League One first teams usually beat Premier League U23 teams, including ours, in the FA Trophy so, I agree with you, it won't be easy. I'm looking forward to seeing what Kegs Chauke can do especially. My main concerns are Valery and Long but hopefully they will surprise me against this level of opposition.

The Leicester players and bench are putting so much pressure on the ref. I fear he is going to cave in. Even though we haven't got a good replacment for him, it might be wise to sub Diallo before he gets a red card.

You know, like every Premier League club, Leicester analyse opposition players' weak points and Maddison would have been made aware of McCarthy's tendency to crouch down at the near post, which is why he was able to fire his shot off so quickly.

Smallbone has been our best player so far. Let's hope he caps the performance with a goal. I'm not saying he is a better overall goalkeeper but Forster would have saved that one, no problem, as he always stands bolt upright at the near post while McCarthy tends to crouch down leaving that space above him to aim at. We're missing Ings' finishing up front.

Jack Stephens was the common factor. His last ditch blocks and clearances were key.

Forster has a better record against Liverpool than any other goalkeeper. Let's hope he keeps his 5th consecutive clean sheet against them tonight and extends his unbeaten run against them to six games.

Perhaps it's simply that he's just not considered good enough for a tough game like this. I guess we will see him at some stage in the Shrewsbury game if we are ever going to see him at all.

What you have to remember is that VAR is ultimately just the opinion of another referee and the bias in favour of big clubs still holds. Where it will make a difference is when crowds return as the VAR ref won't be influenced by the crowd.

Boris himself has quite a choice as he has French, German, Turkish, Russian and American ancestry and was born in the USA. Personally, I think he'll choose the USA to settle in but obviously not yet, although he just might follow his father to France for retirement in a warmer climate but he could do that in California too.

BAD SANTA A retirement home in Belgium has been hit by a major coronavirus outbreak, which has seen at least 26 residents lose their lives and more than 100 test positive. The outbreak was detected a few days after the 5 December visit to the Hemelrijck home in Mol of a volunteer dressed as Santa Claus.

Liverpool draw a lot of games. Only Brighton have drawn more.

Yes, of course, you're right. Just a red card then. Thanks, I've corrected that now.

A lot of fans of other clubs are saying that Dawson kicking Adams in the head was "shocking" and "reckless" yet Saints fans have barely mentioned it. Craig Dawson criticised for kicking Che Adams in the head | JOE.co.uk

Stephens was our best player tonight. His incisive forward passes were as good as Vestergaard's have been lately. In fact, he was just about our only player consistently passing the ball forward, trying to set up attacks. I think we are getting our tactics wrong. We seem to be far too focused on retaining possession and forgetting that we need to shoot in order to score goals. Much of the game time is wasted passing the ball sideways and backwards in our own half, often with little triangles involving McCarthy. It's as if we're playing for a scoreless draw. It was very similar to when we played the ten men of Arsenal: a lot of sideways passes with everyone seemingly afraid to shoot in case the ball hits a defender. They forget that a very great number of goals are scored from deflections.

Man City have played Saints, Arsenal & Newcastle in the last 9 days. Fingers crossed.

On a positive note, I think we have now broken our club record for the most consecutive Premier League away games without defeat. Can anyone confirm if it is also a record for all of our 44 seasons in the top flight?

The highlight was the Stephens block. In fact, the Stephens-Bednarek pairing restricted Fulham to just 3 shots at our goal in the whole match. They hardly put a foot wrong. Walker-Peters was good as always. In midfield we were OK, without creating very much but up front the Adams-Long pairing was poor. Before it eventually happened, I thought, if we get the ball in the net any time in this game, it will be ruled out because Long will be offside. He was constantly standing in offside positions when we had free-kicks in attacking positions and not bothering to run back to get himself onside. Maybe in the pre-VAR days he got away with a few but surely he should realize you can't get away with it now. Adams did not seem to get on with Long at all and that was one of his poorest games for us.

Brentford have defeated 20% of the Premier League so far in their cup run. That's quite impressive for a team which is also very much involved in a promotion campaign. Meanwhile, you have to go back 3 years and 38 games to find the last time the less impressive Andy Carroll scored a goal in any competition, which was in the FA Cup v Birmingham. How bad must their defence have been?

It was a good team performance. We just lacked a cutting edge up front. Redmond fluffed a chance that Sterling would have scored from. That was the difference. Walker-Peters was superb too but Vestergaard stood head and shoulders above them all. He was magnificent. 10/10. Anyway, I feel less disappointed at the end of this game than I did after we dropped those 2 points at Arsenal.

They said in the TV commentary early in the Arsenal game that we were 3rd in that 2020 table but then we dropped those 2 points. But, 3rd-5th is still separated by just 1 point and the year's not over yet. There was one year in the 80s when we were 1st in the annual league table. If only we could have put it together over a season rather than the second half of one and the first half of the next one, what might have been. We still had a better record when we finished runners-up in 1983/84 than Pompey did when they won the league in 1949/50.

If Old Les had still been here, he would have done. But, I have a lot more confidence in the people running the club nowadays to keep both the manager and players happy. The Gaos have come in for a lot of stick but they seem to have made some great appointments. Has the club ever been better run than it is now?

Although some of our fans like to think of us as little Southampton who should be happy if they manage to avoid relegation, the truth is over the last 12 months and the last 38 games, we are one of the top 3 teams in the country so 3rd is where you'd expect us to be - it's no fluke - whereas Arsenal are 15th and had lost their previous 5 games. We were the bookies favourites to win this game. The first half performance wasn't any great surprise; not winning the game against a poor Arsenal side down to 10 men was. One of the TV commentators mentioned early in the game that there weren't many of the Arsenal players who Southampton would want to swap any of theirs for.

We could have brought N'Lundulu on for the last ten minutes if we'd wanted an alternative to passing the ball around. I was disappointed that we didn't. It seemed the perfect time to bring him on to batter the Arsenal defence, who faced no real physical challenge from our forwards at the end and were just going through the defensive routine that they must have practised in training hundreds of times. Remember exactly 2 years ago when we beat Arsenal 3-2 with 3 headed goals, the last one coming from Austin near the end of the game when he came on as a sub.

I hope so. But, that statement seems far less far-fetched this season than in any other I can recall.