Nordic Saint

Yes, totally agree: he comes off his line quickly, makes himself big and narrows the angles, making life much more difficult for opposition strikers. McCarthy is an OK goalkeeper but doesn't do those things anywhere near as well as Gunn did tonight. Whether Gunn will succumb to Watsonitis after a few months remains to be seen.

He is a very good player, he's getting better with every game and he's played in our three best performances this season v Arsenal, Huddersfield and Chelsea. He has a great future ahead of him.

Great performance. There were 10/10 performances from Yoshida and Gunn but the whole team played well together and have clearly been very well drilled by Ralph in training. Yoshida has played in our 3 best performances under Ralph: the wins v Arsenal and Huddersfield and the draw tonight. We miss him badly when he doesn't play.

Good luck to him. He deserves all the success he gets. He did a fantastic job for us. His win rate of 54% still stands as the best of any Saints manager since the 1890s. I thought at the time that he was going to do for us what Revie did for Leeds and Clough did for Forest. We were all gutted when he was sacked in January 2013 after a very good 2-2 away draw at Chelsea and here we are 6 years later going into another game at Stamford Bridge with our sixth different manager since then. There isn't much job security in football management.

And, of course, he will be able to link up with our other Moroccan Norwegian, giving us a monopoly on Moroccan Norwegians in the Premier League. They'll all want to join us after they hear that.

He played a few games for Hull in 2017 but was dropped for a few months after their 4-0 defeat to Everton so he didn't play in the 0-0 draw at St Mary's. He was then brought back for their final Premier League game before they were relegated, a 7-1 home defeat to Spurs. They didn't extend his loan deal after that. At least he has previous experience of relegation.

Not where it mattered they didn't as there were City fans directly behind that goal at the Northam end. If Saints fans had been there, they might well have made the ref's mind up for him, the way that the City fans did for Hojbjerg's red card.

We saw once again today, why this needs to happen. The away fans behind the goal have such an influence on the referee. As soon as the City fans reacted the way they did, you knew the ref was going to give a red card, and the lack of reaction from behind the goal when Ward-Prowse went down ensured no penalty would be given. Research into why in sport there are more home wins than away wins found that the key factor was the home crowd's influence on referees meant that most marginal decisions went the way of the home team. Most of the play is in the central strip of the pitch and obviously penalties are awarded there, so having a noisy bank of home fans directly behind the goal is critical. We don't have one so our team misses out on crucial home support. If the fans in the Kingsland/Northam corner really believe that by being there they are drowning out the away fans, they are sadly deluded. They should be directly behind the goal, where they can make themselves heard and influence the ref.

You must have been to a different game to the one I was at. He looked slow and weak so the game largely passed him by and every one of his free-kicks and corners went straight to a Man City player except for one corner right at the end which amazingly found Shane Long's head. I suppose you could say that at long last he showed he knows where the back of the net is even if it was at the wrong end. When he plays, we surrender control of midfield: simple as that. He might make an average Championship player but at this level he is a liability. I'm really looking forward to Ralph clearing our some of the dead wood we have accumulated and strategically strengthening our squad in January.

You're right. McCarthy needs to learn to do that: move out, make himself big and narrow the angle for the shooter. Watch Schmeichel to see how a well-coached goalkeeper does it.

McCarthy does seem to be developing the same flaws that Forster did. He stays rooted to the line and doesn't come out to narrow the angle when facing shots. This makes the goal 'big' for the striker and much easier for him to score in the corners of it. When Dave Watson works with goalies in the pre-match warmups, I've noticed the same thing, which suggests he's coaching them to do that. Why would he coach them like that? Well, he might argue that it gives them a fraction of a second longer. But, narrowing the angle and making the goal small for the striker is the conventional wisdom that most goalies follow. Also, like Forster, when facing the possibility of a shot, he doesn't stay on his toes, ready to dive in either direction but favours heavily stepping down on his left foot, perhaps because he is less confident diving to his left. This means if, as happened with Anderson's first goal, the shot is aimed low to his right, he's not going to get to it in time. The final flaw, and the worst one, is that when a shot is fired directly at him, he leans backwards in a 'limbo dancing' movement which enables the ball to pass over him as it did for Anderson's 2nd goal. I noticed that Forster used to do the same thing and it cost us several goals. It seems too much of a coincidence that they both developed this flaw independently. Why would anyone coach them to do that, you might ask? Well, I guess he thought it would give them a chance of saving the ball with their hands above their heads, rather than letting the ball hit them on the body. The problem is though that they are leaning back so far that they are already falling back over the goal line when they do it. Take another look at Anderson's 2nd goal and you'll see the shot was aimed right at his body. It was only that limbo dance movement that enabled it to go into the net. Unlike many on here I don't think that Forster was always a poor goalkeeper. He deteriorated badly over time. Some say that was because of injuries, others that it was the influence of bad coaching. But, I wouldn't be surprised to see him start playing well again at another club with a different coach.

I feel as optimistic about this transfer window as I did about our managerial appointment because Les Reed won't be involved. We should see some much needed common sense prevail at last. We can look forward to some of the dead wood being offloaded and the squad being strategically strengthened.

I've thought that for a long time. Wing-back is incredibly demanding as it combines the duties of the old positions of left back and left winger, which used to require 2 players. In order to regularly cover the whole length of the pitch, a wing-back needs incredible pace and energy. Neither Fox or Targett ever had it but they'd both have made adequate, not great, left wingers and in an earlier era might have been OK. Neither of them was ever capable of performing the defensive duties well at the top level, when they are up against pacy forwards. Ryan Bertrand has got a lot of unfair stick on here as with our weak defence he has often had to do the defensive work of two men, whereas, in contrast, Targett needs an extra defender to cover for him. I'd be tempted to put in a bid for Wendell in January: a player Ralph would be familiar with from the Bundesliga.

We were beaten by a team with better players. Ralph has done well so far with the limited squad at his disposal but it is going to take at least 2 transfer windows to sort out the mess Old Les left us with. From the Academy products like Targett to the expensive buys like Lemina, our players simply weren't as as fast, as skilful or as strong as West Ham's. Even their goalkeeper is a class above ours and we have no one anywhere near as good as Felipe Anderson. I still feel optimistic though. We have got a good manager and he will bring in some good players.

Top 3 home games v West Ham? I've missed a lot of them over the years but of those I was at, these 3 stand out for me: 1/ March 1967 Saints 6 West Ham 2. We beat what was referred to at the time as West Ham’s World Cup winning team, as it included Moore, Hurst and Peters, in one of the most entertaining games ever played at the Dell. 2/ August 1988 Saints 4 West Ham 0. Paul Rideout scored 2 goals in one of the best debuts by a Saints striker. 3/ August 2017 Saints 3 West Ham 2. Austin's 93rd minute penalty gave us what stands out in recent years as a very rare injury time victory. Looking forward to another good win tomorrow.

#littlejerk And Merry Christmas & Happy New Year to you too, you miserable ***t.

We are the form team. They've lost 3 of their last 4 games. Good set of results for us. If we beat West Ham, we'll have pulled away from the bottom 3. Meanwhile, Pompey are beginning to falter in League One like City are in the Premier League. I'd expect to see Sunderland & Luton and Liverpool & Spurs finish as the top 2 in their respective divisions.

In my post #39. 8 and a closing bracket have accidentally produced an emoji, so, for example we have only ever lost 8 games v Brighton. Fortunately,we have nothing as bad in our records as this: Pompey haven't won any of their 51 games against Arsenal or Chelsea over the last 60 years.

We are a bogey team for Pompey (W19 D10 L9), in what is statistically the most one-sided of all the major derby games in England, Brighton (W23 D13 L8), Bournemouth (W13 D8 L7) and Palace (W42 D16 L28). We have a winning record against about half of the teams currently in the Premier League as well as the vast majority of teams outside of it. Until they moved to the Etihad, we had a winning record v Man City but they have just edged ahead. Our poor overall records v Everton (W29 D23 L48), Leeds (W27 D20 L45) and Spurs (W37 D30 L55) are still better than our record v Arsenal (W21 D26 L49). So, in terms of results, it's Arsenal, although not so much recently.

These things change. Right up until the early 90s, we were known as Liverpool's bogey team. We have played far more games against Spurs than any other team and so we have an exceptionally high number of both victories and defeats against them. In recent decades they have 'owned' us and have become our current bogey team but hopefully Ralph will change that. Conversely, Arsenal used to be our bogey team but we have become a bit of a bogey team for them in recent years. Overall, apart from the obvious teams, i.e. the ones that every team has a bad record against, like Liverpool and Man United, I agree with ericb and Green: Everton are considered to be our traditional bogey team. We have still beaten them 29 times though (not 5, eric). Contrast that with Pompey's recent record v Liverpool and Arsenal:

How exactly do you know he was doing this? Were you there? Did you see it? None of the TV cameras or reporters who were there saw anything like it and if they had, you can be sure, they'd be highlighting it. Hopefully, Austin doesn't read this forum because if he does he may have a case for taking legal action for libel against you. I don't know which club you support but stop trying to bring shame to our club by spreading rumours like this.

Although he'd been OK for Liverpool, he never kept a single clean sheet for us until the bribery scandal finally hit the headlines on the back pages of the tabloids. Then the very next game, at home v Arsenal in November, with Saints fans holding up 'Bruce is Innocent' banners and cheering him like he was a hero, he 'miraculously' kept his first Saints clean sheet and then kept another one in the following game at Palace. It was about the only time he deigned to show his Liverpool form for us. As for that FA Cup collapse v Spurs, it's a hard one to forget and ranks along with the nightmare at Tranmere as one of the worst memories for us Saints fans who were there. Another one I wish I hadn't been at was the 7-2 loss at White Hart Lane in 2000. The 6-1 defeat there in 1968, didn't seem so bad, as at the end of it we scored the final goal of the game and all sang, 'We're only warming up.' The 5-3 defeat there the season before was even better, as 10,000 of us completely took over the Park Lane End and sang ourselves hoarse for 90 minutes so took some pride from the fact that off the pitch we had taken over at White Hart Lane

He seems to be going through a similar transformation to Raheem Sterling, from being a player with obvious skill but little end product to becoming a really dangerous forward and a game winner.

You do wonder where we might have finished if Ralph had been our manager from the start of the season. There is still an FA Cup up for grabs.

Two great wins. Now let's win the next two as well. Redmond for England.