The9

Having only seen the goals, Juanmi seemed to be involved in a fair few of them.

To be fair they had 50+ shots in the 120 minutes, it wasn't like they weren't totally on top, just couldn't score. I did laugh at Lallana though. Also, if penalties are a "lottery", how come the higher-ranked side wins them the vast majority of the time? Good to see Saints destroy a side from a lower division, reminds me how far we've come - especially as Dean Lewington is STILL their left back somehow, despite somehow-now-Premier League footballer Michail Antonio utterly taking him apart just by hoofing the ball past him and sprinting after it when we were in League One.

10,000 and a bit in a stadium with 40,000 seats in it.

Except of course when we're playing a side with no confidence and from a lower league...

I can recommend my gran.

They've been saying it all day, Clasie was also named right next to him. Basically they probably have no idea what Bertrand's status is and have 1) just assumed he's still injured and 2) no idea what the injury that he DID have was.

Amazingly the Newcastle fans I know all still claim Pardew was bad for them.

I used to use it for our Fantasy Football back in 2000. I don't understand the preciousness about a descriptive phrase lifted from the Champions League when there are fluorescent pink ankle-high boots being worn in most matches.

The thing is, Saints "looking good" is mostly just stopping things happening before they do. And occasionally scoring. We occasionally scored twice, it was just the other bit where a bad official's decision, a terrible defensive decision and basically a lucky rebound counted as goals. As I mentioned, there are very fine margins between the 40-pass comfortable containment and the key-pass-later conceding a goal.

I'm fairly sure your "absolutely abysmal" was Saints comfortably containing. It wasn't like Man U's goals came from any kind of pressure - the first was so out of the blue the linesman forgot to flag for offside, the second we gave them from nothing and the first 40 passes of the third showed no threat whatsoever to the goal. Now admittedly you can say "we should have been trying to get the ball back" for that period, but even then there's an argument that says the other team having the ball and passing it around without threatening the goal isn't really a problem, we're beyond the old school "not having the ball = chasing and getting tired" theory. Had they not managed to find a throughball, chuck a stepover and got lucky with a rebound those first 40 passes could have just been Saints asserting their organisational skill in preventing any kind of threat and getting a bit of recovery time in.

We won't have when Wanyama inevitably leaves and if we can reduce that impact by introducing someone gradually (like Juanmi for instance) then provided we can afford it we probably should. Not to mention that wages could be significantly lower in January than next summer.

Fair enough, bit of thread drift.

Given the level of luck involved in influencing football results, I'm sure there are a pile of mini-moments which have massive significance, but as yet this is a relatively unpublished area of analytics.

It was nearer "we stepped up our signing of Cedric when it became clear Clyne wasn't going to sign...".

I think it might be a difficult thing to record objectively. I guess the only way to categorise it as "ridiculous" save is to gather a bunch of positional data from the players, ball velocity, position, etc and find the outliers.

Will be interesting to see if we offer our key players massively improved deals BEFORE the market moves and wage demands rise or if it's going to be an even-faffier-than-usual summer with the top 6 clubs waiting as late as possible to meet the inflated wage demands of signings. There's SO much more money at Prem clubs from this new deal that the whole market is going to blow up and some weird stuff is probably going to happen before it settles down again. We're pretty good at exploiting market inefficiencies so it might benefit us, but I can't imagine agents aren't going to be agitating more than ever before this season.

We haven't yet played Cedric in a competitive midweek match and the following weekend to my recollection, so I'd be inclined to think he won't play both tonight and Saturday. I'm still clinging to the belief that we've got him on a strength programme and we're protecting him from over-training/over-playing by rotating him out, but we probably won't know that unless he's RB for every match come January. I can see us wanting to use him on Saturday as we're at home and not against a top 6 side, so in that case he wouldn't play tonight.

I'm still trying to work out what Martina did for people to describe him as "awful", as far as I could tell on the weekend, there was one moment where he hesitated over making a pass from the left back position, and then completed the pass. I don't remember him getting beaten out wide, or any terrible tackles, or even any particularly dodgy positioning? Also, being "third choice right back" is hardly an indictment given that we basically signed him as emergency cover, plus the decision-making on first over second was hardly convincing, so why assume 2nd over 3rd is any more accurate? And of course he was played out of position. So what is it that has suddenly made him as bad as *I* thought he was in Salzburg, when he was bloody awful - but have since revised my opinion significantly upwards to "competent and solid if unspectacular".

Because when Pochettino wanted more attacking skill he picked Clyne and when he wanted the defensive skill he picked Chambers. i.e. it was the exact same situation of balancing the attacking/defensive need just with two different players. Great example, couldn't have picked a better one. If you're asking "why wasn't playing a crappy backpass an issue for them...", well, that would be why Yoshida isn't first choice for anything.

Again, this ignores that JWP bombing down the right set up the first goal. Now this is a sample of one*, but it does show that your suggestion isn't the only way we can get crosses in from the right - if that's even what the team wants to do. *pointless disclaimer because some people seem to think everything that is offered as an illustrative example has to be statistically significant...

I guess it depends on which skills he was after, as Yoshida was an understandable choice for RB on merit for certain skill sets he prioritised for that match. Koeman's next "I need defensive skills more than attacking ones at right back" thought process is definitely going to include "not gifting goals directly to strikers", however, which might change the decision.

Thanks for the quote, there. So, "moronic", "p155 poor" and "simpleton". Stay classy.

He didn't say he was limited, he said he thought Yoshida would do it better. And no, it's basically Clyne 3 years ago but minus a bit of bulk.

Is it? A 2 year contract for a bloke to fill in across the back 4 at a time when Bertrand and Gardos were injured, Caulker and Van Dijk weren't yet Saints players and we didn't have another right back other than Cedric. Sunderland would have signed a Man U reserve and Villa some kid no-one's heard of who can't defend (and we already had one of those, hoho). I'm still not sure why people think he was bad on Sunday tbh, I must have missed something. He was also a hundred times better than he was on his debut out of position at left back, too. However, I'm over that, as he's been decent enough since.

You wouldn't have said that if you went to Stevenage. Gazzaniga in goal, Shaw (debut, and his defending was shaky), Seaborne, Richardson, Butterfield. And we won 4-1.