The9

Would I get a hammering on here if I said "the 451 at Arsenal with Lambert up top showed what could have happened at the Etihad against City if we'd started with him there" ?

Who've we got at the moment ?

Tbh, I don't know how much more developed you can get in the Championship when you mostly can't sign Prem standard players or offer the wages until you're actually in the Prem itself. It's just something you have to do when you get up there - hence part of the advantage yo-yo clubs have the second time back, they have Prem experience plus the newer players who filled the gaps left by the (usually) mercenaries when they went down who have a fresh attitude and are a new problem for the other managers to work out. I don't think we've helped ourselves by only signing one experienced Prem pro, especially as he's not pulling up any trees at the moment. Will be interesting to see if Cork has any impact on his return.

Fair point, what I think people are overlooking is that because we've come so far so quickly, our core of standby players includes people we signed as prospects in League One (eg Seaborne) or decent Championship players for getting us out of that league. Must be difficult to prepare for Man U and Arsenal when you've got Ben Reeves pretending to be Santi Cazorla on the training pitch. Consequently we have shape and organisation, but no experience of how to react in match-speed situations. People may recall this was why I was banging on about Prem experience pre-season - we can bring in overseas players who SHOULD be able to adapt quickly to the pace of the English game, but it's still not quite the same as having already done it and having the expectation and knowledge of what to do at that speed (viz Gary Neville slating Clyne "wafting a leg" at the cross for his own goal on Saturday which he didn't need to do, and Hooiveld not retaining his composure for his OG).

No, Bale was given his debut 6 months after Redknapp left, by Burley in the last home match of the season. There's quite enough to criticise Redknapp for without making stuff up.

I didn't think Kelv did all that much wrong either.

Yeah, I know their form was good, but it was Wigan, with Wigan's turnover of players, and their traditionally slow start, yet they killed us off by keeping possession for large chunks of that match, which is something we weren't able to do to them. In addition they had the likes of Di Santo and Kone who looked Prem class, and Maloney, who looks like Steve Davis with more ability.

I thought Puncheon was pretty poor on Saturday, his usual reaction to a good performance, like the one he had agaisnt Man U. He's just not a player who likes doing the work towards his own goal.

Fonte as well, for being too far away to cover his CB partner, and Yoshida for getting spun and not chasing back flat out. And Kelv a bit. Along with whoever in the midfield was meant to be stopping the ball being played forward (very similar to the Tevez goal actually).

It is and it isn't. If he offers a threat himself it becomes much more difficult that to just stand two people next to him to compete the header and pick up the loose ball. Vidic and Ferdinand could have done the same but chose to sit goalside with only one of them competing the header - that allowed Lambert to pick up the loose ball himself and get the rest of the team involved in the opposition's half, which Arsenal only allowed once (we scored from that too). If we're going to play the "long ball to target man" which we we so keen to do for the last 15 minutes against Man U, then he has to be someone who can threaten behind or it's just too predictable. Every other direct side that does that has a pacy target man - even Holt can spin in behind. Maybe not Steve Morison, come to think of it. But the likes of Bent, Papis Cisse, Demba Ba, Pogrebnyak, Rodallega, even Andy Carroll can go in behind. Without that option, we're stuck playing "facing the wrong way football" up front, hoping for the knockdown to go somewhere good so we can get possession high up the pitch. As it happens, our goal came from the usual "Lambert to feet, out to the wing, cross to the far post" routine again, the one time we had the ball under control in Arsenal's half. That wasn't happening often enough - but as you've said, it was fine at home to Man U when the support was there. The key to our season so far has been getting the ball far enough up the pitch to get Lambert into the box with bodies around him to pick up loose balls. Kind of ironic for a side used to keeping possession.

I was quite drunk so thought I may have imagined this bit, cheers for reminding me.

"We're Southampton, we do what we want" the week after the FA Cup defeat to Man U not ring any bells then ?

Re: "leaving Lambert isolated". Significant differences between "linking Lambert" against Man U and "isolated Lambert" v Arsenal, all because the midfield was further back and the defenders played the second ball much more intelligently. I know I'm going to get the usual "you hate Lambert" nonsense for this, but how easy is it for Arsenal to prevent him doing ANYTHING when they know we have absolutely no threat in behind them whatsoever ? Mertesacker and Vermaelen only needed one to jump and one to sweep up in front of him, and that was it. With the rest of the team miles back, he was never going to have the time to win the ball, get it down, hold it up and link play. Against Man U it worked because the supporting players were in and around, on Saturday they were way too far back and Arsenal's CBs (unlike Vidic and Ferdinand) were able to sweep up everything. It is SO much easier to be a target man if there's the chance you can get it down and create something for yourself, or peel in behind occasionally so your markers have to consider dropping off sometimes instead of attacking every header.

I read what was there without any emphasis. Which came across to me as "I doubt Gary Neville could offer Saints any skills because of a lack of ability on his part over what we already have" rather than "for what reason would he help Saints in particular?". Now you've clarified, yeah, there's no particular reason he'd want to help Saints - I doubt doubt he'd be happy to do so though - I assume he's not getting paid to be an England coach to merely spout platitudes (Phil Neal and Sammy Lee examples aside), so that would suggest he's a decent coach with something to contribute. However, I don't think the problems are from coaching, apart from maybe our tendency to stay narrow as opponents exploit the space wide of the box. It's just going to take time for the players to come up to the speed of decision making and reaction required in the Premier League - some of them will, some won't have that capability. It's one of the reasons I was spouting off about Prem experience all pre-season, the learning curve usually involves losing matches in the interim - lucky for us the 3 top sides we've played will give us problems the others won't pose and have steepened that curve, but whether we actually learn from them is another matter.

So speaks the man who doesn't have a clue about the sort of tactical and positional analysis he's providing around Sky's coverage. Imagine Andy Gray with the tactics board but actually telling people the kind of basic technical skills that all decent players who've had coaching know but the public never gets to hear about. Having said that, I think Neville's "you learn at school at 12 or 13 the basics about the full backs moving across" betrayed a life at a top club's football Academy as opposed to grassroots youth parks football. Admittedly at 39 I'm now of a different era, but I didn't even get coached the basics until I was 21, and that was only because I put myself on a preliminary coaching course. Even in 1995/6 whilst at a club who'd played in the UEFA Cup that season I never actually had a positional coaching session.

There's nothing Neville said that they won't already be coaching them, it's down to the players to make the right decisions - their structure and positioning (mostly) is sound.

Anyone who doesn't blame Fonte at least in part for goal 3 really has no right to be criticising. Gary Neville saying "Arsenal were fantastic" is also at least partially relevant. Their speed of thought outstripped ours in most situations - that will come with experience.

I'm amused that this is regarded enough "news" for Sky to be writing an article about it. If Italian football (and their economy generally) wasn't screwed, they wouldn't be selling to us (and with such apparently desperate conditions about the money up front) in the first place.

It is however, far more relevant. Much as I hate to ignore the Wigan result as a worrying pointer, shall we have a statistical analysis of how many of those promoted teams played the previous season's top 3 in their first 4 matches ?

I would. I wouldn't bet against you starting two identical threads on the subject though.

In that case I have a bridge I'd like to sell you.

Thanks to the complete bell-ends in the row behind me for "you fcking black cnt" after the first goal and endless "fcking jews" "fcking jewish" over and over all match long, really made me proud to... oh no, wait. Never mind 6-1, THAT is embarrassing. How the hell the stewards didn't manage to pick them out God knows... As for the Theo chant, I had assumed it was to make the point to Chamberlain that we were only still holding one of the two of them in any esteem.

No, but we were Southampton FC, which is at least as relevant from a statistical perspective.

98/99.

It's not the same brand ball as the numerous different ones we've used in the FL, no, but I don't recall anyone blaming the ball for us scoring twice against the Manchester clubs, and besides, they've been exclusively using that ball in all training sessions for over 2 months which is plenty of time to get used to it. As we learned with the Jabulani in the 2010 World Cup, not all same-brand balls are the same anyway. This season's is a Nike Maxim, last year's was the Nike Seitiro, they're not the same design either, though the basic number of panels behind it hasn't changed since at least 2007. How they feel might have from Nike ball to Nike ball though. Either way, it's a rubbish excuse.