verlaine1979

Lol he's one of the least mobile/anticipatory strikers we've had in decades. If the ball comes in from wide, you can guarantee 9 times out of 10 that Che will be on his heels wondering what happened.

Assuming he's fit, he can do a lot better than the Championship.

The way you can tell that our possession football is mostly tedious propaganda is that it doesn't often result in a similar imbalance in chances. We had 72% of the ball, but Coventry had 11 shots to our 12, and 4 on target to our 3. Occasionally we do convert dominance of possession into dominance of chances, but most of the time we have double the amount of the ball but only a handful more chances if we're lucky. All the movement has been coached out of the side in favor of ensuring that there are always open players to pass to (not that we had a lot of movement to begin with - watched Bournemouth's game against United last weekend, and it's years since I've seen a Saints side play with that kind of pace, fluidity and confidence even in a one off).

Che was the scuffer. Can only hit a clean strike when it's leathered straight down his laces. Any sort of side-foot or precision and he fumbles it. Was evident in his Brum video, and so it proved. Terrible, terrible finisher.

Che Adams is an utterly shit premier league striker. So is Adam Armstrong. Hence, we were relegated from the premier league. Now, by virtue of tenacity and a wider variety of finishing, it appears that AA is a more reliable championship striker. There's no mystery here.

Which poster was advocating for Openda a couple of summers ago when he moved to Lens for peanuts? I want to hear who else they recommend...

Err, I think he's literally just joking about being the fastest player at the club by a mile.

He's not playing shit on purpose. He's playing shit because that's his level.

I'd say it's more like every third game. There have been a few on Sky Sports Arena + extra games in the UK that never made it on to ESPN+.

We're just not good enough to play this style. It won't come with practice. It all falls apart if you misplace any of the short quick passes, and you can guarantee in almost every passage of possession we'll play at least one ball behind the intended recipient that makes them have to backtrack to retrieve it. It's so easy to get pressure on us because we simply do not have the technical quality to play through it. It's so fucking dumb.

Yup. Ten seconds of eye contact and a nod before each pass.

He thumped in a couple from less than 10 yards in our first few games. He was hardly pulling up trees. Reversion to the mean, that's all.

He hadn't even scored a professional goal with his head until midway through his time at saints.

Unfortunately this isn't a style that scales linearly. Your players can either pass the ball quickly and accurately, or they can't. And if they can't, even if it's in terms of putting the ball a ball a yard behind the intended receiver so they have to stop and track back, the benefits quickly evaporate. Up thread, someone talks about "what if your opponent sits back and doesn't take the bait when you're passing it around at the back". Good teams, like City and Barca then proceed to play the game entirely in your half. But we've already shown we don't have the skill or composure to play that way without losing it and getting killed on the break. Obviously you can still play keep ball in your own half to boost your possession numbers, but that's not the same... And as others have said, no matter how purist the principle, Guardiola's sides have always been absolutely ruthless on the break. It's an integral part of the tactic. If you win it back in a good position, you bomb forward, no second thoughts.

Fox was a fantastic crosser of the ball. Completely found out as a defender at PL level, but he was a cut above as an attacking FB in a dominant team in the Champ.

Stoke had very good positions on the edge of our box a number of times, particularly in the first half, but their final ball was catastrophically abysmal. Other teams recently have found themselves in similar positions and punished us.

Happy to get the win, but that's about it. The way we slow down and turn back whenever we get a break or a turnover is incredibly frustrating. Was a great fk, but nine times out of ten the ref turns a blind eye to that and we go home disappointed. All our best moments came from players in motion, playing the ball quickly for other players to run on to. As soon as we slow things down and try to "build" we haven't got a clue. Downes had a good game and Sulemana will have the beating of most fullbacks in the league. The raw materials are there for us to be among the best in the league, but on that performance I'd say we're about where we belong in the table at the moment.

Lol love the "in the trenches" rhetoric. Who's going first to get shot in the head by a jerry sniper just for taking a peek at no man's land, eh? Fonte would've done it.

100% We passed Sheff Weds to death without ever really looking like we were going to turn them over, and it's gone downhill from there. There have been no convincing performances under Martin, only mediocre ones and shit ones.

That's a noble sentiment, but we can't afford to fail so badly that we're not in the running for promotion this season. Solak didn't buy the club to be long-term mid-table Championship also-rans, and he's as likely to cut his losses at that point as he is to pump in additional money.

Question is - with the resources and squad the club has, what should be par performance after 8 games? I'd argue that losing more than we've won on a four game losing streak and having comfortably the worst defensive record in the league is well below par. If we were sitting in sixth with a mixed back of results, I doubt anyone would be complaining and we'd for the most part be optimistic about potentially stringing together a run that would get us up alongside Leicester et al. So then you look at the quality of performances and ask yourself if we've just been on the end of an unlucky series of results, with good performances not getting the points they deserve? On the basis of those quantitative and qualitative criteria, we're nowhere near where we expected to be, and so far the quality of performances is trending down rather than up. Something is very wrong, and from listening to him, it's not clear to me that Martin knows what it is or how to fix it. If he wants to play the possession game he's coaching, he needs the players to be so much more mobile than they currently are. Possession teams are in almost constant motion, while our players (with a few exceptions) are static, waiting for the ball. It's so glaringly obvious, but all Martin talks about are bravery and individual errors, which have nothing to do with our lack of movement. I suspect he has a fundamentally superficial understanding of the game he's trying to play, along with a superficial understanding of the quality of players at his disposal (hence why Aribo, who has spent his whole career playing in the UK, is more trustworthy than Alcaraz, who hasn't). I'll be astonished if he has the capacity to turn this around.

Not really. We just didn't want to be dicked 10-1 on aggregate over the last three games.

Annoying this is, they're not even passing triangles most of the time. At least with a triangle at some point someone has to pass the ball forward. Most of the time we just seem to pass it back and forth along the same flat plane.

It's so basic - whether you're talking about City or Brighton or whoever, the DM is an integral part of playing it out from the back, coming in close to give the more limited CBs options. But our CMs almost never come to collect, leaving the likes of Holgate and Bednarek to act as playmakers. Not only is it idiotic in the extreme, it's doubly annoying as it isn't even the fucking tactic we're meant to be copying.

Can't even claim it's because Pep doesn't play with quick wingers anymore. Doku must be the fastest player in the league and loves a sprint down the wing.