coalman

Meanwhile Bournemouth are 2-0 up against Liverpool. A lesson in moving the ball forward with urgency when there's the chance.

One might argue that the bigger risk was to rebuild the team around that core of players (again)

Oh good - we're in the middle of another process and we still haven't gelled as a team after the summer transfer activity. Looks like Martin left a copy of his big book of excuses behind when he left. Living and breathing the game sounds like the new version of "the players trained really well this week".

I would say calling someone a Fat Steven Gerrard is a sign of respect. Gerrard was an incredible footballer.

There's a lot of words there that all appear to be "blah". Obviously, I didn't bother to read it.

Another club jumps on the wannabe Brighton bandwagon with a data led approach. The name's Bord, James Bord https://www.theguardian.com/football/2026/jan/23/sheffield-wednesday-james-bord-united-poker

All well and good but have they solved their rat infestation problem yet?

Sounds like a good age to bring him back in to bring some experience to the dressing room. He can join the U21 to 1st team coach pathway behind Lallana and Romeu. Get it done, Rasmus.

It depends what his goal is. If he thinks he's bought a lucrative player trading empire then you could argue we've broken even (maybe even slightly ahead with Goztepe) despite two relegations. Just imagine how much money he'll make when Rasmus reworks his Brentford magic. Note I do not subscribe to this viewpoint but I have been in enough meetings with billionaires where similar nonsense was peddled. It's unlikely that Dragan's primary interest is how successful Saints are. Unlike Eckert who apparently lives and breathes Southampton.

I genuinely believe that Rasmus is the only "football" person in the room when Dragan talks about Sport Republic. And Rasmus has stats and spreadsheets to "prove" everything is working as planned. Throw in the fact that we've largely recouped what he's spent on transfers and he may not see there being a problem.

Oh bugger, you're right.

Yes, and Bazunu has a 100% clean sheet record when playing for Stoke.

I'm not sure our dressing room needs more dysfunction 😉

At some point Tonda has to be practical about demands on his players. He's not going to be about to play the high octane style he wants every game due to the frequency of fixtures and sometimes, like last night, he's going to have to rotate some of the lesser squad members to make sure his core team are ready for the big games and hope he gets lucky. It's what all the truly great managers do and you could argue that his consistency in both playing style and personnel has been a key part of our results over the last couple of months.

What are his passing stats, though?

50 points would've been enough to survive last season. We need 12 more with 18 games left to hit that mark. So four more nights like last night out of 18.

Playing with 2 centre backs means we move the ball quicker as there's one fewer centre back to put their foot on the ball and move it on at glacial pace. We cunted about far less than recently because they needed to move it quickly because there were fewer easy options five yards away. It also means there's more likely to be an option in front of them. And, that they are more likely to take responsibility for defending rather than watching each other. Playing with Fellows in his natural position means their left back is going have a worse night and spend more time pushed back towards their own penalty area. It also means Fellows can last closer to 90 minutes rather than blowing hard after 60. Playing with Wellington means there isn't a massive gap in No Manning's Land for the other team to exploit every time they attack. Wellington linked up really well with Scienza in a way that Manning doesn't as well as being present when he needed to be. Playing with Stewart up front means we have more options to move it forwards and carry a threat in the box. Though, it was also good to see him being protected rather than run into the ground. For all his goals, we're a worse side with Adam Armstrong in the side as a lone centre forward (why does every Saints manager have to learn this the hard way?). Last night we defended further up the pitch and were less ponderous when we had the ball. It's nowhere near where we need to be but it was actually watchable football for the first time in a couple of months. Without the usual suspects playing their particular brand of walking keep ball we looked so much better. With Charles back we can get back towards a midfield of him and Jander which is always going to be more progressive than Downes with his inability to turn and move the ball forwards.

Eckert knows what it's like to go for a long spell without winning. Thank god for the pure desire in the team. Though he may find that the second win after a long spell without winning is also pretty hard. Back to the old Saints complacency mantra of "we've won a game of football so everything is fine" "After a long spell (of not winning) the first win is always the hardest. "We had to dig very deep and in the end it was just pure desire to win that game of football. "It comes from so deep inside to grind out games and credit to the boys because they put so much into every minute of the game. "Today we were much more direct and we got the ball forward a bit quicker, Ross Stewart was very good up front for the 60 minutes he gave us today."

I'm just not used to seeing a player in our left back position when the other team gave the ball. It's unnatural

We're at the stage of Tonda's Saints manager career where it's time to drop Martin's favourites. Dragan is getting some phone calls tomorrow.

Crikey. A line up I don't hate at first sight. Sheff Utd won't have prepared for this.

Probably best not to watch the actual games and just look at the stats page afterwards then.

"looking forward to" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Even if I think that the players will rouse themselves to win this so they don't have to feel bad about not showing up on Sunday.

If we look at Hull we created more good chances. That's true. But the "we had higher xG so we should've won" argument only works if there are non systemic issues leading to the defeat. For example a suicidal back pass and two players failing to make a challenge on a corner xG comes from averages and there's a special place in hell for people who blindly use averages in decision making with doing things like understanding the modality or variance of the data. There's also the classics correlation Vs causation bias where you need to understand why two data points align. Eg. did Downs score goal in Bundesliga 2 because he was a good striker or because they kept bouncing off his arse.