gecko

I do love coming to this thread. seeing there's been 20+ updates since the last time, and thinking "excellent something interesting must've happened" ... then scrolling through 20 posts about circles.

Start as you mean to go on ;-)

Surely only one; in the superposition ;-)

I'd bite anyone's hand off for a dodgy 1-0 win from a VAR cock-up and a 0-0 from tonight and Spurs

An very unexpected and welcome point. It will all be for nothing if we can't back it up against Brentford - that needs to be 3 points and another good performance to put everyone else under much more pressure. One win moves anyone in the bottom 9 a lot of places, so it's going to be a hell of an end to the season.

I can see either side of all of those incidents - all of them could have gone either way, in my opinion, for the reasons you've outlined and the counter argument from others. I think we can agree that we're pretty unlucky that they ALL went against us, and that both our CBs had complete brain-fart moments in one game I'd say Walcott was rightly called offside. Although it looked to me like the Grimsby line was very generous to them, possibly because he was obscured by Walcott - which if the VAR guy only gets one angle to draw lines from, then the system is completely pointless in cases like this.

Difficult to dispute this as the likely outcome. However they were garbage last night against Blackburn, and rightly got beat.

Yeah it was a cup game, so probably picked a different team to PL

Selles not done himself any favours there. Got to keep in mind though, loads of teams bring in fringe players for the cup matches, so I'll reserve judgement until the team sheet is out for the Chelsea game. If several of those names are starters, I won't be defending him ;-)

Sky news article has it mentioned; obviously doesn't mean it's legit though - https://www.skysports.com/football/news/11095/12810313/jesse-marsch-on-verge-of-becoming-southampton-manager-a-week-after-being-sacked-by-leeds Sky Sports News understands Marsch would be happy to sign a short-term deal, which also suits Southampton"

I've read a few posts saying how Marsch will be a good fit for our current players, with the additional note that his style is very similar to Ralphs (likes to high press, often plays a 4-2-2-2 etc). I'm not necessarily disagreeing; personally I'm in favour of a return to that style of play; it's way more interesting to watch when it works than say the Puel era sideways passing and recycling. One thing I've not really seen mentioned though, is that we've bought a lot of players recently, many of whom haven't actually trained under Ralph (Orsic, Alcaraz, Sulemana, Tall Paul, Bree) and those that did cross over with him (ABK, Lavia, Edozie, Larios, Aribo, DCC, Mara) trained under the other Ralph "totally-out-of-ideas-5-at-the-back" Hasenhuttl - many of those new names will be the first on the team sheet for a lot of people on this forum You'd hope that with all those players being utter professionals, hopefully they should pick up the routines pretty quick. I'm just not sure it's as simple as saying "Marsch plays like Ralph; ergo we'll be straight up to speed" Some of those names look like they'd work great in a high press team. e.g. Sulemana, Orsic are nice and pacy etc for the press. Some not so much. Some of the Man City recruits will probably be okay too, having coached under the City/Pep infrastructure too. as an aside, I don't mind the 6 month contract too much. If he fails miserably, we can ditch. If he succeeds then we can obviously renegotiate. In the mean time, we get someone who is head and shoulders above Jones, and the board get 6 months to sort out a contingency or two for every possible permutation of surviving/relegation/marsch leaving/not leaving etc.

I think the concern around Marsch is fairly well founded. - He's a lot like Ralph in his formations/style, which clearly stopped working for us for whatever reason - He's just been sacked by a relegation rival - He's was less successful than Ralph in the RedBull echelons That said, his first big win for me, is that he's not Jones. Secondly, he had his Leeds team at least scoring goals. If we're going to go down, and in all likelihood we will, then it would be nice to see a few more goals to make it seem like we're trying to stay up. Not saying he's my number 1, I'm not really sure who I think is the best man for the job right now, but we could certainly do worse.

Guess there wasn't a stat to show how much of a jackass the guy was, nor how much the fanbase would detest him in a matter of weeks.

With all these promising looking connections; the history with Selles/Ankerson, ex-players etc etc, and the fact he's been out of work for a little while. This guy looks half decent... so it really does baffle the mind that we ended up with Jones.

clearly your expectations are too high ;-)

Not that I wish to defend him, but I'd say it'd be ill advised to divulge his game-plan and specific tactics prior to the match, no? We'd rightly be slating him if he'd pointed out a bunch of flaws in the typical Wolves formations, and thus informing the opposition of how he's going to set us up to exploit it... In reality though, nothing in the previous games seems to suggest that he's ever come up with useful tactics for specific teams, so he couldn't spill the non-existent beans if he tried.

I wouldn't have been unhappy to see him brought back in January - seems to have stepped up nicely in a well organised Burnley. Whether he'd make an impact in our (currently) disjointed team, is up for debate. But as that wasn't the plan, every goal he scores this season is adding a healthy chunk to his sale value - 11 in 29 so far this season; better stats than a lot of the names we were linked with over the transfer window. Hope he goes on to score a load more

If memory serves, I'm sure I'd read somewhere that the Man City formation/tactics was actually something that players approached Jones with themselves. Perhaps that was all hearsay or I'm remembering incorrectly. But it wouldn't surprise me given what we've seen of Jones' selections, that the one game he had less input on, is the one we actually played well and deservedly won

getting the guy sectioned might achieve the same end-goal though :-D

BBC got an interesting take on that line up. If this is actually Jones' plan, then he deserves no one's support

If there was one of our other players for AA to hand him off to, I'd be agreeing with you. AA does need to make himself available for an out-ball/counter-attack should the Newcastle move break down. But that's not what happened; the problem is that he doesn't even look, drops off Longstaff in acres of space with none of our lot anywhere near him. AA delivered Longstaff into the box and then watched the rest happen in slo-mo

Absolutely agree. People must really hate Bednarek so much to place that first goal on him... Diallo, Alcaraz and JWP just jog their way back to the box after losing possession Armstrong follows Longstaff to the edge of the box and then just gives up and watches And KWP should force Trippier down the line All of that lot completely culpable in some way, but sure, it's Bednarek's fault for not making the block from an opponent who has 10 yards of space in every direction inside our box.

This is the definition of Saintsy. Play crap for 60 mins Boss it for 10... Let in a goal Play crap again.

yes, but the point is who do we get to improve on this? Players who outperform their xG are likely to be the ones we need to get in - and if we can use this amongst other factors to focus our scouting on people we can actually afford, then great

I like the simplicity here. However, if there is a statistic that points out to the club that our strikers regularly under perform, and it highlights who might be able to do a better job, then that could show who to bring in to improve the number of goals in the back of the net. xG correctly tells the club that Che misses loads, and if we'd kept Ings, we would (probably) have more goals than we do now - not sure many would argue that even if there wasn't a stat to back it up.