Tommy Mulgrew

IMO, the squad we have now is no worse than the one that Ralph had and he managed to keep us up, mostly by some margin. Unless Martin changes his apparently preferred style of ponderous passing the opposition (and crowd) to death - almost entirely in our half of the pitch - I have no doubt that we shall get relegated. So far, he has given no indication that he will. Given Ralph’s example, another manager could very well keep us up. It is definitely worth a try. Even though your record of appointing managers so far is dismal, come on SR, roll the dice. 🙏

He watches them play only when he ought to bring on a substitute or two or to tell them to play differently. He is the one who before every match tells them how to play; and look how that turned out so far this season.

Ralphball at its best. 😉

https://www.footballinsider247.com/exclusive-southamptons-board-holding-russell-martin-talks/ Some movement reported at last but not especially definitive. Too many ifs and buts for my liking. But here’s hoping. 🤞

I don’t usually disagree with you, trews, but this time I do (if I may be so bold). Charlton has a manager who is offering to resign; hence, “I wish we were Charlton!”. (Agree about Jones, though.)

We’re pretty much where you would expect: equal bottom of the table. ”I wish we were Everton!”

At present and with the way that we play, we are by far the weakest team in the league. Wolves, although below us on goal difference, have scored three away from home at Brentford. Everton, Ipswich, Leicester and Palace are picking up draws and Everton and Leicester have even won a game. We have not even looked like winning; we could not score against 10-man Newcastle and although we came close to beating Ipswich we were second-best in most aspects of that game; they more than deserved to draw. Other relegation-threatened teams have shown commendable levels of grit and determination to grind out results whereas Russball completely drains our side of fighting spirit and magnifies mistakes that even our better players make in our half (Sugawarra and Downes most recently). We just have to adjust the style of our play away from faffing around in and near our penalty area and get the ball up the pitch a lot more quickly, avoiding having to face 10 men defending in front of us and us recycling the ball back to Rambo from promising attacking positions/free kicks in their half. Russ has had long enough to learn those and other lessons - lots of other posts have talked about the ways in which we can get more competitive - and, if he cannot get a grip and get us firing in a high-tempo, high pressing way, he has to be sacked. He could do far worse than to watch and learn from some of the Ralph, Koeman and Poch games against Arsenal and Man City to see how to get points from the most unlikely sources. IMO, we need at least nine more points before the end of November to have any chance of avoiding relegation. I wish I were confident that RM could deliver them. From what I have seen so far, I think he cannot. We need to get someone who can. Sadly, I don’t trust SR to do it. 😩😡😥🥺

The BBC lineup, but with Taylor instead of Manning, is not a bad one, tbf. But Manning fgs!

It won’t be “one nil to the AAARSenal” tomorrow, though, will it? Time for RM to get Ralph’s playbook out. It got us a few good results against Arsenal and Man City when we used to press high and break fast.

Calling gio; calling gio. Are you out there? I hope you are not ill and are well enough to post on here. I know several dozen people who are hoping to hear from you. I, for one, am interested in what you have to say. 🫣 🤞

Shells of nuts.

Are you sure that is true? How do you know? What is your HP? (Note that I did not mention ketchup!) What has ABK done to deserve it? If true and ABK has done nothing to warrant such treatment, that in itself is enough for RM to get sacked, regardless of the dross he gets the squad to serve up each game this season.

Che scores again to equalise against Empoli in the coppa italia. If only we had a striker as prolific as him!

But only one point. And accumulating points is the whole, ahem, point of EPL games. Our opponents were just about the weakest team in the league and, like us, acclimatising themselves to life in the top league. We could not even beat Ipswich at home. Unfortunately, that takes the gloss off the positives you mention. We need to do almost everything an awful lot better if we are to get enough points to stay up this season. Starting next Monday.

Just for the record, Charlie, what gives you such optimism? 👍 And can I have some of what you have been drinking? 👅 🙏

But we did not fight hard enough. Just look at the photo of the Ipswich goal: Taylor turning his back on the shot and Aribo turning side-on. That is not good enough. And what other team would spurn an attacking free-kick three quarters up the pitch in favour of playing it back to our penalty area and then give the ball away? And spend 80 minutes of the game not trying to get a second goal? One might lay the blame on the players but the buck stops with the manager in my opinion. If he wanted something different, our manager would have stopped all that type of crap, which we see served up almost every game, long before now. Blaming our second-rate strikers is the easy way out. A good manager gets the most out of the squad he has at his disposal. Ours is patently not doing so. Yes, a Pelle or a Lambert, even an Ings, would be a great help but we do not have one now. We need to show some fight and guile and I did not see enough of that today. It was a performance that reeked of sleepwalking from the jaws of victory to inevitable relegation if we continue to play as we have so far this season. Today’s game and its management was way beyond depressing. More change in our attitude and our on-field strategy is needed. And quickly. Ipswich at home was our best and supposedly easiest chance of three points and we blew it. The red and white future is not bright; it’s really, really grim. I, for one do not like it. I am angry and saddened by our inability to gain three points at home from a fellow relegation-fodder side. Depressing.

VAFC doing a perfect Saints impression: three goals up before half-time, contrive to throw it all away, go into injury-time 3:2 up, concede a goal, which is then disallowed, and then give away a penalty in the eight minute of a seven-minute extra-time to draw 3:3. That is taking SR team likeness to extremes. VAFC and Saints - perfect partners. Better luck next match, Christophe.

On Sunday Maya’s LA Galaxy beat Los Angeles, their closest (in both senses) rival 4:2, after being two goals down in the first 15 minutes, to go 7 points clear at the top of the western MLS league having played two games more than LA. Five games to go before playoffs. Could well be yet another pinnacle in Maya’s stellar career. Japanese, Dutch, English, Italian, German and American leagues so far, more than 100 caps for Japan, most of them while playing for us, and Japan captain for several years and in team of the tournament at one of the World Cups he played in. And he recommended Suga to us and us to him. Perhaps he knows a proper striker or two! Then he would be a Saints legend.

“One man went to mow …”.

U r right; my mistake: I thought I remembered seeing his name when I looked up the teams last week but I was wrong.

Yes. Played in the first game; an unused sub in today’s earlier win v Bahrain. Not sure when he comes back to UK.

S. Sam Amo A 😩 A. Aaron Ramsdale 😬 Aah💡 Adam Armstrong 👍 S. erm -who? 🫵

🤭🫣🥱😴🤐 😭 read hypo’s reply and consider, please. don’t tar everyone who disagrees with you with a personal abuse accusation; most of us on here are perfectly reasonable people.

I think you might like a cold shower, BarberSaint.

I cannot recall anyone on here wanting to “ditch the style our players know”. But many, me included, want Russ to vary the style a bit to avoid so much short passing between our CBs and GK in our own penalty area, let alone inside the 6 yard goal box, while under severe pressure from pressing opposition attackers. And for our midfielders to receive more balls on the turn and go forwards in a fast and more direct attack instead of passing back to a CB or our GK, who are still faced with being pressed. Preferably, the GK to spray some longer balls outside our penalty area, probably out wide in preference to up the middle, where we have no TP to harry oppo CBs into a mistake. Call the latter Plan B if you like but it does not imply the complete abandonment of a fast, flowing PB style of football. The turgid stuff that we serve up almost all the time will not do at all. We had exactly the same vituperative conversation/argument last year. Let’s not do it all over again. Unless he is more pragmatic than he has been so far this season and for much of last season, Russ will be exposed by any other EPL manager and team as a one-trick pony and we shall be consigned to the Championship again well before this season ends. Hardly any of us want him sacked regardless of what he does in the coming months; most of us are willing him to be more flexible in how we set-up and play, rather like how he adjusted for the last few games of last season. Here is one of my posts from last season after our horrendous defeat by Leicester. It received 23 likes and is just as apposite now as it was then. What Leicester did to us then is what almost every EPL team could do to us this season.