Rasiak-9-

Where should we be in the table? Who should we be above? Which of the teams above us are actually worse than us? These are the three questions he'll never answer.

Re. read the OP. We haven't won a match in which an opponent has scored an equaliser or taken the lead for almost precisely a year now. (The last time being the 2-1 vs Chelsea 30/03/2013)

If you're going to criticise the manager, it is necessarily true that you believe the team is underachieving and that another manager would have achieved a better set of results/higher points tally. As such, here's an idea, if you're going to criticise the manager you have to name teams that we should be above in the league, whilst also naming the points total we ought to have. Now, obviously you're allowed not to do this, but failure to do so, for the reason I've just described, takes a great deal away from the credibility of your post. We do have a major problem with mental strength and holding on to leads, but overall its been a solid season. (Doubtless there'll still be a few idiots who think that I'm somehow contradicting myself by being disappointed with the loss yet viewing it in perspective with the way the season has gone overall!

A meaningful goal (an equaliser or goal to take the lead) A fair few people (a minority i'll admit) laughed with stupid statements like "oh what a surprise its harder to win matches when the opposition score :lol:" Guess you've learned the hard way now that its been symptomatic of a major problem. As my old mother used to say. "If you don't hear, you must feel."

This. The season running up to the last World Cup, Darren Bent, when in his prime, was the top English goalscorer with 23 goals in the Premiership for flipping lower mid-table Sunderland and never got a look in. He arguably did more to justify a place in that squad than any of the three players being discussed in this.

Its about the long term pal. If we can finish in the top half of the table and break the top six, whilst consistently staying there for three or four years on the spin, the club will attract the best players, bring in more revenue, grow its fanbase and give ourselves a shout at graduating to the top four. From all of that, the trophies will come naturally. Personally I think it does smack of arrogance if you're genuinely ungrateful for where we are at the moment. Derby, Forest, Leeds, Leicester, Sheffield Wednesday. All of whom are bigger clubs than us and have been stuck in the lower leagues for well over a decade in most cases (with one season of pure embarrassment for Derby and Leicester finally getting their crack at the Prem starting next season). Following on from that; Coventry, Sheffield United, Ipswich, Charlton, Middlesborough, Watford, Blackburn, Bolton, Birmingham, Reading... all of them could reasonably claim to have Premiership potential. When you look at the lower leagues and teams of similar size we could absolutely still be down there now. When you look at the difference between us and Norwich, a team of similar size who spent a similar amount of money to us at the start of the season and whom a lot of people predicted would finish above us, then my goodness am I pleased at where we've got ourselves.

Well its already been mentioned, but if you're picking him on chances created and as a deep-lying support striker, there's no way he's getting in ahead of Lallana, Barkley, Rooney, Sturridge etc. The first two strikers pick themselves, the third is likely (unfortunately) to be Welbeck. The fourth is therefore going to be a target man, and in that respect I think Hodgson will rightly go with Andy Carroll.

Pochettino called him over. If it was that big a deal he'd have told him to **** off back into the game. "Fancied himself injured". How about he WAS injured and was honest with the manager that he needed to be taken off. Had a superb game today. He'll never please some of our fans though. Need more players like Chaplow and Hammond eh?

Chelsea are the only team we've lost to where I've been happy to more-or-less shrug my shoulders after the game having been simply beaten by a better team. There isn't a single other team in the league in which I felt we couldn't at least contest the match.

Back from the game. Lovren and the entire back four and goalkeeper superb.

Oh and the other thing is that they should just have a straightforward league instead of this whole 'playoff' trope they love to include in their sports. Always annoys me that. I follow the NBA and you get some cracking games, but its all completely undermined by the fact that when two good teams play each other in the regular season it literally doesn't matter. And of course anyone who's got any chance of winning the thing could never possibly miss out on the playoffs. Imagine if the top 8 at the end of the Premiership season played a knock-out cup competition and Manchester United were in no worse a position to win the competition than the top four? Awful. (although incidentally I realise that hypothetical would certainly solve our nothing-to-play for syndrome completely!)

The problem for building a real 'soccer/football' culture (which lets be frank, thrives on there being a bit of an 'edge') in the US is the lack of away fans because of the size of the country. It'll never be as big as their main three sports but in a country of 300m people which cares far more passionately about sport than we do as a whole (and yes, that is dead true btw) it really doesn't have to be in order to be relatively successful.

As a philosophy graduate I very much enjoyed!

Just makes you realise how many talented midfielders the French have at their disposal. Really would be one of the favourites for the tournament if they hadn't had a good decade of crippling mismanagement at international level. Its like England but even more extreme.

2 goals from open play all season and we're expecting too much?

Adrian you're one of the better posters on here in my opinion; but the way you've spun that is completely unfair on the people who have different opinions to you. If I may be so bold, I'm going to speak for the posters you're referring to. We haven't 'turned on' Lambert. You make it sound like we've got some kind of vendetta against him or that our problem with him is personal or malicious when a sensible poster like you should really know that its nothing of the sort. We don't dislike the guy and we aren't ungrateful for the contribution that he's made to the team and the club throughout the past four years. All we're doing is giving an honest answer when people start threads and post things like "where are we going wrong?/why can we dominate possession but not score?". When you take off your Saints-supporting spectacles and look at our team objectively I'm afraid you can come to conclusions which might well not fit the rhetoric and propaganda that I feel a lot of our fans would like to believe. Lambert has scored two goals from free kicks, two penalties, two goals from corners. Other than that he has knocked in that sitter against Tottenham which Lallana laid on a plate for him; and scored against the bottom club Fulham. That is all of two goals from open play from a dedicated centre-forward in a 4-5-1. You can defend him by saying that he drops back and gets involved in the build-up play well, but again, that isn't what the centre-forward in such a system should be doing. Time and again he finds himself out wide, putting decent balls into the box but of course there's no-one on the receiving end because he himself is meant to be the target man. He never arrives late at the back stick to bullet in a header, he's never smacking the ball about on the edge of the box, or trying shots from range. People are defending Lambert by criticising J.Rod and trying to shift the blame, and whilst Rodriguez might not be deadly, Lambert hasn't look like scoring in the slightest. People who criticise people like me for having unflattering opinions of Lambert's performances this season act like we're ungrateful, lack loyalty and that we've forgotten what Lambert has done in the past. That's pretty much the point; we really haven't. We remember it clearly. And because we're able to remember it clearly, we can see equally clearly how much of a different player he is now. No-one wants to say this Adrian; but looking at it objectively, watching our last three matches in which we've failed to score from open play in four and a half hours of football, Rickie Lambert is a huge, huge weakness. Its like The Simpsons. Lets not besmirch the memory of something great by dragging it out for another season when its obvious to everyone its well past its peak.

Morgan and Lallana both made equally vital contributions to Saints getting promoted and yet you obviously don't think they should be immune from criticism. I want to enjoy the memory of Rickie Lambert's fantastic contribution to my team being promoted too; but the one thing thats threatening to stop me and everyone from doing that is the fact that he's been an absolute dead weight around the leg of our team for the past six months. Carrying an impotent, ineffective, immobile centre-forward has been a major, major weakness for us this season. You can whinge and moan about me not showing him respect. You can bury your head in the sand. Just don't complain when your team has 60+% of possession and still can't score.

Where do you think the team should be? Who above us are we better than? (apart from possibly Newcastle)

I've been disappointed with Morgan this season too. Think he's a wonderful player but he takes no responsibility for any creative aspect to the team. Once he's into the final third he tends to play a sideways pass and just expect someone else to do something with it rather than ever taking a player on, attempting a killer pass, or shooting from distance. Interestingly enough, I remember the other day thinking back to a game we played at home to Ipswich in the champo when he was an 18-year old and I actually remember him (perhaps with the fearlessness of youth and all that) attempting to take a player on and executing a pretty impressive sequence of step-overs. It just sticks in my mind as it was so out-of-character as I don't remember him ever taking anyone on in his career apart from that one occasion. Ahwel, I don't know if he'll be able to re-learn stuff like that but long story short, he needs to offer more of an attacking threat if he wants to get picked for France. I'm beginning to be a bit sceptical of the holy trinity of Davis/Cork/Morgan. Neither JC nor MS offer anything whatsoever in terms of forward running and SD for all his effort and useful passing is hardly going to beat two players and slot a through-ball through. I think the pressing game earlier in the season did paper over the cracks of just how defensively-minded that midfield three really is.

Mavuba and Sissoko are the ones he could conceivably displace. Grenier is a star in the making and Morgan neither will, nor should, be ahead of him in the pecking order just yet (although Grenier is more creative). The rest of the midfield is pretty darn immovable though and he's just unfortunate he's been born into the same generation as that lot. The one thing I would say though is that I am surprised the French haven't given him a couple of caps just to try him out and give him a bit of international experience so that he's better prepared if they do need to call upon his services in future. Most international teams do give a fairly wide pool of players a try just as an experiment if it goes wrong and as a wise investment for the future if it goes well (you wouldn't believe the complete swathe of mediocrity that has turned out of Brazil for the odd cap here or there) So I am in that sense, quite surprised he hasn't even been given a try just to see what he can do even if they wouldn't plan on including him in the squad provided everyone is fit.

MF Franck Ribéry 7 April 1983 (age 30) 80 16 Germany Bayern Munich MF Mathieu Valbuena 28 September 1984 (age 29) 30 5 France Marseille MF Yohan Cabaye 14 January 1986 (age 28) 26 2 France Paris Saint-Germain MF Blaise Matuidi 9 April 1987 (age 26) 19 0 France Paris Saint-Germain MF Moussa Sissoko 16 August 1989 (age 24) 13 0 England Newcastle United MF Rio Mavuba 8 March 1984 (age 29) 9 0 France Lille MF Paul Pogba 15 March 1993 (age 20) 7 1 Italy Juventus MF Clément Grenier 7 January 1991 (age 23) 3 0 France Lyon Thats a pretty damn terrific midfield in fairness, and I'm one of Morgan's biggest fans.

Is it really? For everyone? Again, I re-iterate my point of the largest winning margin between two teams this season, the Manchester City 7-0 Norwich and the way the two teams played there. Furthermore look at Manchester United under Fergie. I don't remember them getting held by teams that went backs-to-the-wall. When teams were able to beat United it was because they played them with neither fear or respect. When teams played against them with two much of both and sat behind the ball, United would gleefully take advantage of that and duly beat them out of sight 2, 3 or 4-0 with ease. I'm not one to moan or complain, I think its been a brilliant season for Saints regardless of the way we went out of the cups. 8th, if we make it, would be an incredible achievement four years after League 1 on a -10. But on this issue, I think our team does have a major weakness. As has been said on the West Ham response thread. We've drawn or lost against them in our last 5 meetings with them, so they must be doing something right.

Glad that people appreciated my research and that it provoked some constructive discussion in the wake of the last two very disappointing matches. I must admit however, that I am a little surprised at the focus on the defensive side of our game; surely the fact that we have literally never won if our opponent scores a goal (of any meaning) against us this season ought to hint that the problem is up top? Or if not simply with our forwards per se, then in the way we attack teams that get behind the ball? People have mentioned that its extremely difficult to break teams down who just get 11 men behind the ball, but is that really true? Sometimes getting 11 men behind the ball and in doing so, completely surrendering the midfield, is the worst thing you can possibly do. Take the Man City 7-0 Norwich from earlier this season. Norwich attempted to do precisely that, but in doing so, sat off City completely, so that when they did win the ball or get a block in and clear it, City were able to recover the ball quickly, reload the cannon so to speak, and just try the hell again! It ended up with Norwich being mauled. Had they tried to at least contest the game as a football match they might have come away with a semblance of respectability after a 4-1, 4-2, 5-2 or something. Anyway, the point is that no, not everyone finds it that difficult to break teams down that sit behind the ball, protecting either their lead or their point. We do. Us. Specifically. As I say; we haven't been able to come from behind to win in over 18 months now! and as (I hope) my OP shows, its not an isolated statistic.

People really, really really need to calm their **** on on Ings. He's having one good season in the champo; what on earth makes people think he's going to be a sudden success in the Prem? There have been a ton of strikers who've been **** hot in the Championship Jermaine Beckford...Jordan Rhodes... etc. and either never really make it in the Premiership or don't attract interest from Premiership managers. We need strikers with experience and success in Europe's top leagues. Also, slightly off the subject, we need to decide whether or not we're sticking with 4-5-1 and looking for a 6'3' target man, or whether we might change to a 4-4-4-2 and look for strikers with pace and movement. We might not necessarily be sticking with the former if we're moving into the post-Lambert phase.

This season: 1) 9 of our 10 wins have involved us keeping a clean sheet. 2) Our record in matches in which our opponents have scored at least once: 1-8-6 3) Our record in matches in which we've conceded the first goal: 0-5-5. 4) Our record in matches in which we've been behind at some point during the game: 0-6-8. So all in all, things don't look great in the 'facing adversity' department; we basically need everything to go swimmingly in order to win a match. The last time we came from behind to win was at home to Villa 18 months ago. Teams who score even once against us have always taken at least 2 points off us (with the completely un-threatening Hull consolation being the one and only exception). You might say this is pretty standard as obviously this stat basically gives our opponents an automatic one-goal head start, but when you consider that the bottom club, Fulham, have managed to win three matches this season despite conceding it does look pretty concerning. This really is a pretty damning indictment of just how poor we are going forward against teams/defenses who have something to defend.