Lighthouse

As bad as that team is, there’s nobody missing from it who hasn’t been utterly dreadful for 95% of the season. I’m not sure what people mean when they say that now we’re relegated we can go for it and play with freedom etc. These are bad players with a bad manager, they aren’t going to suddenly turn in a performance just because they’ve been relegated.

There’s pretty strong hindsight and outcome bias with this, like saying these are the lottery numbers I should have picked last week. Yes, Forest have stayed up and MGW has been decent for them recently (apparently, I’ve not watched them much). Was spending a big chunk of money on him in summer the obviously correct decision we should have made? No. Forest’s transfer strategy has barely been a success, they’re only really above four dreadful teams by virtue of their two wins against Saints; games in which they themselves looked pretty ropey.

They somehow managed to not sh*t the bed and concede twice after 88 minutes. What is this sorcery!?

What makes you think we haven’t?

As opposed to what exactly? If you go direct you will lose possession nine times out of ten and not get a shot on goal at all. There is no system we are realistically going to be able to implement, with the players we have at our disposal, which will result in incisive, flowing football and shots raining down every five minutes.

Any system, played badly, is going to look sh*t. Ralph had times when he got the press badly wrong, Jones was basically the antithesis of possession football and got nowhere. Puel-style possession football without penetration may be frustrating to watch but it’s no worse than lumping it forward straight to an imposition keeper. A lot of people seem to be living a level above where we really are. When Ralph got sacked it was, “what about Poch, Tuchel, Potter or Emery,” now people are talking about Rogers, Potter and others. Whoever we appoint, I think there will be a lot of disappointed faces.

I smell a follow on…

Because they’re Championship level players and the others aren’t. If I had to bet my own money, I’d say there was more chance of those three signing a new deal than JWP, Lavia and KWP sticking around. Nothing we do in the last two games will be of any relevance to next season. In much the same way as the teams Wotte put out with Saeijs, Skacel and DMG had no bearing on Pardew’s team.

In what way? At least three of those players wont be here next season and neither will the manager. I really don't see why you'd be annoyed, even if those three did play. They're all more likely to be here than KWP, JWP or Lavia.

And helped them win the league by being the only other team unbeaten against Arsenal this season.

Because they were a thoroughly substandard bunch of players, overperforming and it's impossible to keep it up forever. You see it all the time with promoted teams; they go up, have a way of playing with confidence and style which catches people out and they're top 6 in November. Then they have a couple of bad results and the form drops right off because they just don't have to quality of PL players to keep it going long term. Our squad was that bad. There's only so long you can keep churning results out of Valery, McCarthy, AA, Moi, Bednarek and co. If these players were so horribly managed, remind me again what they've gone on to achieve at other clubs, without Ralph holding them back.

It’s more the occasion than the ground. St Mary’s was heaving for the JPT Southern final, second leg when we had a trip to Wembley on the table.

To quote a line from 2 Unlimited, "no no, no no no no, no no no no, no no."

For me: Boruc KWP - VvD - Toby - Bertrand Lavia - Morgan Mané - Davis - Tadic Pellè Subs: Forster, Fonte, Clyne, Wanyama, JWP, Lallana, J Rod, Gabbiadini, Lambert Davis made the team tick, he moved the ball up the pitch in a way we’ve been badly lacking since Stu caught covid. Plenty of great candidates

All of the above with an honourable mention to watching Charlie Austin score a pretty good goal against us for QPR, only to have it blown out of the water two minutes later by a piece of obscene filth from Pellè. That was THE moment I knew we weren’t going to miss Lambert.

I really can’t be too harsh on the player’s commitment, personally. I’ve been there, working for a company which was badly managed from the top down, people in key positions, too smart for their own good, making ridiculous management decisions which were so obviously not going to work and it all panned out exactly as expected. People got fed up, wanted to leave, customers weren’t happy etc. Nobody likes being routinely embarrassed going to work, especially if that happens to be in front of 30,000 people and on Europe-wide TV coverage. I can’t believe that by some amazing coincidence we’ve managed to assemble 30-plus separate individuals, none of whom can be bothered to do the thing they’ve been obsessed with since they were toddlers. That’s a management failure, from Selles and the people above him. The only players who’ve stood out as having a bad attitude for me are AMN and Aribo. The rest, Moi, AA, Diallo all included are no doubt useless but I can’t accept that they aren’t trying.

* Without Kane holding them back, when he f**ks off to Man Utd, obviously.

Ha, I can't believe he fell for all that mainstream media nonsense about us being relegated. Everyone who's awake and willing to do their own research knows we finished 9th this season, the video he watched was a bunch of paid actors in Saints shirt.

I came on this thread to say basically the same thing. The only difference is I’d say 70th minute as it takes 10 to empty the ground anyway and if we leave it until the 80th nobody will know by FT. Not that you could pay me to go to this game and sit there surrounded by joyous Scousers, watching their team win 5-0 from the home end.

Young Bogdan has expected anti-woke (X-AW) stats of 3.47 posts per day and we’re confident HCDAJFU. Plus he’s young, hungry and guaranteed to improve. Turkish won’t be missed.

As the Ankersen of Saints Web I can say that we aren’t worried about your departure as we already have scouts looking at a 19 year old Slovakian with some strong views on sadoldgit, trans women and Dianne Abbott.

Fair enough.

Brighton are just annoying me now. The one f**king game I wanted them to turn up and put in a performance was Everton and they played like they were on prescription painkillers .

If we do assume that Ralph gets spanked by Liverpool and there’s no improvement in results even in the much more winnable games which immediately followed AND we assume that Lavia and Alcaraz make absolutely zero difference to how we play; 12 points in 15 is still 31 over a full season. Clearly better than the 24 we’ve managed and hovering around where the cut off is likely to be for the two above us. Im not saying he’d have turned it around either. I’m saying that we wouldn’t have had the absolute nose dive in results we had after he was sacked.

It’s no different to saving a penalty. I’m not sure people will feel the same when we’re on the receiving end of a couple of howlers next season. Stuff like David Silva’s goal against us in 2014 or Fonte’s penalty against Brighton. I’ll take minor disruption to the flow of the game to stop results swinging on things like that.