Lighthouse

Great start with the ball. Abbas 3-7.

Lallana looked comfortable enough against a very poor Everton team in a cup game, for 45 minutes. I’m not sure I’d be starting him based on that. For me it’s two threes with: Les - Downes - Fernandes Cornet/BBD - Archer - Fraser With Dibling in and out of the mix, along with Lallana and Stewart.

There’s always an element of luck to any cup draw, we got to Cardiff largely thanks to being drawn at home to lower league clubs in every round (apart from Spurs but they were the worst of the lot). There’s a whole world of difference between that and the best teams just never being in it from the start.

We played in that competition twice and it was our first trip to the new Wembley. Would you care about it if you were in it every year? Do you even remember us playing in it the second League 1 season?

It’d be crap. Who’d care about winning a cup when the best team in it was someone like West Ham or Brighton. We’re well rid of extra time, especially for midweek games. Who wants a game like that dragging on until 2230, followed by a traffic jam and a four hour drive?

Christ, we’ve just won a penalty shoot out away to a PL team, at a ground we hate going to. It wasn’t an all time classic but if you can’t enjoy that result, Saints really aren’t the club for you. Them being ‘there for the taking’ was largely a result of our game plan being effective and nullifying theirs, that’s not something you can just take for granted. For all the snorting and sneering at our possession stats, when we get it right we go to places like Goodison, silence the crowd and get a result.

I vaguely remember this from McCarthy before. I don’t think he’s ever dived the right way for a penalty for us, let alone saved one.

I’d like to think that was with a view to Saturday’s game.

WTF was that from BBD. Walcott-esq.

Half an hour here seems reasonable. He wouldn’t necessarily have started Saturday either.

It’s not, we’re 1-1 away to a PL team and playing well enough whilst still lacking a cutting edge. This performance is far better than our cup trips to Sheff Utd and Sunderland under Poch and Koeman, for example.

Ugo lucky there, ran into three tackles.

Just kept trying harder and harder to give away a free kick there. Idiot.

We were supposed to let the, go 2-0 up FFS! Honestly, do we even scout their games?!

A complete flap at that cross and two free headers. Dreadful.

Probably a few rivets, some guttering, a light fixture and a sheet of asbestos too, if you listen carefully. The place is a sh*t hole.

If.

His record in Turkey is comparable (I think slightly worse) to Cenk Tosun. The fact that he’s not getting a chance and nobody came in with a serious bid probably says something about him as a PL player. In any case, it’s clear that neither he nor ABK will be in our plans by default this season, just because we failed to sell them.

I’m not sure you’re going to deflect attention with generic GM/Trump bait on this but good luck.

I’m not a betting man but if I had to, I’d bet on Archer outscoring Ings this season and not vice versa. Given the financial constraints were under, I’d also wager we couldn’t afford both.

Not that I’m supporting anything you’ve said but for the sake of not digging a deeper hole, the word you’re looking for is ‘disproportionate’ not ‘trivial’.

I’m not entirely sure you have any concept of what hipsters are and your obsession with another man’s hairstyle is starting to get really weird.

So we try it for one whole game against a top six team, then we abandon it and move on?

Which was your favourite goal, from the ones he scored for previous Saints managers?

Why would you say it’s that way round though? One could equally argue that the first 30 minutes proved Russ can organise a team well and execute an effective game plan against superior players, despite a crap squad. The truth is that it’s probably six and half a dozen but to say that playing well for half an hour is proof that the manager is crap is something of a distortion.