Daft Kerplunk

Matt Hale is ex-Bristol City too. Who’d have thought it. The academy is in a mess.

Don’t be surprised about Reed though, I have heard through the football grapevine that he has been involved in discussions about an SFC takeover. At what level, not sure, but football consultancy and the higher level discussions is his gig now. If Simon Jordan is involved, I wouldn’t expect some of the current board to last very long as he’d surely be able to see right through them. He’d probably challenge Matt Crocker to get on with restructuring the academy and not be too focussed on first team and the pavilion.

When will the penny drop that the academy structure, and many of the senior staff members, is a busted flush? Needs huge attention but the rewards won’t show for 5-10 years

Uncomfortable comparison (football was dire under Branfoot but no contest on the fight - this team would be scared to leave a luxury spa with their wash bags if faced with some of the players on those teams - but at least now under the current regime, we are market ‘disrupters’ so the 9-0 defeats are just a clever commercial strategy for bouncing back and being different.

That’s as piss poor as you can get. From embarrassing stop the count T-shirts because we were top for a day or so, to stop the count so we don’t get relegated

Will be a tough match, they are desperate, we are not yet fully confident and are still on very patchy form. We only need 2 more wins and a draw so can see us thinking we are still fine and don’t need to grind out the result

As good a line up as we could have. Fingers crossed we get the 3 points

You also currently identify a chunk of players who joined our academy structure before the Liebherr’s were involved...showing how long ago it was that the academy was actually decent.

The success of the current academy is to be defined by those players coming through...which is how many at a regularly playing Premier League football? I also should clarified that by recruitment I meant within the academy. All the players ‘breaking through’ from our academy bar a couple have been rejected by Arsenal, Man City etc. or we’ve had to buy them. Many are just there to make up the numbers. It would be great to be proven wrong on the academy and there might be a few that come through unless we lose them to Chelsea but having watched plenty of football over the years, and like many others, you do develop a reasonable idea of what makes a top flight player and who probably won’t make it to be a first team regular in the top league.

If anything should help Ralph, it surely has to be the realisation by those overseeing the football aspects of the club (Semmens and Crocker) that the academy leadership and its recruitment, plus the coaching staff chosen for Ralph are just not up to the job. Ronald Koeman could see the younger players weren’t good enough but good ol’ Les was able to convince everyone else that he was wrong. Anyone watching these players coming through who has also watched the decent players of the past could see it too. They simply do not match the world-beating storytelling that goes on alongside the academy. The last players to make it through is the James Ward-Prowse group and how long ago was that? Now Ralph is coming to the realisation too that the whole academy myth is just that. We need new ownership, a good clear out at the FDSC (that’s Staplewood to most) and a leaner operation that lets action speak louder than nice presentations. It may all be too late to either save or keep Ralph.

I actually barely remember the match as b) just enjoying the one-off moment of us playing such a legendary ground and b) I’d consumed a fair few Menabreas along the canal 🤣

At first glance, I don’t disagree with your logic but do the same calculations over 5 years. Most of the players are similar so it’s a reasonable to suggest that last year’s good run was a blip (albeit relatively sustained) more than anything. If it were music, you could say that out of 5 albums, one was a blinder but 4 were bang average. Do you judge on the one, or the career?

For a good number of years before the first lockdown last year until December we just haven’t been good. Form last year was temporary from the evidence of this year so far. It’s easy for some to forget just how bad things were before covid put a halt to the 2019/20 season temporarily. If form is temporary and class is permanent, we are just a little bit above the dunces in our class.

I’m sure Paul Hardyman might potentially be a nice bloke but...who in their right mind takes on a coach with no particularly outstanding track record to join a club that prides itself on having a world-beating academy? And he’s a Pompey hero. Incredibly bullish!t decision when you absolutely know there are better coaches available, perhaps some of them even have Saints in their history. Just like the first team, the academy needs to be intensely assessed and realise that beyond spreadsheets and matrices, humans make the difference. It’d be nice to see us start employing the best people available and if not, at least people who give a sh!t about what this club means and have the desire to make it better from a deeper POV.

Bet Gao is regretting the decision not to sell now. We are absolutely in a relegation battle on this form

Phew

The club’s accountants will be. With commercial performance lower than it should be (covid and non-covid), the drop is league places will be putting the pressure on other departments outside the first team to make savings

So the plan is the problem 🤔

In other words, absolutely perfect for modern football 😄

Ralph could surely benefit from a decent coaching set-up. It can’t be great on the training pitch with the dross we have in Craig Fleming, Kelvin Davis and Dave Watson! Ralph doesn’t appear to communicate with any of these during a match and seems isolated.

Fans can focus on penalties though, the players should have come out fired up in the second to carry on applying pressure and be on the front foot. Any team playing us that is 1 nil down at half time knows they can come at us early doors and we will fold. We have a mentality problem. Super harsh penalty but that only made it 1-1. We’ve been weak in our attitude yet again.

Utterly predictable. Forget blaming the penalty decision, we’ve been fannying about since the last minutes of the second half.

Mark Dennis with loads of very bad challenges: cult figure. Different time, different football.

Stop the count! Stop the count! Stop the coooooooooooooouuuuuuuuunnnnnnnnnnnnnt!

Between April 2010 and November 2018, Reed was Head of Football Development and the Vice-Chairman of Football at Southampton. In this time many of the strong but perhaps forthright coaches were got rid of and replaced with average yes men, or worse, just mates of those at the top who aren’t that great but have got the plum roles. Add declining recruitment and more challenge from the likes of Chelsea who pay parents or offer ridiculous contracts to youngsters and there is a blend of problems. All these players making the first team now are just statistics to sell the club to sponsors, prospective buyers and fans who can’t tell the difference between a genuine good prospect and an average one. The last players of genuine ability and the hunger required came through the academy a decade ago. Matt Crocker has a huge job on his hands, the success won’t come because of cowering corporate behaviour, pretty powerpoints and pulling socks up, it’ll come by having the best coaches, perhaps even some ex-players in the environment who know the club and what it takes to make it in the game, and then convincing parents that this is the place for talented kids playing among other talented kids, not just kids taken on to boost the numbers. Some will be lost because of the money, many will know that with the best coaches, this would be the only place to be. That’s what has been lost. Some still choose to ride on a wave that fell flat on the shore a decade ago.