sadoldgit

I didn’t think that you were capable of irony Batman, but fair play here.

If only it were that simple but I think that relegation will be a combination of a number of factors - poor recruitment, poor team selections, poor tactics, numerous poor mistakes by a number of different players, injuries to key players. Just to dump most of the responsibility on a goalkeeper who doesn’t have the best defensive cover in front of him is way too simplistic. No club gets relegated because one player has a poor season.

As someone else has pointed out, if we go down this season it isn’t the fault of the goalkeeper. We are struggling because of our inability to score from open play. That is not Bazunu’s fault. I’d be interested to see how many games we have lost that are directly attributable to him rather than defensive errors or missed goal scoring opportunities.

I couldn’t agree more. I had a few nasty knee injuries when I used to play and it makes me cringe every time I see a player do this. Why risk buggering up your knee(s) celebrating a goal? The last thing we need is a self inflicted injury keeping a key player out right now. You get booked for taking off your shirt yet it is ok for multi million pound athletes to risk damaging ligaments with crazy knee slides.

Personally I would rather ditch 4222 and go back to the good old 442

Given how much grief the likes of Redmond and McCarthy got on here before it seems odd to see how they are now being redefined. All I can remember was Redmond getting slagged off constantly and McCarthy getting pelters for being beaten time and again at his near post.

Larios started but only lasted 12 mins. Bree and Edozie the other two playing. Currently 1-0 down.

It was more of a petulant shove/slap than an attempted punch but if that had happened anywhere else on the pitch he would have given a foul and a yellow too. Yes the guy made a meal of it (don’t agree with the commentary team that he was entitled to go down to draw the officials attention to it - he made a meal of it) but what on earth did DCC think he was doing? Having watched it again several times this morning though I would argue that the ref should have blown up for a foul for Grimsby outside the box as DCC had hold of his shirt collar for some time whilst running back towards the goal. I would have given the free kick and booked DCC for the slap. Once again though we have lost a game through the initial team selection. I get the argument that the team, on paper, should be enough to beat Grimsby but we all know about cup banana skins. Making 9 changes was never going to help a cohesive team performance. Make a couple of changes but keep the main balance and then give some of the fringe players some game time if you must once the game is secure. Now we have even more players with low morale and go into the Leicester game with even less confidence when a win last night would have least have given the squad a lift and maybe would have provided a goal or two for our two new main strikers. Selles seems like a nice bloke and it is good to hear that the players like him, but I would prefer a manager that the players feared and respected and was prepared to do what was needed to win the game rather than to give people a game in order to keep them happy. They are professional footballers. If they want to start matches they should put the effort in training and then take their chance when selected. Last night KWP, Lavia, Djenepo, JWP and Walcott all looked the part. The rest were poor, but then how often has this line up taken to the pitch?

Not very good to be honest. But then he was amongst good company.

The first one gets given now. I don’t think it was deliberate but it hit his arm and that it is. The second was stupid. First he held his shirt collar and then he hit him. An international player, a Premiership player, should never, ever do something so stupid. But we didn’t lose because of these penalties. We lost because we have virtually no goal threat. Note to Selles - if you are serious about getting into the quarter finals of the FA Cup, start with your best XI and bring on fringe players later.

You have to enjoy the irony of our latest Tory PM selling the virtues of the Windsor Framework to his party, Parliament, the UK and the Republic of Ireland based on the access to the single market. Three major positives here. It makes the argument for leaving the EU weaker, it makes it less likely for Johnson to make a come back as PM and it will increase the blood pressure of Farage and his fellow gammons. Perhaps England, Scotland and Wales could sign up to the same deal too?

It’s been happening for years. Go check out the fuss over Enid Blyton books which even goes back to the time they were published. Certain things will always trigger certain people. Surely, as one of the most often triggered people on this forum, you of all people should know that!

I don’t think that Ely is a poor player but he just isn’t suited to the pace and the physicality of the EPL. The last 3 successive managers have picked him and whilst it is not entirely down to him that we are rooted to the bottom of the table, surely it is time now to try something different? We have nothing to lose and need to find a way of creating more. That isn’t going to happen if Ely is used as an attacking option.

Looking forward to the point where all Delldays/Batman/AlexLaw76 posts on SaintsWeb are rewritten in order to “protect readers”.

I read plenty of posts saying that they trusted Selles’ team selection before the game. Just because we beat a below par Chelsea side with a particular set of players doesn’t mean a different selection wouldn’t have. He said himself not to read too much in his first team selection. I assumed that he was being conservative in his selection because it was Chelsea and he was using experienced players. I had expected a bolder line up against Leeds who are a very poor side, irrespective of what happened in the Chelsea game. The love-in over Selles this week has been bizarre to say the least, but we are back to reality again. I hope that he is successful with us but he won’t be if he doesn’t grow a pair. I’m sure, if we are going to get relegated, that we would all prefer to go down in a blaze of glory - out with a bang rather than a whimper. His team selection against Leeds said whimper. Ralph used to talk a lot about being brave. Today’s team selection was anything but.

Jones picks Ely and Bednarek and he is a clown who doesn’t know what he is doing. Selles picks them two matches running and that is ok. Go figure. I guess wearing a smart suit with a turtle neck and not being Nathan Jones makes a whole load of difference. Just as he wasn’t the worst manager in the world after the Sheffield Wednesday match he isn’t the best after the Chelsea game. Fair play to him though, he has stepped up to the plate and here’s wishing him all the best in his career as manager of Southampton FC. May it be a long and successful one!

Anyone that can name Janny B and Moi in the starting line up and bring on Walcott with a significant period of the match still to be played and not get strung up by a baying mob after the game deserves the job full time!

When I say that he has not been tarred so far that assumption has been made on the basis that he is still in the job. No idea what input he has had on both managers so far and I don’t think it is fair to judge him on the Sheffield Wednesday game. He says he wants the job full time. Time for him to step up to the plate and deliver. He will need more than one game against Chelsea to prove he is the man though, and we really do not have time to mess around anymore if the intention is to give avoiding relegation 100% effort.

Around the time Ralph had talked about retiring at the end of his contract, Semmens made a comment about looking to bring someone in to the coaching team to be groomed to eventually take over. I have always assumed that Selles was that person. The fact that Ralph departed earlier than expected must have thrown a spanner in the works if that was the case. The fact that Jones was appointed instead of Selles would indicate that they didn’t think he was ready to step up just yet. Would another year/year and a half tutelage under a more senior manager much a huge difference in his ability to lead us? Who knows. Given the lack or poor quality of choices at the moment, perhaps they will give him his chance earlier than planned. Pure conjecture on my part of course but given that he has, so far, not been tarred with the same brush as two failed regimes, perhaps there is something in it? It could also explain why the Board wasn’t over keen on offering JM a 3.5 year contract if they were looking to promote Selles in a year or two.

Good to read a sensible, well balanced post amongst the usual toxic mob mentality ravings at last. You are right of course. The problems are bigger than just one person and have been for some time, but there is a need to find a scapegoat when things go badly and our current manager fits the bill perfectly. Funny how few people were bothered about narcissism when we had a Prime Minister with a Narcissistic Personality Disorder, in fact I suspect many people who are slagging Jones off now for it voted for Johnson. It didn’t seem to bother United and Chelsea fans either when Ferguson and Mourinho were filling their trophy cabinets. If Jones does manage to turn things round and make us a relatively successful club again, will it still be an issue or will it be - he may be a narcissist, but he is OUR narcissist? Just a few days ago our owners were crap and didn’t know what they were doing because they hadn’t bought a no 9 on the first day of the transfer window. They bought a no 9 so that was shut down. Now they are crap and don’t know what they are doing because they haven’t sacked (yet) a manager they have only just employed and who clearly needed a proficient no 9. The previous manager didn’t have all of the tools he needed to do his job better ( a proficient no 9), many of the fans wanted him out and got their way last November. It doesn’t seem unreasonable, now the replacement manager has, apparently, been provided with a decent goal scorer, to give him some time to see what he can do. But apparently that is the reasoning of an egotist who doesn’t know what he is doing? If Boards running football clubs listened to their fans all the time we would have managers sacked every week. It is their money. It is their club. It is their responsibility to make the calls. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. For most clubs, most of the time it doesn’t work well enough to win something. As fans we sign up for the ride, for better or worse. It gives us the right to moan when things aren’t going well, but it doesn’t give us the right to make decisions about how the club is run. The growing toxicity does nothing to help the club. Hoping the club loses on Saturday does nothing to help the club. Losing matches has got us where we are today, why on earth would you actively want to lose more? Surely the best chance we have of staying up is getting behind the club and everyone pulling together? If we do go down, the best chance of a swift return is the same. It is quite scary how quickly this has become personal. Many had decided he wasn’t right for the job before he had walked through the door. The “chippy little Welsh twat” had barely got his feet under the table before the haters started. Maybe it was the wrong decision to hire him and maybe he should have been sacked earlier this week, but those are not our decisions to make and, to me anyway, do not effect my wish to see the team do well and win a football match no matter who the owners are, who the manager is and what players are on the pitch. We are the closest to WW3 than we have been for decades. The country is currently going to the dogs. The future looks bleak for our children, yet we have posters who spend their days on a football thread telling us how much they hate a person most have never even met for not doing his job particularly well at the moment. I am sure the people buried under rubble in Turkey and Syria aren’t too fussed about where their teams are currently in their leagues.

Given that the country has been systematically run into the ground for over a decade and is run by incompetents far greater than Nathan Jones and the most reaction you are likely to get here is a keyboard meltdown when they decide that they don’t like the manager of our football club, I am not sure what you are expecting? If they aren’t taking to the streets over the corrupt and inept way they are governed, they are hardly likely to leave their cozy lounges when they can moan all day behind their keyboards. God knows, if keyboard warriors actually made any difference we would be top of the league by now!

Did he actually “bad mouth” him or did he defend his decision for taking him off by saying that he wasn’t running the game? No fan of Jones but it seems like some things are being blown out of all proportion as part of the witch hunt.

No one seems to know. According to someone on another site Jones wasn’t even there on Sunday so it is not clear, if there was a fight, that he was even involved. Also, if there was a fight you would expect the club to already have investigated the situation. It all seems to have gone very quiet so either there is a cover up going on or it wasn’t that serious. My money is on the latter.

I like the Detectorists, Motherland, Fleabag, The Great, This Flag Means Death, Ghosts, Cunk and Have I Got News still delivers as do some of the stand ups at the Apollo, but the golden age of comedy has passed along with music. Political satire does not work so well when the material you are trying to parody goes beyond your ability to send it up. Brandon Flowers asked the question a few years ago, have all the best songs been written? You could ask the same question of the best gags. I don’t know what the BBC thought they were doing with Mrs Brown’s Boys? Perhaps they thought there was still an appetite for the laziest type of 70’s humour but that backfired big time (although I assume that it still managed to find an audience as he still has a job). As a country we have had the stuffing kicked out of us over the last decade plus. Austerity, Brexit, Covid, Government scandals, a major war in Europe…just constantly one thing after another. Whether the lack of quality creativity in depth in certain fields is just a phase we are going through or whether we are just becoming mediocre at certain things, who knows, but it’s hard to think of people in 50 years time getting all nostalgic over the likes of Harry Styles, Little Mix, Ed Sheeran, Brendan O’Carroll, Michael McIntyre etc.

Good to hear Whitey! The scariest things about aging is the older you get the faster time passes. When I was a kid the 6 week summer holidays seemed to last for ages. Now the years pass in the twinkling of an eye it seems.