Lallana's Left Peg

His pace always concerned me but he has a wand of a left foot and if we were to be possession based and if we were to have the lions share of possession next season he'd be brilliant for us.

Just one more loss to go in order to be confirmed as the sixth worse team in the history of the Premier League - can we do it?

I still can't quite get my head around these events: 1. Signed players and stuck with a Manager that they wanted to sack but didn't despite him also playing opposite to their vision. Allowed signed players to be coached into that Hasenhuttl style. 2. Sacked Hasenhuttl and appointed a long ball merchant who is again against the vision. 3. Appointed a DoF to align with vision of possession based football (although he doesn't start until this summer). 4. Sacked long ball merchant and appointed a coach who reverted back to the Hasenhuttl way of playing to try and give us the best chance of staying up. Which makes me wonder...had Jones kept us up, what the fuck would they have done? Sacked him anyway?

But not more means or better players. And that needs to count for attracting a manager in the Championship to give us the best chance of getting out and getting the players onboard.

I keep thinking a game couldn't sum up the state of Saints more than anything else and then we play the next game and stoop to new lows. An absolutely horrendous season in which the only people that will really suffer are the employees of the club that will be made redundant because of the awful decision making at board level and lack of effort at a playing level. I keep thinking we'll do alright in the Championship but then I remember who the clowns are that will make the decision about our next manager.

Sometimes its hard to know if the players are ok and the manager is terrible, or the manager is ok and the players are terrible, and then it dawns on you that both the players and manager is terrible and it all makes sense why we're on course to have the sixth lowest points total in Premier League history.

No clue, no fight, no quality. The note being passed around in the first half was frankly embarrassing. Blow it all up and start again.

Their record transfer fee is irrelevant to us though. If we have a young English player ready to plug into our Championship team who is familiar with the league and was one of the best players in it, then that is worth a lot of money to us. The loan worked out great for both Burnley and Southampton.

I should add, we're not too far away in games on the whole but too often now we've been shown to be unable to piece together a 90min game and a lack of quality in either third makes all the difference. We're rarely outclassed, we just don't have the quality to make a game of small margins ever go in our favour.

Selles approaching the management of the team like we're midtable and he's been told he has a three year contract. Club leadership all over the place. Players either mailing it in or not good enough. Don't wish for relegation - it'll be the same clowns in charge and the only players left will be those others don't want.

£45m of attacking January signings not good enough to get in the team ahead of a Theo Walcott on the verge of retiring 😎

I read that the last time a Southampton striker scored in the league was Che Adams on 12th November. 111 days ago.

He was doing us all a favour, as it meant there was less time for my eyes to bleed in reaction to watching us in possession trying to attack.

The problem with the 'right man' approach: 1. We just tried it 2. Good managers don't leave their clubs mid-season unless they have a release clause So we need to assume that Sports Republic know who the right man is, and that he is remotely available. For both those scenarios to happen seems very very unlikely. The struggle Leeds have is exactly what we will have.

Years of neglect catching up with us combined with an atrocious managerial appointment when we needed to get it absolutely right,

Maybe a part of the reason we can't finish in games is because in training they are scoring goals against the worst keepers in the division and so think the same thing will work in matches 🤔

I'm beginning to think it is clearly too rich for us. The worst club in the division by far and the least amount of investment - hardly a correlation of co-incidence. Remarkable that we can be outbid for players by the likes of Bournemouth. All we've got is the platform of Premier League football to attract emerging young players. And that platform is about to disappear.

He has somehow taken a bad situation and made it worse. And I didn't think that was possible. Ankersen needs to accept his mistake and move on - quickly. Or he has hoodwinked our owner into spending £100m on an asset he has relegated in his first season in charge.

We've hoofed it long so much Che Adams back has given up.

Needed a striker back in the summer and failed. First part of the season highlighted that even more and this run of fixtures has been staring us in the face for 6 weeks. Still nothing. At what point are they going to act?

Based on what JWP and Jones said after the game, the players weren't brave enough and weren't good enough to implement what they had worked on. That's worse than not working on anything at all, because it shows how awful the situation is. They don't have the mental bottle or the technical ability to follow instructions - and that's automatic relegation in most cases.

An absolute joke that players deemed not good enough 6 months ago are now possible solutions because we need 'experience'. Exactly what is the recruitment strategy here that this can be a situation in the space of 6 months? And what does it say about the owners if their new Manager has already told them that their approach to buying players is wrong? I thought the whole point of this was to get a manager that was aligned with the Sport Republic approach? It's yet another sign of a club going in one direction - down. I'm used to Saints being a bit rubbish over the last 40 years, but never incompetent, just poor due to lack of finances. We're officially incompetent right now.

I just don't understand how you can have 5 weeks off to work on everything / anything and then play like a bunch of trialists thrown together. If you squinted you'd say that we were trying to play long balls and feed off scraps but as antiquated as that 'tactic' is it also wasn't obvious. Awful in possession and unorganised out of it. What exactly have they been doing the last 5 weeks?

Exactly this. The decaying of the quality in our team started a long time ago, and one transfer window was never going to fix that. We're now in a position where the potential we have purchased isn't mature enough to steer us out of a relegation scrap and the experienced players don't have enough quality to make moments count. It was the worst case scenario for the club which had to stay clear of trouble this season for the transfer strategy to have any credibility.

Hopefully he learnt today that Championship level tactics will get you nowhere in the Premier League. Mind you, nor do Championship level players.