EFL Playoffs 25/26 (Saints booted out of final and given 4 point deduction - pg34)

Arsenetatters said:

I might be alone in this but I want Boro to win. They were on the receiving end of all this shit not knowing if they would be playing or not. Yes I know Hull didn’t know who they’d be playing but at least they knew they were in it.

AFKABartram said:

Wife and son are there today, cheering on local primary school in pre game match. Have some of the best seats in the ground and son is loving it. 

Said atmosphere outside ground is fantastic 

PragueAddick said:

valleynick66 said:

PragueAddick said:

SDAddick said:

PragueAddick said:

The more I think about it, the more I'm buying the idea that we were spied on before the home game. I've just gone back over the season up to that point, trying to recall where we were - as a club - prior to that game. We hadn't let i in more than one at the Valley in any game; we were very unlucky to lose to Wrexham in the previous game and we'd had time to regroup in the international break; although we suddenly had injuries at the back. Lloyd Jones may not have been fully fit. Southampton were showing early signs of new manager bounce.

Funny things happen in football and they did in this league last season. Many would have done a double take when they saw our result at Portman Road. But that was hardly "clinical", at least not until after we'd hing on to the half time break and then later made some subs, one of whom decided it was time to be "unplayable" to quote Louis Mendez. Nobody could remotely suggest it was all part of a plan based on superior tactical knowledge.

Southampton probably would have won that game, given our injuries at the back. But the way they did it..4 goals in 8 minutes and looking like it could be 6-7 by H-T as Brownie feared...can you ever recall anything like that the Valley? It certainly wasn't like that against Chelsea despite the scoreline and their technical superiority being obvious throughout. I'd have to go back to the mid 80's when we lost 5-1 at home to Rotherham. Tony Towner and Ronnie Moore ran riot at their leisure. But we were a shambles of a club and Ken Craggs was sacked after that game. 

There are of course counter-arguments, but it's the sheer precision of how Southampton played in that first half that stands out  now. I found it quite chilling at the time, and remember wondering if about 8 of ours were playing with colds or something. 

Stinks. 

Counterpoint: We have Apter and Hernandez starting at Wingback and got overrun by a pacier central midfield.

Also, Eckert was still relatively new, so we had less scouting tape on them than they did on us.

I actually don't disagree with you, but I also think there were other potential reasons why we got battered. 

Sure, and generally I can be accused of post-rationalising a performance that was both traumatic and embarassing to watch. 

But re the team selection thing; looking back, Lloyd had been injured at Wrexham and it was not clear whether he would start. We also had other injuries at the back, but up to this point our defence had been the rock on which a steady start had been built. So there was a rich brief for a spy to get his teeth into. Would LJ in fact play, and would he be fully fit? Would  NJ start Gillesphey? How would he set up the midfield, given the lack of obvious choices? It’s not unusual for weakened teams to be eventually overrun in a game by stronger opponents, but the key for me there is “eventually”. A weaker team with good spirit and self belief (which was very much intact at that point in our case) would usually be in the game for 60 mins or so, Chelsea Cup game an example.  The choice of Apter and Hernandez took us all by surprise. It took Southampton a very, very short time to work out the rich opportunity this presented them.

So armed with this information beforehand (if you believe the conspiracy) what exactly did Southampton do they wouldn’t otherwise have done?

On this occasion (and not the only time) we were just poor. 

They figured that neither Apter nor Hernandez had played these roles before, especially with each other, and set up to exploit that. I agree that they might fairly soon have worked out they could do that as the half proceeded. However they were playing that almost from the starting whistle.

I don't know the details of how their away game at Wrexham unfolded, but it's another result that descended like a thunderbolt from a clear blue sky from the perspective of the home team's performances in recent matches before then. The other thing that bothered me afterwards was how they failed to look like and get results like the champions-in-waiting they looked like at the Valley, in quite a few subsequent games. On matchday 27, they lost at home to Hull, and this left them in 16th position, just 2 places above us.

SDAddick said:

Liam Millar has bleached his hair. That's been the highlight of the first 8 minutes 

MrBurns said:

I reckon this goes into Pens. Hull will need to bring the lawyers on with 10 minutes to go