Not really through any fault of his own, Will Smallbone has had a rough week.

Explaining why Saints are where they are is a hard thing. Look at me. When we were flying I wrote nothing. Now we're in a funk, I'm churning out conspiracy theories week on week. It's an unfortunate thing that in lieu of a good explanation, some fans choose to dump their grief on Will Smallbone.

Some of you will have seen a now deleted social media post that crossed a moral line, and may or may not be related to Smallbone having deactivated his social media account this week. The most important point to be made is that players deserve a degree of basic human respect regardless of how well they play. But this point has been well made elsewhere, so I’d like to take the time to make the point that Smallbone is also a genuinely talented and useful midfielder, more than he is probably given credit for. And I too brought receipts.

It’s a point worth making because even before this week, Smallbone has come in for some stick. It’s difficult to say why. Will is a likeable and hardworking academy product who we all want to succeed, but seems to have a moment or two in every game that evokes groans, even when his 90-minute contribution is very strong. Cruelly, he was jeered off at QPR by a handful of our own fans. Some players are just lightning rods.

Anyway, on the subject of 90-minute contributions, let me show you what I mean.

A few notes on my data. It’s all publicly available on FBRef. But the graphics are my own, so the green data bars work differently: they show a player’s stats as a proportion of highest scoring player’s stat in that row. So above, Stuie’s ‘Min’ bar is full because he played the most minutes of the four players. Aribo’s is just over a third full, having played 38.5% of Stuie’s minutes.

I’ve chosen these four players on the grounds that they have played consistently at no. 8 this season and for enough minutes on which to judge them fairly. I would love to compare Shea Charles but it’s not fair unless I can isolate the games he wasn’t playing in the pivot, and that is a chore I just ain’t doing. Flynn is obviously doing the Lord’s work there too, so he’s out. Similarly, bear in mind that Charly played more than a few games as a false nine, which will have had some bearing on his numbers. Finally, Aribo and Charly have played more off the bench, and thus during different gamestates (e.g. defending a lead). Keep this in mind when you interpret how they do what they do.

Most importantly, everything, except percentages, are adjusted per 90 minutes.

Goal threat

So first of all, it probably won’t surprise anyone to discover that Smallbone doesn’t spend loads of time directly threatening the goal or raiding the box. Fine. Not his game, or something for which he has been criticised. Stuie is by far our most important no. 8 for this kind of labour, and he and Smallbone are likely our most played pairing precisely because they do different things.

However, note that despite his lack of take-ons and touches in dangerous areas, Smallbone’s expected goals (0.17) is as good as Armstrong’s (0.18), and having outscored all his peers, in fact has the best differential between his actual (0.16) and expected goals (0.17) per 90. Nothing wrong with having few touches in the box if you know when to arrive there, and you can hit the target.

Smallbone also has the joint-highest expected assists (xA)1 for completed passes, which suggests that although his passes do not lead to expected goals (0.13 xAG) as efficiently as Armstrong (0.2 xAG), the kinds of passes he plays are typically incisive and dangerous. So although he doesn’t spend nearly as much time in the box or driving at defenders as Aribo, he nonetheless matches him for shot-creating actions (2.83, 2.86).

In short, Smallbone is our most efficient goalscorer in the no. 8 position and probably the best passer, insofar as Stuie’s passes are improved by his ability to get into dangerous positions. More on this below.

He also has the most touches, so, y’know. He’s busy.

Passing and progression

In the whole Saints team, Smallbone’s pass completion (89.3%) is only surpassed by our three centre backs, and Flynn Downes (a Godly 94.0%) and Kyle Walker-Peters (89.4%).

He is the best of our no. 8s, and by a margin that matters. There’s a technical point here. A variance of 9.0% seems insignificant, but consider it like this. A pass completion rate of 90% means that for one in every ten attempted passes, you give the ball back to the opposition. At 80%, that increases to one in every five attempted passes.2 Think about what that means in Martin’s system. That’s the difference between Armstrong and Smallbone.

This should be considered in light of the fact that Stuie provides more key passes, more passes into the box and the final third, and his passes generate more xG (xAG), than any of his no. 8 peers. But we also know that the profile of completed passes Stuie plays are about as likely to assist a goal as Smallbone’s (0.2xA). So there’s probably a part of the pass completion gap that is explained by Stuie being the more ambitious passer, and a part of it explained by his being a sloppier one. Just by the eye test, I personally feel Stuie is guilty of giving away balls in dangerous second-half periods more often than I would like.

Should probably note at this point that Aribo offers Southampton something entirely different here. He nearly matches Smallbone’s pass completion (88.6%), while still making a comparable number of progressive passes and passes into the box, but is a monstrous ball carrier to boot, more productive than even Stuie over 90 minutes.

Defence

The differences in ball retention between Armstrong, Smallbone and Aribo don’t seem so bad, or at least mostly explained by style and role rather than quality, until you factor in their defensive statistics.

I was really surprised to see how often big man Aribo is dispossessed, especially because this stat doesn’t even include attempted take-ons. The fact that Stuie miscontrols a ball almost three times a game is an issue, only partially mitigated by how much time he spends in dangerous positions. Remarkably, he performs worse than Alcaraz, who has essentially gone on loan in no small part because of his ball retention. It would maybe matter less if Stuie was turning out tackles, interceptions and blocks in the other direction, but he’s not doing that either (Actually big praise for Charly here).

Let’s suppose that it’s nonetheless a reflection of all the ball-carrying and penetration that Armstrong and Aribo do. Only Stuie is actually generating more shot-creating actions (3.86) as a consequence, and arguably that team as a whole will generate more threat if they can more reliably retain the ball. Smallbone is categorically the best at this.

I don’t think any of our no. 8s are perfect. The Liverpool game left me feeling that should we go back to Premier League we need a glow up in the middle. But it is my strong belief that Will Smallbone will be a Southampton player for a long time. His relationship with the club runs deep, and whilst I don’t see him progressing to an elite club, he is finding evermore ways to add value at Southampton (notably he is starting to show promise at no. 6). I expect his career trajectory to be a bit like Ward-Prowse’s, in that there will be no revolution in his game, but one would expect him to slowly hone his craft, season on season, becoming an evermore accomplished midfielder.

That, and I think he’ll captain Saints one day.

Sorry I've been off. I am on the job market, housing market, getting married, and crucially, a teacher in middle of term. I've still been at St. Mary’s most weekends and am totally hooked on this season.

Hull City brought a lot of things I’ve half-written this season to a head. This piece is about our 25 game unbeaten streak — how it started, how it was sustained, and what brought it to an end. I’ve written it because I think the end of our streak presents a challenge like we had right before it started, in September.

This is a blog about being good, then getting rumbled.

August — undercooked.

On opening day, Russell Martin’s Southampton were a hot mess. Beautiful, incisive attacking football marred by calamitous gaps at the back. Flamenco dancing with our arses hanging out. But we took 10pts from 12 through a combination of sheer force, late winners and playing even leakier teams. We conceded four against Norwich and still got a point off them.

Then we got rumbled.

September — first rumble.

It was Sunderland that found us out. You see that pink space in the image below? That's part our shape that encircles opponents, sets up camp in their half. The Black Cats knew that if they stayed compact and resisted our advances, we would make mistakes playing the ball laterally across central areas and their runners could exploit the turnovers. Jack Clarke ran riot. At full-time (5-0) Martin was visibly hurt.

After Sunderland found the blueprint, September was a disaster. Leicester (4-1), Ipswich (1-0) and Middlesbrough (2-1) turned out to be top sides this season but they beat us by following Sunderland’s lead. All have different styles but all were successful because they stayed in shape and exploited a possession system that had been taken out of the oven too early.

Game 1 - Leeds (H)

Perhaps the silver lining was that Southampton fixed this problem at precisely the right moment to wrongfoot our main promotion rival in a head-to-head. Leeds looked awful against us in the first half, but they were only doing what everyone else had done and succeeded: stay in shape, wait for the mistake, pounce on the counter. But the mistakes didn’t come. For 45 minutes, Southampton were flawless. Ambitious, stretching passes that pulled Leeds around St. Mary’s like a ragdoll. Farke’s side were three goals down before they even had three touches (hyperbole, not a stat). In the second half, Leeds had to come out and play us, and naturally showed a bit more of why they currently sit in second place. But on that day, the damage was already done.

Games 2-24 - the streak

Then began the long, hot Indian summer (winter). I don’t need to tell you all what this was like. In busiest period of the season, Southampton Ws were arriving like buses: one one a Tuesday, one on a Saturday, and often very late but you still knew it was coming.

Interestingly, the way teams set up against us didn’t really change. Home and away, opponents continued to allow us to assert ourselves, on the basis that if they could make it through to the hour mark, maybe they could snatch a point. And it worked too. From October through December, Saints were mostly brilliant but there was still a 15-20 minute window in every game where we lost control and let the opposition back in. Sometimes we got away with it. Sometimes The Late Show™ dug us out. But Rotherham, Preston and Huddersfield all sneaked through that window and pinched draws we should have won.

This window is important. I think that 20 minute window simultaneously cost us those draws but is also what gave us our record streak. The prospect of the window made it worthwhile to play passively, to let us dominate the game, then hold out for an equaliser or for Saints to run out of puff. But at the same time, playing that passively, nobody could beat us. No wonder, nobody even really tried. For 25 beautiful games.

Then we got rumbled.

Game 25 - Huddersfield (H)

Somehow, I feel it’s fitting that lowly Huddersfield were the ones that figured it out. 20th in the league, with 31 points from 31 games, the Town said fuck it.

In possession, Martin’s Saints play with a back three. For our entire unbeaten streak most teams didn’t even bother to press them in our own half. You just get sucked in, leave space in the centre and then Southampton pass round you and suddenly you’re sprinting back to your own goal.

Huddersfield set up with a mobile front four, and pressed the living shit out of our backline. Having four to our three means you can press in pairs. In the image below, Manning has the ball. One player blocks the wide option (Fraser), and the other prevents him from playing in the no. 8s in the centre. Smallbone is an option, but there’s a fifth man to stop him from turning round. The ball has to go back inside, across the backline. As ball is switched left to right, the mirror situation occurs — one player stops Bednarek playing wide, another centrally, and the ball is forced back inside.

Huddersfield didn’t wait for our mistakes. By asking us to break their press, they forced their turnovers, and countered repeatedly. Southampton still spent a lot of time in their half, but were frequently exposed by dangerous breaks. Huddersfield fashioned two good chances, two excellent finishes, and at half time Saints were two-goals-and-a-Flynn-Downes down.

There are no words to describe the ridiculous 45 minutes that followed, resulting in a 5-3 Southampton win, and I certainly couldn’t put them in order than would tell a coherent story. But you all remember it and it doesn’t really matter for the story I’m telling here. The point is, again, we got rumbled.

The end - Bristol City (A)

Bristol City are better than Huddersfield but the recipe was the same. Like the Terriers, Bristol pressed in pairs, a front four against our backline with a fifth man to keep the no. 6 in check. Shea Charles did not enjoy this at all, and was hooked at half-time. Thrown into the role, Smallbone didn't like it much better. The willingness to turn and carry, to make things happen, was not there. Rothwell, the source of all chaos against Huddersfield, was anonymous.

All of this made Tuesday night’s game against Hull City quite frustrating. Respect to West Brom for going out and trying to West Brom, rather than counter Saints. But Hull City are an excellent side with nippy, dangerous forward runners, and predictably set out to try and Huddersfield us. I don't know if Martin and his team failed to anticipate this or we were just saving key personnel for the weekend, but we weren’t prepared and it was hard not to register a strong sense of déjà vu.

And not only did they Huddersfield us, they perfected the Huddersfield. As exceptional as Hull were, that is the larger problem. The cat is now fully out of the bag. You can press Southampton. Their midfield is squishy. They don't make sloppy crossfield passes anymore, but if you press them in pairs, you can stop them playing vertically and getting to the no. 8s.

What next?

As we did in September, I think we can get through this. We can reassert the fear. Pressing us high comes at a cost. It means giving up the middle of the pitch and/or running a very high back line (a la Ralph — not wise against our forwards).

Maybe there's a tactical solution Martin finds to fix this. Maybe the arrival of Brooks, a true right-winger, allows KWP to come deeper to help get the ball out of defence more often. Maybe Che spends a few games dropping into midfield. This feels like the point in the season that the absence of Ross Stewart is going to hurt the most.

But I suspect it's less about changing the system and more about just running it better. Getting balls into the centre whatever the weather. The whole team need to step up, but especially the no. 8s, who need to become viable passing options again. For that reason, I suspect Aribo may have just become our most important player. He was a monster in the second half against Hull. As well our most press-resistant no. 8 and most reliable receiver of the ball, he has the strength and technical quality to turn and make things happen. He makes the most tackles and interceptions (of our no. 8s), most successful take-ons, completes the most progressive passes, and his overall pass completion (89.3%) is as good as Smallbone’s (89.5%) and significantly better than Stuie’s (81.8%).

Stuart Armstrong is a wonderful ball-carrier but it comes at a cost. His ball retention, when measured by pass completion, miscontrols and dispossessions, is weaker than Aribo and Smallbone, and puts out a lower volume of tackles and interceptions (and blocks, not shown).1 Against good teams with a strong press I think those two should start at his expense. Not enough data yet to judge Rothwell but the eye test hasn’t been pretty.

None of our no. 8s are bad, but none are perfect. Each are useful in different situations, so picking the right ones for an unknown opposition setup can be a game of rock, paper, scissors. Rothwell was paper on Tuesday, when we needed Aribo to be the rock to Hull’s scissors.

I don't know how Millwall will set up today. But we need to batter the next team who try to press us. Make all that running seem exhausting, risky and fruitless. But what does the dominant strategy against Southampton then become? Perhaps there won't be one, and setting up tactically for every game will be rock, paper, scissors.

I do not wish to add to the debate about whether Bazunu should be starting. Whether he is performing at an adequate level. Whether we can reasonably expect him to come good in the future. Whether we need to recruit competition.

But like you, I think about it a lot.

Yesterday, Baz made some errors. It didn't really matter in that collective defensive shitshow, a fact that has led both to competing claims that Baz is being scapegoated and that his failings went under the radar. Probably it's both. He was plausibly at fault for the third and fourth goals. For third, I think he may have been unsighted. And for the fourth, it's difficult to parry a stinging shot anywhere ‘safe’ in a box that busy. And yet, he parried another shot into a dangerous area earlier in the game (Bednarek was on hand), and came 35 yards off his line to send a tame header to an opposing midfielder. I don’t keep a log, but he has made some unpunished errors in other games this season too: I can remember him flapping at at least one late cross against QPR.

So often I find myself thinking, what the hell do we do about Baz? Everyone wants him to succeed. But how much rope do you give him, in a season we're trying to get promoted?

I don’t know. And that’s problem: there’s no way to know. It isn’t that Southampton misjudged Gavin Bazunu when they recruited, I don’t think. It's not even that they underestimated the risk that comes naturally with inexperience. It's that risk is fundamentally less manageable with goalkeepers, and maybe for this one position, Sport Republic should have relaxed their youth-first transfer policy.

To explain, I don’t hate the policy. If Southampton buy Gavin Bazunu, Samuel Edozie, Juan Larios, Romeo Lavia, Shea Charles and Taylor Harwood-Bellis, and five of the six turn out well, I think that's a vindication of our strategy. But if Gavin is the struggling one, there is so little Russell Martin can do besides play him every single week, and hope the problem fixes itself. Or drop him, and halt the player’s development, which is supposed to be the core of the strategy.

But if Shea Charles struggles, Martin can manage his exposure. He has Downes and Smallbone, he can draw down Shea’s responsibilities. He can take Shea out of the pivot. He can play him in Cup games, and give him 30 minutes at time to see out league games, and see how he fares. Crucially, I presume it is easier to gauge how an outfield player will perform on a Saturday by their performance in training.

They are no such hedges with goalkeepers. You bet the house or you fold. That is why the Bazunu debate is such a live one, why it got so much attention at the fan forum and such a robust response from the gaffer. Betting on goalkeepers is a casino with one game, and it's called “Red, Black and Three Years of Your Salary”.

This isn’t a problem unique to Southampton. It is inherent in the nature of the position and all clubs must manage it. But it does make me wonder if, perhaps in this one position, Sport Republic would have done well to bend their own rules. Goalkeeper is the cheapest position to recruit and 20 years old is absurdly young for it. I could even be in my fifties when Gavin Bazunu retires from football. Would have been absolutely unconscionable, to pay slightly more, to recruit a goalkeeper who was say 23-24, with maybe three or four seasons of senior league football under his belt? I am not even saying that I don’t rate Gav, or that he won’t come good. I’m just not sure it was a risk we had to take, in position where faith must always be paid in full, up front. By which I mean at the back.

Ah well, suppose this is the headache you get for betting on Portsmouth stock.

I owe a big thanks to Chris of Southampton FC Women Supporters Group for fact-checking this piece. Give them a follow for more regular (and better informed) SFC Women content.

What’s this article for?

Interest in Southampton FC Women is rising, as the team rises through leagues. But a weird bottleneck on that growth is basic information about the team, beyond their last result. Building a broad fanbase will take time, but I suspect there are loads of dedicated Saints fans right now who are curious about the women’s team, but don’t know how to connect with it. By dedicated Saints fans, I mean junkies, like me. People who obsess about the club, wait on hour-by-hour transfer updates, look up progressive passes received on fbref.com then write about them on the internet, and then argue with strangers about what they mean. These sociopaths are your gateway to the casuals.

So it’s strange that even I find it difficult to retrieve rudimentary information about fixture dates and venues, player positions, goal and appearance stats. Most apps don’t cover women’s football below the top flight, so it’s fiddly to even check a score while a game is on. The best way I’ve found to check the table is Google ‘FA Women’s Championship’. Season stats are scattered and unreliable, and match stats are almost non-existent. Meanwhile, club media channels focus on off-pitch content: interviews, videos, Q&As, community engagement, but you can’t tell if the new ‘defender’ we bought is a full-back or a centre-half.

So for those curious fans (and myself), I decided to write the most basic, elementary, bread and butter introduction to Southampton FC Women possible. Nothing is too obvious: I’ve started with what league they play in, who the gaffer is, and a two-paragraph potted history. Then I progress into some ropey tactical analysis, breakdown the squad, new signings, review their 2022-23 season and their prospects for 2023-24. I watched a fair bit of the women’s team last season, attending a handful of games and streaming about half of the rest. Hardly makes me an ultra, but because there’s so little out there, even if I get only half the claims I make right, most readers will still come away better informed than they were.

Writing this was a fun experiment. Hours of Googling and I still don’t know if Lexi-Lloyd-Smith is naturally left-sided. Why did we start three right-backs for half of last season? Why is the two-time Championship Player of the Season and Golden Boot winner not in double figures? Where will Molly Pike play? But for every question I haven’t answered, there are two more that I have by researching this piece. And that’s exciting. It’s so difficult to add anything original to the very noisy conversation about the men’s side. By writing this, I get to make a meaningful contribution by stating what should be the obvious.

If it works, I plan to do one every summer.

Southampton FC Women: the very, very basics.

Southampton FC Women compete in the second tier, the FA Women’s Championship. Like the Women’s Super League (WSL), it’s a national league, and about half the teams are fully professional. When Saints were promoted from the third tier, they made the whole team full pro and committed to playing all their home games at St. Mary’s. They still play the odd game at Snows Stadium in Totton when there is a fixture clash.

The league contains twelve teams, who play twenty-two games each from August till April, with an especially busy period September to November. They’ll also compete in the FA Cup and League Cup, where the gap to WSL teams has so far proved cavernous and Saints have been beaten handily by top flight sides. Having since defeated some top sides in the second division, perhaps next season they can make a go of it.

Which Saints?

There have been three women’s teams in the city to play under the name ‘Southampton’ or ‘Saints’, each having had different relationships with Southampton Football Club. This article is Southampton FC Women — established 2017 — not to be confused with eight-time FA Cup winners Southampton Women’s FC (nicknamed the Sirens), or with Southampton Saints Girls and Ladies FC (formerly Red Star Southampton). It is indeed as confusing as it sounds — there is even some debate as to which team won those FA Cups. If you want to get into the historical weeds, The Athletic’s Carl Anka did a good write up in 2019.

The Manager

Since 2018, the manager has been Marianne Spacey-Cale. Is she good? Well we win a lot. Her first coaching gig was Fulham Ladies (2003-2006) after retiring as a player. When Fulham disbanded their women’s team, she worked as development officer for the Worcestershire FA. From 2013 to 2017, she spent a number of years in the England coaching set-up, initially as assistant to Mark Sampson, then as manager of the u23s. In July 2018, after six months of Phil Neville as England manager she left to become the first Head of Women and Girls Football at Southampton. A decorated player who has grafted for two decades in women’s coaching, I really like that she’s building her own thing at Saints, with autonomy, security and resources.

MBE, Arsenal legend, Hall of Famer and one of the best deep-lying forwards England ever had, with 91 caps and 28 international goals, don’t-cha know.

History in two paragraphs

In 2001, Southampton FC invited one of the two women’s teams (SSGLFC) competing under the city’s name into the club fold (affiliated since 1995). When the men’s side got relegated in 2005, the women’s team was one of the first things to go (they carried on independently). In the Liebherr era, interest has ramped back up, and at the same time the FA started putting money and thought into the women’s game. Off the back of their prestigious academy and the appearance of a genuinely well-run club, Saints were granted a licence for a Women and Girls Centre of Excellence in partnership with Hampshire FA in 2015. The Centre of Excellence was later replaced by one of four Tier 1 Regional Talent Clubs (there are now twelve), and an u16 side was formed, followed by an u21 side. For the 2017-18 season, the club fielded adult side in the Hampshire Women’s League Division One under the name ‘Southampton FC Women’.

A big club in a small pond, Saints ran riot in Hampshire and Southern regional leagues. In their first season, they won 11 of 12 games, scoring 42 goals and conceding 5. In 2018-19, they won all 18 games in the Southern Region Premier Division with goal difference of +86, but early curtailment of the 2019-20 and 2020-21 seasons due to COVID twice denied them further promotion. When they finally achieved promotion to the Women’s National League South it was by application to the FA. Getting out of the third tier is brutal. Winning the National League South title (against Pompey at St. Mary’s) only earnt them a playoff against National League North champions, Wolves. Saints won 1-0.

What happened last season?

In their debut Championship season Saints finished 6th (of 12). It’s the first time they haven’t just pissed the league, but they didn’t just step up a division, but also to being a fully professional outfit who train everyday. It’s a massive gradient and there wasn’t much telling how they’d handle it. As it turned out, they kept pace with eventual winners Bristol City for half the season, then fell away. You’ll note the excellent defensive record (15 GA) is marred by a lack of goals scored (22 GF). More on that later.

How do they play?

Don’t want to be too bold here, but the system is 4-4-2-ish. MSC usually favours a back four, Kendall and Griffiths in the middle, and the wingers generally stay wide (though I’ve noticed them swap wings mid-game a few times). Saints play two strikers, with Katie Wilkinson as the deeper one. Arguably the second striker plays as a no. 10, which is why I’m unsure exactly what new signing Molly Pike will be doing. Below, I’ve suggested she’ll compete with Kendall/Griffiths, but I feel increasingly convinced she’ll take a spot off one of the strikers instead. That’s what I feel I can tell you with confidence.

Then again, Saints have signed three new strikers (giving us five in total), so surely we can expect two of them to start? To be honest, with so many reinforcements Spacey-Cale could experiment with all sorts of setups. In defence, with the addition of Milne and Purfield on the left Spacey-Cale now has plenty of assets from which to build a back five, if she so wishes. Something is cooking, anyway.

Where are they good?

Basically, the team has a really sound base but goalscoring at Championship level has been an issue. Second best defence in the league (15 GA) was let down last season by the fourth worst attack (22 GF).

As such, the summer transfer window has seen major spinal surgery, weighted to the top of the pitch, and little change on the flanks. Six players have been released and eight have arrived, including three centre-forwards, two central-midfielders, a right-sided attacker, a left wing-back, and a left centre/full-back. Spacey-Cale made clear on BBC Solent that the focus has been bringing in players who know what it takes to compete at the highest level — five of eight have WSL experience, the three that don’t are teenagers.

I don't see any further additions being made, but then, that’s what I said last week before Izzy Milne arrived. And then Atlanta Primus. And then Emma Thompson.

Defence

Rendell (GK), Howard (GK). Purfield (LB, LW), Milne (LB, LCB), Parnell (CB), Rafferty (CB), Peake (CB), Collett (RB), Morris (RB, RW), Mott (RB).

The backline is excellent right through, and this season goalkeeper Kayla Rendell (22) became the team’s first England u23 call-up. Fullbacks Ella Morris (20) and Milly Mott (19) are among the best established players in the squad despite their ages; adventurous, energetic fullbacks who like to get forward. Both have represented England, Morris at every level up to u21. Rosie Parnell (29) has been an assured captain in central defence, but Paige Peake (21, pictured) is the star. She has Van Dijk vibes. Just glides about the pitch dominating 1v1s seemingly without effort, pinging long diagonals left and right. If that wasn’t enough, she takes free kicks from centre-back. Peake arrived last summer, claiming the starting spot from Laura Rafferty (27, CB), a seasoned WSL player and Northern Ireland international that came out of the Saints/Hampshire women and girls programme even before the women’s team itself.

Since the departure of Shelly Provan, Southampton have been a little short on the left. Ashleigh Ward (28, LB) is on the club’s 2023 retained list but I am told she has left the club. Mott and Morris are both right-backs by trade, and have taken turns to deputise on the left. Academy graduate Megan Collett (18, RB) has just signed her first professional contract, and her introduction has allowed Ella Morris to push up to right-wing, with Mott behind and Collett on the left.

Marianne Spacey-Cale spoke about the rarity of left-footed players in the women’s game on BBC Solent recently, and expressed that her priority in the transfer market was WSL experience. This summer she has stocked up on both. Jemma Purfield (26, LB) comes with bags of WSL experience and can play as a fullback or a winger, so if Marianne wants two flying backs she now has one to partner Morris. Izzy Milne arrives straight from Chelsea’s academy on her first pro contract and I can’t even find her age, but she plays left-back and left centre-back, padding out the left side nicely.

Midfield

Lloyd-Smith (LW), Kendall (CM), Griffiths (CM), Pike (CM, CAM), Peplow (CM), Wynne (RW), Primus (RW, CAM).

Lucia Kendall (19, pictured) is the jewel of the youth system, one of several products of Saints’ nascent women and girls programme that have come up through the leagues with a Saints side she broke into at 16. She’s represented England at every youth level up to u19, scoring both goals for them last summer in a 2-1 win over Norway. In our 2021-22 National League campaign she scored 22 goals in 27 appearances. I know less about Alice Griffiths (22) but she’s young, trusted and a regular. Chloe Peplow (24) was brought in from Reading on loan in January and has just made the move permanent. She comes with several seasons of top flight experience to balance the youth of Kendall and Griffiths. Southampton seem just fine at centre mid. Phoebe Williams was released this summer.

New signing Molly Pike (22) is an interesting one. Scored goals for fun in her youth career (Chelsea) and breakout season at Everton, and Jacob Tanswell recalls being given the run around by her in training as a CB. He suggested she’s perhaps now a no. 10, but her stats over last few seasons suggest a deeper role. This was my thinking, until she started the friendly against Billericay Town alongside Griffiths and Peplow at the expense of a second striker and scored a hattrick. This lends credence to the theory that she is indeed a no.10, and will play in front of Kendall and Griffiths (or Peplow), as does the straight swap she made with Kendall at half-time (who also bagged a hattrick). Alternatively, she’ll compete with Kendall, Griffiths and Peplow to be in a midfield two, likely the attacking one. That is my best guess. With bags of top flight experience and still so young, she should be strong competition for Kendall or Griffiths, or one of the forwards, depending on her remit.

The wings have seen a lot of turnover, and there’s less I can say with confidence. Academy graduate Georgie Freeland was released this summer having made a serious contribution to the team’s ascent. Megan Wynne (30, RW) is an older but decidedly joyful player to watch who has something to offer every game. Lexi Lloyd-Smith (19, LW) arrived last summer and has made herself a regular fixture with 2 goals in 15 appearances, and can operate on either flank and through the centre. Then there’s Sophia Pharoah (22, FW), a versatile forward who can also play wide and centrally, and has a long association with Saints marked by some outrageous and crucial goals, mazy runs, a long injury lay-off, a stint at Brighton. She’s 22 and if her future at Saints is as eventful as her past we’ll be hearing more about her.

Truth be told, I thought Molly Pike marked the conclusion of our summer business. So to learn late in August that Atlanta Primus (26, RW/CAM) would be returning from Jamaica’s excellent World Cup run to join Southampton was huge news. As a WSL and Championship winner who collected 8 goals and 5 assists for direct promotion rival London City Lionesses last term, it will also raise eyebrows in the division. Primus started three of Jamaica’s four World Cup games (and played half the other) at wide-right, inside-right and no.10 positions, so I expect she’ll compete with Wynne, Morris, and perhaps Pike and Pharoah. Yes she is related to notable skate Linvoy Primus, who is her father.

Forwards

Wilkinson (CF), Pharoah (FW), Dean (CF), Kraft (CF), Thompson (CF).

Not unlike the men’s team, there’s been a bit of an issue at centre-forward. Beth Lumsden was signed at the start of last season and released at the end, after scoring twice in 16 appearances. Long-serving no. 9 Ella Pusey was also released this summer with over 100 appearances and over 50 goals to her name (4 goals in 2022-23). Sophia Pharoah scored 16 goals in 16 games in the National League South (2021-22), including a sublime promotion-winner in the play-off, but her long injury lay-off means she’s not been properly tested at this level. She’s having a good pre-season and seems to be up front a lot.

Katie Wilkinson (28, CF, pictured) won Championship Player of the Season and the Golden Boot two seasons running with Sheffield United, scoring 19 goals in 20 games in 2020-21, but has failed to replicate this output. She was our top scorer last season with 7 goals. This may be because she’s been used as the deeper of the two strikers, almost as a no. 10. You’ll be seeing her lot again this season, perhaps more advanced, perhaps sometimes as a lone striker, with a much revamped support system.

As such, Saints have sought to reinforce at no. 9. In July, Saints signed centre-forwards Rianna Dean (24) and Emily Kraft (21). My best guess is they’ll compete to partner Wilkinson as the runner. Dean is a striker whose impressive CV (Arsenal, Millwall, Spurs, Liverpool) has been blighted by injury. Kraft scored 3 goals in 15 appearances for league rivals Lewes last season, and feels like a cheeky dip into a rival’s youth assets. Just in case Lewes hadn’t had enough of us, Southampton announced Emma Thompson (19, CF) late in August after impressing as a trialist in preseason. She signed for Chelsea last summer after scoring 17 goals in 15 games in the WSL Academy League, and immediately went on loan to Lewes, where on the club website she describes herself as an “old school No 9”. Chelsea fanzine Pride of London suggests her debut season of senior football at Lewes was one of highs and lows.

Three centre-forwards feels like a lot to add in one summer, on top of Wilkinson and Pharoah, and two no. 10s. Exciting, but somebody has to lose out. Best of luck to them all.

Expectations for this season

Since the reformation of the women's team Southampton have made no secret of their desire to get to the WSL as fast as possible. Last season was probably the first where consolidation in the new league was considered acceptable. On BBC Solent in July Spacey-Cale suggested her team should be looking at the top two. By the end of last season, Bristol City (promoted), London City Lionesses and Birmingham City had decisively broken away from the mid-table, each winning over two thirds of their games. Saints will look to break into that elite. Will be interesting to see whether the men’s or women’s chances of reaching the top flight turn out to be more realistic. In the Championship, only one team is promoted and one relegated.

What are matchdays like?

It’s great. Difficult to compare with going to men’s games because it’s fantastic on very different terms. If you’ve been to much grassroots football you’ll recognise the vibe. Everyone hears everything said by anyone — players, fans, officials, coaches, so it’s intimate and spicy. Spectacle is great, it’s dirt cheap, no queues and you can always get prime seats. The club doesn’t skimp on festivities: Saints Brass are usually there, as are the programme sellers, Sammy and Mary Saint. Also you can basically park at St. Mary’s in the industrial estate. Just easy, cheap, honest fun. Go.

First home game is against Blackburn on Sunday 3rd September, tickets should appear here in time.

Romeo Lavia, trying to kiss all the boys during his hot girl summer.

The market for ball-playing sixes is HOT this summer. Really hot. In fact if the number six market were weather, it would actually be last summer. Except last summer was all about number nines: Haaland, Darwin, Jesus. This summer is all about spines: Bellingham, Rice, Caicedo, Lavia, Tonali, Phillips, Kovacic and Ward-Prowse are all out, with their guns out, burning up the parks and leaving them all wilted and yellow. Not only are selling clubs out in force, but so are the buyers. All of the top six apart from Spurs, plus Newcastle, are in the market for a progressive no. 6, and most want to make marquee signings. Not squad players, but lynchpins, players who promise to be their engine for years to come. The implications for Saints are clear. There’s never a bad time to have Romeo Lavia and James Ward-Prowse on long contracts, but summer 2023 is a very, very good time.

Let’s look at the suitors. For several seasons now, Liverpool have been courting Jude Bellingham with all the subtlety of Nadine Dorries chasing a peerage. They failed to make the top four with a planet-sized hole in their midfield and Bellingham signed for Madrid. Arsenal have been floating around Declan Rice for ages in a similar way. With Xhaka set to leave and Partey stretched to manage a whole season, Arteta is searching for depth, and for that rare, elusive thing separates smiling silver medallists from teams that challenge Man City. For the first time in at least 15 years Arsenal are a genuinely exciting project, and have usurped Liverpool as City's most attractive rival. Rice’s arrival has been fêted for months. But in rare show of force, City have tabled a bid - having already signed Mateo Kovacic and cast doubt on the future of Kalvin Phillips, who could also make a late entry to the market. It was telling that Arsenal reportedly sent bids for Timber and Havertz on the same day as Rice. Everyone and their mums know Rice is their top target, but it's a cute way of signalling that he's not their only concern. Casemiro has been a revelation at United, but with 62 years between him and Eriksen they aren't exactly the future of the team. Neither are McFred. I… have no idea what Chelsea’s transfer strategy or requirements are. Stamford Bridge appears to be a clearing house for the Saudi Pro League. Todd Boehly is running round like a dog with two dicks and I dare not guess who he might sign, but they will certainly be active. In City-esque fashion, Newcastle have wrapped up their business quickly and quietly with a £70m move for Sandro Tonali. West Ham will need to replace Declan Rice.

Anyway Saints. Romeo Lavia is such a beautiful curveball into this market. Bellingham was supposed to be the top prize this summer, long destined for Liverpool. Now on paper it’s Declan Rice, a legitimate position, but you have to wonder if Lavia might be preferred if people had had more time to adjust their expectations. Rice is stylistically distinct from Lavia too, who is actually more similar in profile to Bellingham, an interesting comparison when you consider their shared inheritance but starkly different pathways. Both are nineteen years old, progressive, technical, ball-carrying sixes that thrive on tight spaces. But whereas Bellingham became teenage sensation by swapping Birmingham for Dortmund at seventeen, Lavia was cooped up in the City academy until last season. Had they not had such different trajectories, how might we compare them? Bellingham is a generational talent, the pick of the draft, without question. But I suspect the gap is smaller than people might think.

Jude Bellingham, officially the hottest girl this summer.

As it is, Bellingham’s departure and Lavia’s late entry have blown the market apart, instigating a scramble for the Belgian, undercutting other deals and the price of other targets. After 26 appearances, Lavia has been credibly and seriously linked with Chelsea, Arsenal, United and Liverpool. His father met with United representatives in March, and Chelsea actually bid £50m on deadline day in January, on Joe Shields advice. Arsenal are presently the most advanced, having a verbal agreement with the player and a bid in the works for 15 days now, an important contingency if Man City pip them to Declan Rice. Having lost Bellingham, Liverpool have enquired about the conditions of Lavia's leash back to City. Meanwhile, Brighton have been strutting around for two seasons telling anyone who will listen that they don't have to take any deal for Caicedo they don't want. This is the sacred right of the club who are presently best of the rest, and I remember well how bullish Saints were when it were us, but unfortunately they are no longer the only game in town. Chelsea have reportedly told them flatly that they will not meet their £80m asking price, and the Mirror reports that Lavia has moved ahead of Caicedo in Arsenal's thinking.

It's quite remarkable then, that the Southampton centre-mid who is most in demand isn't called James Ward-Prowse. That would have seemed unfathomable 12 months ago. I don't see starboy and the skipper as strictly rival products in this market, but the contrast in their prospects is stark. The most enticing thing about Lavia is his ceiling. He could start for a top six side tomorrow, but performing as he is at nineteen there's no telling how much further he could go. Ward-Prowse is a fantastic footballer but very clearly at his peak. He was never a player who ever promised he could reach the level that he has, but through sheer graft, has gradually honed himself, season by season, into a first-rate Premier League midfielder. This is to his credit, but isn’t suggestive of a player who still has room to grow.

James Ward-Prowse, looking quite hot, but not as hot as last summer, when he was super hot. He is staring into your eyes, trying to see his future.

His contract situation is complicated by the change in circumstances. In 2021, Ward-Prowse signed a new five-year deal, of which the subtext was: “Give us control of your exit, and we'll make you the best paid player in the club's history. If a club offering Champions League football comes in, and the fee is good, we won't stand in your way. If not, you stay and pass into Southampton folklore”. To add to the intrigue, The Athletic’s reporting initially implied the inclusion of a clause to this effect in the contract itself. Later that day, this detail mysteriously disappeared from the article.

This seemed like a sensible deal for all parties at the time, when a move to the top-six was a very real prospect. However when summer 2022 came and went, it felt like that ship had sailed. Twelve months later, the beleaguered captain has been dragged into the Championship by a broken team and the top six have moved on to bigger fish. Brentford, Newcastle, West Ham and Aston Villa have all been linked, but you sense that we’re courting them, rather than they us, as with Lavia. Ask a Saints fan twelve months ago and they’d tell you upwards of £50m was non-negotiable. £30m now seems more likely, £25m or less would be hard to swallow. But the question remains: who exactly is paying?

Last season, a big reflection of mine as we limped towards relegation was that many fans seemed to feel that we simply didn't deserve a talent like Lavia. Southampton were so nakedly terrible that his obvious class seemed grotesquely out of place. In a different way, there is a feeling that we do not deserve Ward-Prowse either. Neither player has outgrown us, but we have shrunk, debased ourselves to the point we feel we don't deserve to hold onto them. But whereas the sky’s the limit for Lavia, and I'm happy for him, Ward-Prowse's loyalty could have priced him out of an exit.

P.S. Apologies that I’ve been quiet for a couple of months. I'm not having a hot girl summer. I’m trying to finish my PhD and get on the academic job market. Come the start of the season I should have a bit more time to blog.

Crystal Palace is where I called it, personally. The day the lights went out completely. I’ve read much since that weekend trying to place where it all went wrong. Put a finger on the big mistake that led us to this point. Most of it has been pretty good and I’ve not really had anything to add. I didn’t much care to write an ‘autopsy’ piece either.

Truthfully, I’ve found it hard to pin down one singular reason. There is a Portsmouth fan, Luke Moore, on a popular football podcast, who often describes clubs that are in a spiral or otherwise on the road to nowhere as travelling down the “Pompey Highway”. I like this metaphor for obvious reasons, but also because it suggests an better way to frame how Southampton got to this point than trying a identify a single, decisive mistake. A highway is a road that can take you a great distance in one direction but with many exits. It’s less that Southampton made one big mistake, but missed many opportunities to get off the highway. Some are big, others small. Some of the mistakes could even have been successes, had other off-ramps been taken. Accepting this has been helpful for me in getting a handle on what we did wrong.

So I thought I’d use the frame to write my autopsy piece in a slightly different way.

Exit by exit, let me take you down the Pompey Highway.

In my head, the Pompey Highway looks like M3 and you slide down it from London. Not far off really. The only problem is deciding where it starts. If we really wanted, I could go much further back. We could talk about Marcus, Cortese, Les Reed, Katerina, Gao, Ross Wilson’s horror signings. Do a whole inquest about “the Southampton Way”, whatever the hell that was. But this article will probably be long as it is and I have to call it somewhere. So we’re starting with Danny Ings.

Exit 1: Not selling Danny Ings

It’s a controversial place to start and the source of much nostalgia. The absence of a productive striker since Ings’ departure is the biggest single factor in our relegation, a gaping and persistent hole in the squad. Perhaps that’s why I’ve started here. But I don’t think we should have come off at this junction.

It needs to be restated what position the club was in, in summer 2021, our most dangerous and delicate transfer window since the 2014 firesale. Still crippled by the expensive failed signings of 2016-18, the club had no profits to reinvest in a tired and bloated squad and Gao was nowhere to be seen. In that context, Villa and Leicester offered a combined £37m for our best player and best CB: aging, injury-prone, assets with a year each left on their deals. The club walked a tightrope between selling them and getting relegated immediately, or sitting on their hands and getting relegated in a season or two, with no money, after Ings and Vestergaard left as free agents.

We rolled the dice, and picked up Livramento, Salisu, Perraud, Armstrong, Diallo and Lyanco. A mixed bag to be sure, but I think it was the right decision to try and rebuild the spine, invest in youth, and give us a fighting chance to survive seasons to come. That season ended very poorly, but we stayed up, without it ever really getting dicey, and I think most people felt that we were looking up the table next season, not down.

Obviously, it’s therefore a terrible irony that we failed to capitalise on the time we bought ourselves, especially after Sport Republic arrived and solved the investment issue anyway. I don’t think Semmens and Crocker are at fault here. It was on them to prepare for the future as far as was foreseeable. That brings us neatly onto exit two, and what we did last summer…

Exit 2: Signing an attacker in summer

For a long time, I argued that we didn’t need a new striker as much as we needed new wide players to feed them. I was wrong about this — we need both. But hell, with a couple of solid wingers who knows, maybe we scrape 16th/17th? Bottom line, we needed a goalscorer.

This is the biggest off-ramp insofar as it makes the biggest contribution to staying up regardless of whatever other exits we take. If we sign a good forward in the summer, it’s feasible we survive without Ralph, or without even properly fixing the attack. As it was with Danny Ings, you can imagine a Saints team that are painful to watch most of the time, but the talisman-carry-player does enough for us, often enough, to scrape through. I’d go as far as to say that maybe, we even survive Nathan Jones, with a good enough forward.

Eventually though, I think Ralphdom comes crumbling down either way, all those relationships worn thin. So it’s not a sure fix, and definitely a short one.

Exit 3: Signing more experience

The best short account of Saints relegation I’ve seen is Lucy Highnett’s argument that Sport Republic failed to respect the task of staying in the Premier League, by privileging their long-term strategy of buying young, raw assets that could be developed over experienced players that could have keep us in the league this season.

Without undermining my whole exits-not-reasons framing, this is about as nailed on as I think it gets. If I’m being really pedantic, I’d stress that it’s not so much youth/experience per se, as Premier League-readiness more broadly. Lots of half-watching TV pundits have said that buying so many young players has killed us. But in reality it is the new kids (Lavia, Bella-Kotchap and Edozie) that have been our strongest performers this season. Meanwhile experienced players Walcott, Stuie, Adam Armstrong, Elyounoussi, Oršić, Onuachu, Aribo (and to some extent) Che Adams have contributed very little.

This is why Lucy’s take is so sensical, because the core feature of Sport Republic’s strategy, buying young and buying smart, has been largely successful — it’s just the blind, unwavering overreliance on it that has proven fatal.

Exit 4: Not loaning out Stephens, Tella or Bednarek

Nope, nope, nope.

I’ll admit to being totally blindsided by the Bednaissance. And I’m really happy Jack Stephens is having a good time, a very lovable, imperfect player. But let’s not be goldfish about the Bednarek-Stephens partnership, a very long and testing fixture in Saints’ recent history. Both players are probably much improved next to Bella-Kotchap, but neither help us avoid relegation, and our problems are deeper than individuals anyway. Even with ABK and Salisu lining up fit, our two best CBs, Saints have struggled with elementary defensive competencies, particularly set plays and crosses.

The Tella question is more interesting.

Nobody is more pleased than me to see Tella killing it at Burnley, and nobody is sadder to see him leave without showing his true colours in a striped shirt. But Southampton’s attacking problems run much deeper than the power of Nathan Tella to solve. Let’s suppose that Tella is capable next season of maintaining numbers not too far short of what he’s achieved in the Championship (17 goals, all comps). Ralph limited Tella’s minutes because he felt he didn’t have the competencies for his ‘ball-oriented’ pressing game. Perhaps there was a way to accommodate him, but that challenge of solving the mismatch between personnel and the system has gone unsolved all season. Edozie, Onuachu, Aribo, Sulemana, Ćaleta-Car and (maybe) Oršić are all talented players, but successive managers have failed to integrate any of them. It’s hard to see why they would have succeeded with Tella.

I guess my big reflection here is not that Tella could have saved Saints, but that maybe a model of football so narrow and fussy that it couldn’t be adapted to accommodate Tella’s talent eventually killed us. Put another way, if you have top attacking talent coming out of your academy, and they can’t fit into your system but you have the worst attack in the league, maybe it’s, you know… the system that's the problem?

When we go down, I can’t wait to play football where players like Tella, with pace, vision, nerve and finishing skills, are celebrated for it, rather punished for not being ‘ball-oriented’.

Honourable mention: Exit 4a, Not loaning out Will Smallbone. I don’t think this one is worth considering. But similarly to Tella, he has spoken to The Athletic about how our system didn’t suit him. Pleased he’s had a good time at Stoke, excited to see him next season.

Exit 5: Not selling Romeu

Selling Romeu was a relatively small risk, of which we took a few too many in the summer. It doesn’t take us too far down the Pompey Highway and shouldn’t have been fatal had we taken another exit.

But we didn’t. We took all the risks. And in the period after Lavia’s injury against Chelsea the gap at the no. 6 was excruciating. Diallo couldn’t protect the backline, and Ward-Prowse was pulled away from the offensive contribution he could have made further up. Certainly cost us vital points and what could still be a close run battle for 17th (for others). The path from Lavia’s injury to Ralph’s sacking is short and straight, so you can at least wonder.

Definitely not the reason, but with my tin foil hat on, maybe a domino?

Honourable mention: Exit 5a, Not selling Nathan Redmond. If he stays, he ends up in Walcott’s role of being our most-creditable-but-ultimately-useless wide player. Gave us many years of service and I’m glad he’s moved on to greener pastures.

Exit 6: Not sacking Ralph

Naturally this is taking up the most attention. I don’t feel comfortable calling this one as decisively as the other exits, as if I could have the final word on what is a live and raw debate for lots of fans.

Instead I’ll say that I was a soft #RalphIn until the end. My feeling at the time was that he might just have scraped 17th, again, but as the season has unravelled I’ve actually become less confident he could have done it again. I really liked him personally.

I can’t bring myself to criticise Sport Republic for sacking him. First, the fraught, angry, tired sentiment toward Ralph’s regime at the end just wasn’t sustainable. Let’s assume he had just enough left in the tank personally to keep us up, circumstances aside. Even then, it would have been another long, painful season of fits and starts, flitting between a clear identity and missing-in-action. A truly toxic dressing room. A misfiring team would have been accompanied by a very real threat of relegation, all season. The atmosphere would have been vitriolic. A good board should have the courage to stand up fans if they believe it is truly best for the club, but to withstand the siege that would have accompanied backing Hassenhuttl all the way to May — I just couldn’t expect that.

Second, the Nathan Jones debacle has given some people a more positive outlook on Ralph. But since the arrival of Sellés, I feel less confident Ralph could have succeeded. It is widely understood that a fatal problem for Ralph was a major breakdown in relationships and team morale. After Jones, Sellés essentially reverted to maximally Ralphy style of play, but boosted by a fresh face, charismatic leadership, some home truths, a disciplinary reset and a tactical identity so clear you could walk into it. A comprehensive new manager bounce. But though for a while this brought back the best of Ralphball, in time it also brought back the worst. Sellés has failed to solve the systemic issues that Ralph never did. And if Sexy Ruben Sellés can’t make Ralphball work in a healthy environment with £60m of reinforcements, I don’t see how Ralph succeeds in a toxic one.

Exit 7: Not hiring Nathan Jones

You will be unsurprised to learn that I think relegation could have been avoided by hiring a manager who was not Nathan Jones.

Confession time again though: I was willing to back him, grudgingly, right until the Wolves defeat. I wanted it to work so badly, and felt we couldn’t afford for not to. I will say that I thought much criticism of Jones was heightened by prejudice against managers from the Championship, and managers that aren't sufficiently continental, both of which are poor proxies for actual ability. So I waited for the fruits of his ability to come good. I also felt it was the kind of tactical paradigm shift change that would come with a difficult adjustment phase rather than a new manager bounce.

So yeah, definitely a big exit missed. Up there with Exit 2 (striker in the summer). But this one in fairness was especially difficult to navigate. A manager is the most consequential hire a club can make and also the most unpredictable. I'm not surprised it melted Rasmus' shiny data model. He's probably still in Task Manager right now trying to close Excel. On the Pompey Highway, picking a new manager is Spaghetti Junction.

Exit 8: January…

Best deadline day in years. Wild.

It is a big exit missed, but one that depends heavily on others.

First off, I don’t think we signed objectively bad players. Oršić is the only clear failure and it was a cheap and opportunistic transfer. Sulemana has looked decent in the same position without making the difference we needed. You get the sense he could be great with better direction, and that’s the real problem: we still don’t really have a idea of how to use these players to break teams down. Tall Paul can’t be judged and Charly Alcaraz is a straight baller.

If there’s a missed exit here, it’s probably not that we signed poor players, but that we signed players for Nathan Jones then sacked him two games after deadline day. Which in turn begs the question…

Exit 9: Sacking Jones earlier?

Yes.

In the end, sure. Despite losing every league match in 2023 against the bottom bar Leicester, we were only cut adrift right at the end. At the time, I thought it was Jones or bust. But clearly there was more hope for another spin of the wheel than I realised.

Most fans were way ahead of me on this one. The board were not.

Of course, this exit only counts if you pick the right replacement.

Exit 10: Not hiring Selles

Having signed all those players for Jones, should we have hired Sellés, a manager with a more Ralphy philosophy than Ralph?

The reason I like the highway frame so much is that decisions like these all look so reasonable in isolation but when you join all the dots together and you see the trainwreck of this season as a whole, it’s like an Escher painting. Sellés did so much genuine good for the team when he stepped up, and after the Chelsea game I think the hope was truly justified. Ralph’s tenure collapsed because of a breakdown in relationships, so it wasn’t unreasonable to think that someone with the same ideas who was internally well-regarded throughout the club and was liked and respected by the squad, was the right guy. In hindsight, that he would bring the worst aspects of Ralphball back with the best aspects seems as predictable as the rain.

Even more tactically stubborn than Ralph, but chances are he’s a solid coach in the right setting and has a great managerial career ahead of him, elsewhere. Best of luck.

Honourable mention: Exit 10a, Hiring Jesse Marsch. Good coach, but fail to see how the only manager around as similar to Ralph as Sellés is successful, for all the same reasons. Maybe.

Exit 11: Sacking Selles?

Perhaps the strangest thing about this relegation battle is how many exits we missed without totally closing the door. When we almost went down in 2018, my gut feeling is that the fight then was harder, we did more to arrest the slide, and even then it still came down to a lucky knifefight in South Wales. Not only have we completely bottled this relegation fight, we’ve bottled one of the easiest fights in years. So many vulnerable teams asking to go down, so much for the magical 40pt mark. As I write this, Leicester City are in 16th place and mathematically they cannot earn more than 39pts (played 35). Yet we have conspired to be the worst. To top it off, I actually feel we have a better group of players than 2018.

For that reason, you have to grudgingly consider the possibility that even having missed all those exits, we could have replaced Ruben Sellés and made a Hail Mary hire to save the season, like 2018. I mean who knows, perhaps Mark Hughes still has the same number.

Realistically, I think we would have needed to sack Sellés before West Ham away (28 played, 23pts) to have even a remote hope of this, and at that time his failings weren’t so obvious. I don’t think the board could reasonably be expected to have made this call.

But then, if there’s one thing I’ve learnt writing this article, it’s that I’d have made most of the same decisions they did at the time and got the club relegated too, so what do I know? Fittingly, I’m finishing this piece at 6pm after the Fulham game, and we are now mathematically relegated. Like the Pompey Highway, it’s a long post — the longest I’ve written by far. Now that it’s over, I’m just glad that in my first season of writing about Southampton FC, I just post my shitty takes on the internet, and I don’t have to run a football club about which I care very deeply.

We should get some rest, then march on.

People often ask which game was the final nail in the coffin. When you knew. But like any solid piece of furniture, the coffin actually has many nails in, all as vital as the last. For me, they were Forest, Brentford, Leeds and West Ham. With just four nails it’s not an exquisite piece of carpentry, but it should be just sturdy enough to lower this dead team in the Championship where they belong.

Sunday was my first away game since December 2021. The last one gave me COVID a week before Christmas and I still preferred it (I had to isolate until Boxing Day). On Sunday I left early from both halves, something I never do at St. Mary’s, but as Taylor Swift once said: I’d seen this film before, and I didn’t like the ending.

The best thing about Sunday was, as ever, Romeo Lavia. In a game with all the usual failings and even Ward-Prowse going missing, he was a beacon, a reminder that movement through the lines isn’t just a pipedream. Sadly, you cannot penetrate dangerous areas on your own from DM, and all of Romeo’s ball progression came undone at the feet of Armstrong, Walcott, Elyounoussi and Mara. The contrast between this teenager and his teammates is blinding sometimes.

I think this is part of the reason Saints fans are so confident he’ll leave in the summer. The adulation we’ve heaped on the eighteen year-old is colossal, gushing even. So it’s understandable that Sellés has tried to manage his ego publicly, as he tries to shore up disciplinary standards and bridge dressing room divisions between young and old. But as a fan, it’s hard to respect that commitment to the team’s togetherness when the gulf in class is so glaring. Fans are actually embarrassed to make a Rolls-Royce player drive through the mud with us. It feels absurd that he plays for Southampton now, let alone in the Championship. Can you imagine, Romeo Lavia strolling around the park away to Rotherham, or Preston North End? So it’s difficult to countenance that he ever would.

But if we take stock, just for a second, let’s recall that there is no Rolls-Royce release clause. Saints being shit isn’t actually a breach of contract. Romeo Lavia is nine months into a five-year deal. Relegation clauses are not inserted into player contracts as a matter of routine, and it's not clear how a normal release clause would operate around Man City's buyback. So assuming we aren’t forced, if we sold him this summer, we could do so for a very large sum. That sum starts to fall when he’s two years from being a free agent, and falls drastically at 12 months. But three years is an age in football. A twenty year-old with three years left will be worth just as much as a nineteen year-old with four. So it’s not clear to me that there is a business case to sell this summer, and Sports Republic is predicated on developing assets and selling them at the peak of their value.

This is also consistent with Saints’ recent history. When we were a good selling club, I always felt the unspoken agreement was, we bring you to the Prem, you play well, have two good seasons in the shop window, then you go to a top-six club at peak value with minimal fuss. This was the case with Mané, Lallana, Lambert, Shaw and Chambers, who all did two years in the Premier League before moving on (okay maybe there was some fuss). Clyne, Schneiderlin and Van Dijk took three years, others were slower to develop.

As I recall, only Dejan Lovren broke the unspoken rule and did it in twelve months, and he really did kick up a stink. Such a move isn't totally off the cards then, but I think it would be more difficult for Lavia to force his way out like that. Lovren was 25, not as good, and on a deal that was one year shorter. I think there was more incentive with Lovren to strike while the iron was hot, and his subsequent season at Liverpool suggests we may have got a good deal. Lavia is 19 and represents a much more obvious long-term prospect for pretty much anyone who can afford him. It should both discourage the club and placate the player that he will still be a hot property in 2024.

The big stickler in all of this, is the £40m buy-back clause inserted into his contract by his previous owners, which crucially, becomes valid in 2024. This is the only thing I can fathom might give us a strong financial incentive to sell this summer, because next summer Man City will have first refusal over offers from other clubs and their own offer need not exceed £40m. To command a higher fee it may be necessary to sell this summer.

And that’s where it gets interesting, because you have to seriously consider how much Lavia is worth to us not just as saleable asset but as key player in a promotion campaign. Southampton would rightly be looking for an immediate return, and the raw materials are there, but Lavia is still our only reliable source of ball progression. If Lavia was sold, we’d need to dip into the market again for a no. 6, perhaps two, as well as sorting out the mess further up the field. The forward positions have been reinforced, but have they been improved? They certainly aren’t settled. Neither is centre-back. Defensive midfield and fullback are the only areas in which Saints don’t have unanswered questions, and KWP (and Salisu) is now late in his contract, and will leave whatever league we’re in. Replacing Lavia as well feels like a bridge too far if we want to go up. Even if we cannot command the same fee in 2024, I think it’s an open question: would you rather sell this summer for 50, maybe 60 million, adding to our squad issues and trying to fix them; or next summer for £40m and make starboy slum it in the Championship.

I suspect maybe that’s how it goes down on an personal level too — not pleasantly. Two weeks ago SaintsExtra reported, via Belgian journalist Sacha Tavolieri that Lavia’s father met with Manchester United representatives in mid-March to discuss a summer move. Tavolieri also claims Chelsea have also shown significant interest, and Man City remain vigilant given their buy-back clause. Romano has linked Arsenal. If the wheels are indeed in motion, it will take all of Ankersen’s hard-headedness to halt them. But my feeling is Rasmus has that in his locker, and I think he’s in decent position to say: “Look, before we took a chance on you, you hadn’t played a single minute of first-team football. You are nineteen. You signed a five-year deal nine months ago. Next summer you will be twenty, and your whole career will still be at your feet. Give us one more season.”

Perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps there are nuances to the contract situation I don’t understand. Perhaps my priors are off, and sheer force of will on the part of a player who wants out has more power over contractual realities than I’ve estimated. Perhaps we don’t get to understand how it happens, but something goes on behind the curtain and the big clubs always just get what they want. But until I see either a clear business case or a legal obligation to release him, I won’t accept that it’s a done deal. As much as Southampton fans feel like we don’t deserve Lavia, that’s not how football business works. We can play hardball, if we want.

At least once this season, it feels as if each of our centrebacks have taken a turn at being the best, or at least the favourite. Salisu was comfortably top boy before the season began. So when Bella-Kotchap’s exceptional start made him an early season darling, I felt Sali had been forgotten a bit unfairly. One of Nathan Jones’ last battles with the fans was over the exile of Duje Ćaleta-Car, for whom many were baying to be integrated, though this feeling seems to have softened. After Arsenal (H), even Lyanco was briefly a cult hero.

But nobody could have expected that last weekend, at the business-end of a relegation battle, unprompted by injuries, DCC, Sali and Lyanco would be sat on the bench, watching Jan Bednarek line up next to ABK.

At first, Bednarek’s return was a just mildly humiliating bodge-job. Jones wanted to recall him from Villa because he prefers to play three centrebacks and wanted five in the squad, and because he’d made it the core of his mission to make Saints more robust at the back. Bednarek was also unknown to Jones, and part of how new managers get a bounce is by trying to breathe new life into underutilised players. But why would Ruben Sellés, trying to reboot quite a Ralphy system, and to whom Bednarek’s strengths and limitations are well known, voluntarily start him ahead of Salisu, DCC and Lyanco?

Earlier, in the season, it was notable how much our build-up involved long balls from Bazunu. This was a hallmark criticism of Jones but was true of twilight Hassenhuttl too. So it was notable against Leicester that Saints drew boos and jeers from the home fans, because Bazunu repeatedly declined to release the ball quickly for a counter. Instead, he waited for the teams to reset, then rolled it to one of his centrebacks, who took up horizontal positions inside the penalty box. Sellés is trying to get Saints to relearn playing out from the back, and last Saturday they took their first baby steps.

I suspect, or at least hope, that like most of us Sellés believes Salisu is a better all-round centreback than Bednarek. He has incredible recovery speed and physicality, accompanied by good concentration, positional awareness and passing range. Basically a monster in all the areas Bednarek is weakest, particularly one-vs-ones and last ditch defending. But for all his flaws, Bednarek’s one genuine strength is that he has always been composed on the ball. By contrast, Salisu has had some notable clangers in this department (see Son’s goal, Tottenham (A) on opening day). I suspect Bednarek started at Leicester because he is deemed to be (marginally) our best centreback with the ball at his feet and under pressure, and this is what’s most important for Sellés right now as we reinvent our first-phase build-up. Lyanco is actually in with a shout here too, but while Sellés is pragmatic he’s not clinically insane.

As we witnessed on Saturday, this isn’t without risk. Southampton’s ball progression was as good as its been for a long time, and although this had a lot to do with Charly Alcaraz (and Lavia/Adams) the backline also need some credit. But it came at a cost. Banuzu produced two should-have-been fatal errors, one passing to Iheanacho out of defence, another flapping in busy box. The first is an indictment of our ability to play out like Sellés wants, and the second indicative of our weakness defending our own box. Historically Bednarek is not strong here. He had a pretty quiet game, and as expected was composed in possession, but Saints were torn wide open by Maddison’s deliveries, and for that threat I would take Salisu over Bednarek any day of the week, including this Sunday. It is unclear if improving our passing game is worth the risk.

As such, next weekend’s fixture against a derby-stung Manchester United who need to put in a professional performance at home now looks very fucking ominous. Sellés has made clear his desire to cultivate 7-8 regular starters, and you’d think the centrebacks would be among them. If I’m right that Bednarek’s inclusion is related to the ambition to play out from the back, then I expect him to start on Sunday. That terrifies me, because whilst his press-resistance will be an asset, Ten Hag will surely look at our vulnerability from crosses against Leicester and seek to target this. I have no desire to be pushed further towards relegation by Luke Shaw. On the plus side, it’s unlikely to be Bednarek’s worst visit to Old Trafford.

And what of the future? At the start of the season, when Bella-Kotchap debuted, I truly thought the Bednarek-Stephens era at Southampton FC might finally be over. His contract runs out in 2025,1 the replacements were in, and we packed him off to Villa. I actually thought his parting dig was pretty funny, and had been well-earned by player who'd only ever tried his best and taken massive stick from the fans. I thought it was a fitting end.

His hysterical own goal in Jones’ departing game against Wolves only underlined how laughably wrong I was. He was always going to return from Villa, score a calamitous own goal, and be readmitted to the starting XI. Now, it's not even unreasonable to think his contract might be extended. Sellés wants to trim the squad, but with Sali's contract running short and Lyanco allegedly disheartened, maybe there's space for an imperfect senior player who knows the team and is possessed of specific competencies that Sellés values. Who knows?

Nobody knows, because there are no fans at Southampton FC, just passengers on the Bednarek Carousel. We march on, but the carousel just goes round and round.

Happy Bednaissance everybody.

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When Saints signed Shane Long in the summer of 2014 for £12m, I was powerfully whelmed. We hadn't seen Mané, Tadić, Pellè or Wanyama play yet, but they read like ambitious, progressive signings. That guy from West Brom felt really horizontal. Although he perhaps outstayed his usefulness by the end, Long paid back every penny of his transfer fee as fast as his little legs could carry him, which is really fast.

Adam Armstrong arrived at Southampton for the same fee under very different circumstances. Both players came in to fill the shoes of a talismanic striker making an abrupt exit, but Long came into a team on the crest of a wave, not a tightrope. Saints have yet to see the fruits of their recent squad revamp, as they did so immediately in 2014, and Armstrong has not made an impact anything like that of Long’s.

There is a widely held belief in the Saints fan base that this is because Adam Armstrong is a bad football player. His numbers seem to bear this out. Rather than me listing his crimes one-by-one it’s worth looking at this chart worked up by @kristianoko comparing Saints’ current and target forwards. Kristian made this to shed light on Nicolas Jackson, but for the wrong reasons it’s Armstrong that stands out. A centre-forward by trade, Armstrong has among the very lowest goal returns and xG figures of any forward in Europe’s top 5 leagues, and is similarly ranked for the accuracy of his shooting and quality of his opportunities. His shooting and scoring, by the numbers at least, are appalling.

Some obvious caveats apply. First, since January 2022, Southampton FC have been one of the worst performing teams (on points) in England’s top five divisions. Being in a bad team disadvantages Armstrong and not all of that fault can be laid at his door. Second, Armstrong has not been played at centre-forward, his natural position. Ralph eventually repurposed Armstrong as a left-sided forward, often playing extremely wide and deep, and this has continued under Nathan Jones. Finally, not only is Armstrong played out of position but increasingly he isn’t played in an attacking capacity. You’ll note that the one class of statistics above in which Armstrong not only performs well but outshines everyone is in tackling, recoveries and interceptions. Like Elyounoussi, Armstrong is a superb presser who is played for his contribution without the ball in spite of his contribution with it. It’s also worth noting that in the table above, Armstrong is in the 41st percentile for goals-xG, not good, but significantly better than his all round shooting and scoring stats, suggesting that his poor goal return and shot accuracy is largely explained by all his shots being very difficult ones. His npxG/shot supports this. This might be expected of someone playing out of position, in a poor attacking side, mostly tasked with systemic busywork.1

In his new role, Armstrong has gained some limited praise for his endless running, hassling of the backline, and late in games especially, tracking back to support his fullback and defending deep in endgame situations. But it’s difficult to get excited about strikers for mucking in around their own box. Long also had a slightly thankless spell like in 2019-20, when the goals had very much dried up for him but Ralph favoured him for his pressing and running.23 This wasn't a golden era for Long, or even really a renaissance, just an aging player finding a small way to contribute rather than being put out to pasture.

My hope is that Armstrong can do something like this in reverse: do his workhorse phase first then blossom into a fox in the box later on. It is just a hope, but I believe Armstrong launch failure at Southampton owes more to a mismatch between his game and his teammates, than his game simply being poor. If I’m right, then perhaps he can turn those numbers around.

So what made Long great in 2014-16? What makes Armstrong bad now? Koeman's Saints, our highest scoring side since 1994-95, revolved around the hold-up and first ball-winning abilities of noted Italian supermodel Graziano Pellè. Pellè is not central to this article but I’ve supplied a picture of him below because I need to break up the text and also because phwoaarrrr. This system worked in different ways with different personnel, but a core feature was Pellè receiving balls in dangerous areas and laying them off or creating space for various runners, one of them being Long. Pellè scored 11 leagues goals and 6 assists in 2015-16, Long scored 10 and made 4. When Pellè left Saints in 2016, Long's goalscoring dropped off a cliff.4 This is not the only reason, but without a focal point up top Long was deprived of a major source of space and chances. Charlie Austin arrived in January and is a big boy at 6’2, but also a different kind of striker and the same dynamic was not recaptured.

All of this squares quite well with what fans generally believe is wrong with Saints’ frontline right now. The main complaint - after finishing - is size. There are lots of things that Ings did better than Adams does, but an important one was being 5'10. Adams is only good at being 5'8. His body strength makes his hold-up play passable but it’s pretty manageable for defenders and he doesn’t have the height for a target man. The problem is even more pronounced for Armstrong. A popular refrain of Saints fans is that Adams is a second striker in need of a new Danny Ings, a brain to his brawn. I think Adam Armstrong needs a Pellè.

Of course, there were other routes to goal for Long besides Pellè. Saints’ main playmaker during that era was Dušan Tadić, and in Schneiderlein and Wanyama we also had midfielders capable of playing in final passes from deep. Mané’s breathtaking creativity also made him a reliable source of assists. Armstrong’s problem is bigger than just a big man. Today, Saints’ main, nay only, reliable source of creativity is James Ward-Prowse, who mostly contributes with set-pieces, crosses from out wide or the right half-space, which by virtue of his size Armstrong cannot profit from. Like Long, Armstrong is a player who wants to run in behind. Armstrong is rapid, makes excellent runs behind the lines, is constantly demanding the ball, has good feet over five yards and is capable of some superb finishes. None of this is particularly useful because Saints do not have a playmaker capable of the kind of passes that would serve him, and his physical limitations means he struggles to receive balls into feet or from Bazunu, Saints’ primary route into the final third.

As a result, whereas Adams is regularly criticised for his finishing, Armstrong’s problem is that he just doesn’t see goal that much at all. In every season of his career (for which there is publicly available shooting data) Armstrong has matched or outperformed his npxG - except at Southampton, where last season it was a paltry 4.9 (2 goals). I do not accept that Armstrong’s expected goals is so low because he is not capable of finding space, opportunities or good positions. Whatever criticisms can be made of him, throughout his time at Saints Armstrong has made excellent, incisive behind the lines and is visibly hungry for the ball. I can’t prove this statistically because I am aware of no way to measure the quality of runs made that were never honoured. My best evidence is the frustration I felt for him against Coventry in February 2022, a profoundly stupid football match, in which a number of other out-of-favour players with something to prove, Walcott, Redmond, Long, Diallo, even KWP, ignored all of Armstrong’s runs in order to make heroic solo dribbles into nowhere and fire over the bar from 25 yards. Armstrong went off at half time and Stuie saved our blushes.

Armstrong’s predecessor, Danny Ings, was so special for Saints because he could conjure a small part of the 2015-16 team’s collective magic all on his own. By contrast, Armstrong is a striker in need of a strong supporting cast. He cannot play as a target man or as a false 9, but he is not an intrinsically bad football player. He needs space-makers, and like Long, his contribution will live or die by the players he has around him.

In my second ever post, I argued that it was ‘good’ that Saints didn’t sign Cody Gakpo in the summer, or indeed any premium-rate centre-forward. It wasn't a popular take then and the last four months haven’t done it any favours. I now accept as a face-value statement, I was wrong.

I’m revisiting this awkward episode because, although we do need a centre-forward, I think much of my underlying reasoning still holds and is particularly relevant as we navigate our most important January transfer window in the (post-) Liebherr era.

My main schtick was that although our strike force was underwhelming (full disclosure: I said ‘about par’), our weakest position was actually attacking midfield, what Ralph designated his ‘wide 10s’, and that it would be cheaper, safer and more productive to reinforce here than to do so at centre-forward. I still think this part is true, but at the same time, yeah, we also really need to buy a centre-forward.

For many Saints fans, that forward was/is Danny Ings. In not finishing this piece before Christmas, I’ve let myself be outmanoeuvred by the Dildo Brothers and Ings is now at West Ham. I think we can all agree that Danny Ings’ return would have immediately improved Southampton Football Club and likely been a solid bulwark against relegation. Whether it was ever desirable or possible is up for debate, which is now academic. I don’t want to get into all that. But truthfully, I think there’s something wrong with the ambition to bring back Danny Ings, which conflates a very good player for the club with a very good time for the club.

Without question, there are some good reasons to desire an Ingsnaissance. First, Ings was so complete a forward that he didn’t so much solve a problem in our attacking system as he did paper over the complete absence of one. In October, when arguing we needed to reinforce at no. 10 more than no. 9, perhaps I overstated the distinction between players that create chances and players that finish them. Saints aren’t great at finishing but they are really bad at chance creation. The reason Ings was so brilliant and important for Saints was that not only was he an excellent finisher, but was possessed of that little bit of magic in the box that allowed him to make the space for himself that Moi, Redmond, Stu, Djenepo, Tom, Dick and Harry could not. Ings is an especially valuable player if you are missing multiple pieces of the creative jigsaw.

Much of fans’ anxiety for a new striker seems to reflect a desire to recapture the spark that Ings delivered. After our defeat to City in December, Luke Osman lamented that nobody in our current group is “capable of creating something from nothing”, as Ings was for years, and Broja was last season. The absence of such a player is a “massive worry”. His analysis is absolutely correct, in the sense that such a player is why we used to be good, and their absence why we are currently not. But there are different ways to skin a cat, and football teams need not be based on having one guy who does everything. In October, I said we’d be better off trying to improve the supporting cast around our strikers rather than find a new talisman. In part, this is because a balanced team is surely a better one.

Second, part of the reason it was deemed so essential to buy a no. 9 in the summer was that we needed somebody to partner Che Adams. Adams is now a well-regarded senior player and our most fertile source of goals, but living off Che's benefits has been a bleak existence. Even when he’s good he doesn’t convince as a lone striker leading the line. He lacks guile in the box and at 5’9 his physical presence is often overstated. Che works as a troublesome, physical second striker, but an opportunist needs opportunities, and his link-up and hold-up play isn’t good enough to work them alone. Imagine Micah Richards doing a flagship punditry role without Roy Keane as a foil, all cackling laughter with no bearded frowns — or even vice versa. It’s a sad sad show.

There's nothing wrong with trying to get more out of Che Adams and I can accept he needs the right partner. But the Ings-Adams partnership was not in reality the mesmerising double act that people seem to remember. In the one season they played together, Ings scored 22 goals and assisted 2. Adams scored 4 and assisted 2, from 12 starts and 30 appearances. Adams started the first 6 league games that season, scored 0 goals, and was dropped after a 3-1 defeat to Bournemouth, breaking his duck at the end of the season with a 40-yard wonderlob against Man City. Ironically, Adams only really came good after Ings left, which may or may not be related. But if Ings really is Bonnie to his Clyde, we’ve yet to see it.

Moreover, all of this made a lot more sense under Hassenhuttl, when the team lived and died by its ability to run the 4-2-2-2. Having only half a good striker is especially painful when you are wedded to a system that involves two high-pressing, high-energy centre-forwards. Ralph’s dalliances in lone striker formations soothed some of the team's issues, at times, but also increased our reliance on Che and forced Armstrong out of position, exposing their limitations even further. Understandably, this made Ings’ absence even more obvious. But Ralph is gone, and Jones is starting to show evidence that Saints can play in a different way with the same squad. Alternating Adams and Mara, none of Nathan Jones three wins have Saints started with a front two.

All of this is a long way of saying, I guess, that Danny Ings was awesome for us and probably would be again, but there are other ways to play football and Saints must find one. The fact that Ings was such an incredible carry player explains both why he was so good for us and why we need to move on. Being carried by your best player isn't a healthy or enjoyable model of football, and the nostalgia is misplaced because Ings-era Southampton was not the whole not a good time. In our best season with Ings we finished 11th, and even that was a mixed season, one of coherence and dysfunction. I wrote in October, that I hadn't forgotten how great Ings was for us. But also that I hadn’t forgotten those games he floated alone, isolated in a defensive block that his teammates couldn’t break down. That part at least, I stand by.

The Ward-Prowse free kick debate has always struck me as a bit unnecessary. The question of the greatest player, or greatest striker, Gerrard or Lampard, whatever, always remains open because any method of calling it is unavoidably subjective. There is much in the greatest ‘something’ in football that cannot be measured or compared, and much argument over the worth of different achievements and qualities.

This isn't the case for the question of the greatest free kick taker. The quality of a goal, a pass, a player, or a team might involve many intangible things that aren't easily squashed into a number. But the best free kick taker is the person who bangs them most reliably, from the most difficult positions, against the best shot-stopping. These things are all now relatively easy to measure. So the debate about Prowsey shouldn't be that hard to settle.

Maybe a year or two ago, on another occasion we were doing the Ward-Prowse GOAT convo, I realised this and asked a mate who works in football analytics to check where the skipper ranks right now. How reliably a player scores free kicks is easily given by free kick goals divided by number of direct free kicks taken. The remaining ambiguities are the difficulty of each one and the quality of the attempt, which we can now measure quite confidently with expected goals and a variant of it. I'm not going to add to the long list of xG explainers on the internet but if you need a quick refresher look here. Expected goals doesn’t measure the probability of scoring an individual shot perfectly, especially over small numbers of observations, because so many different and obscure factors can confound or enable a shot. But it's pretty accurate where n > 100, and more importantly direct free kicks are the most homogeneous class of shots in football. This means we can expect xG to the track the true difficulty of a free kick very well.

If you've read this far, cheers. If you scrolled straight down, fair fucks, I probably would have. I can’t produce any charts because I don’t have direct access to the data and my friend is mindful of his proprietary obligations. But he has pulled out a few relevant figures. Sample details in the footnotes.1 Anyway here's the sauce.

James Ward-Prowse has scored 15 of 70 free kicks since the start of the 2018 season, a conversion rate of 21.4%. His total of 15 is higher than his nearest neighbours, James Maddison and Lucas Zelerayán, in fact by some distance.

The rate at which he converted attempts muddies the waters a bit. Scoring 8 of 31 free kicks, James Maddison actually has the best conversion rate in the world over the same time period (25.8%). But, muddier still, he did so from a post-shot xG of 3.81.

Post-shot xG (PSxG) measures the probability of a shot resulting in a goal after being taken. It tracks the quality of a shot itself, rather than a chance that results in a shot (xG), and is thus mostly used to rate goalkeepers (You measure their save rate against quality of shots they face, given by PSxG). But because it’s a measure of shot quality we can use it to rate free kick attempts incredibly well. Maddison's cumulative PSxG for his 8 free kick goals is 3.81, suggesting that with average goalkeeping/luck he should have scored about half the goals that he did. Ward-Prowse, by contrast scored his 15 free kicks from a much more representative post-shot xG of 13.2. Put differently, on another day, we would expect JWP to have put away about 13 free kicks to Maddison's 4 (having had twice as many chances), based on the quality of their strikes.

The final nail in the coffin is the differential between their post-shot xG and their xG, in this case the differential between the likelihood of their strikes going in (once taken) and the difficulty of their shooting positions. I don't have the exact numbers in this category, but am given to understand that JWP comes out on top again. Trent Alexander-Arnold also scores very highly.

All in all, Ward-Prowse's dominance along most relevant metrics, and the fact he has sustained them all over a larger sample of attempts, makes it very difficult to build a case that JWP has not been the best free-kick taker in the world over the last five years, at least. When I first asked about it two-ish years ago, I was given the top 5 players for average PSxG, and JWP was in the top spot, a mere 0.01 above Messi (I think it was 0.109). This is yet another way to cut the cake, but it means I suspect he’s been on top for a while.

The GOAT question is more difficult. Juninho scored over 70 direct free kicks in his career, so even pricing in the differences between leagues, eras, opposition, technology (which isn't much), the Brazilian’s title looks pretty unassailable. He is also credited with developing the ‘knuckleball’ technique (which JWP replicated against Wolves), which arguably gives him an extra unquantifiable GOAT credit.

What we can do for certain, is bandy these decimals in face of anyone who dares question JWP's current supremacy. The naysayers will tell you data in football needs to be used responsibly, understood in context, and employed to support a story but not replace one. But we know that actually, statistics are a bludgeon, a stick to beat other fans into the 3G dirt. So next time someone pipes up, show them these digits, give it a big JWP golf swing celebration™, and ride off into the statistical sunset before they can reply. Ping it like Prowsey motherfucker.

A quick prologue. If nothing else, the Ralphampton era was defined by the manager’s attempts to wrestle the team into his favourite shape, the sacred 4-2-2-2, with eternally mixed results. In 2020-21, Saints often seemed stuck between a rock and hard place: their inability to run the 4-2-2-2 safely for ninety minutes and their unfamiliarity with any alternative. Last season, buoyed by some new personnel, Saints were more flexible, running various systems, notably a 3-5-2 deployed to great effect against Liverpool, Spurs and Arsenal. Arguably, the watering down of his core philosophy led to a degradation of the press which ultimately cost Ralph his job. But perhaps it’s no wonder that in summer 2022, again wrestling with an improved but incomplete squad, that Southampton played half of preseason in a new shape with three centre-halves.

Above is our starting XI for our final game of preseason, a 2-1 defeat to Villareal. We ran the same system against Watford and RB Leipzig. Below is the same system with slightly more likely personnel and a clearer specification of the shape. When I saw it in preseason, I read this system was as a fairly naked attempt to get Southampton’s best creative players on the pitch and higher up it, shouldering more offensive responsibility, at the expense of the 4-2-2-2. Southampton are famously blunt in Ralph’s ‘wide 10’ position and have in Che Adams about 70% of a centre-forward. At the time, our first-choice centre-halves were still Bednarek, Salisu and Stephens, an enduring liability. However, Saints were blessed with an excellent slate of full-backs, a stalwart DM, a passable ball-carrier in Stuart Armstrong, and of course JWP, now an all-action talisman who bleeds goal contributions.

The new system spoke to all of these strengths and weaknesses. From the 4-2-2-2, it involves dropping both of Ralph’s ‘wide 10s’ for an extra centre half and an extra central midfielder. Firstly and most obviously, having three centre-halves allows them to paper over each other’s limitations - Bednarek and Stephens especially are often dominated physically and for pace, and this way they all have less air and less ground to cover. What’s more interesting is how this enables Saints’ attack. Playing three centre-halves, KWP/Tino/Perraud can venture forward more freely and add the creative value on the flanks that Djenepo/Stuie/Moi simply never have. Saint’s weakest position, the ‘wide 10’, drops out of the system entirely. Instead, with starboy Lavia in the pivot, James Ward-Prowse can come off his leash into a true no.8 role, accompanied by Stuart Armstrong, Saints best ball-carrier. Up top, the Southampton striker issue remains unsolved. Except perhaps with the acquisition of Joe Aribo, we have a player who can partner Che but also drop into the channels to create a box midfield, as Trossard did to us so successfully on boxing day. All sounds wonderful right?

I thought so. And then we conceded six goals in 150 minutes against Spurs and Leeds. Turns out, having three at the back doesn’t really count for shit if your defenders can’t win their 1v1s. In fact, having three centre-backs arguably weakens the backline if you staff it with shit players. On the hour against Leeds, we switched back to ol’ faithful, turned up the heat, and equalised from 2-0 down inside half an hour. 4-2-2-2 was back, baby.

Naturally, the old problems resurfaced and we are where we are. Ralph tried different systems, some with three CBs and some with two, including a 4-1-4-1 that bore some fruits, but it didn’t matter. The new system had failed and nobody, including the players, could stand the old one any longer. I genuinely believe the that aborted preseason system is an underrated aspect of Ralph’s demise, especially when I entertain questions like, what if Bella-Kotchap had been ready to start against Spurs? What if Oriel Romeu hadn’t been sold? But I might not have to wonder much longer, as Nathan Jones is in, and word in Luton is he likes three at the back.

So here we have the curious situation where twice in 8 months, under two different managers, Saints have spent weeks rehearsing a 5-3-2/3-4-3 in their back gardens, before having it shredded by the first available Premier League opposition and reverting to a back four. I won’t offer any analysis of Jones’ efforts because I’m on holiday and haven’t been able to watch the past three games. But dear Christ does the fanbase paint a picture. Nonetheless, I do think Ralph’s experiment in August has some lessons for the January Jones project.

I suspect Saints have to play a back four, at least for the time being. Time is something Jones repeatedly says is needed for his project to work, but if that’s true then he needs to respect that a back four is what these Saints know right now, and he ought to let them run it. I understand why the Brighton game will have put him off it, but Brighton are just excellent right now, well out of our reach, and it’s a different side with Lavia back in for Diallo. Just like Ralph’s opening games against Spurs and Leeds, if your defenders make the kind of individual clangers they did against Brighton, Fulham and Forest, it doesn’t really matter if they’re lined up in a three, four or five. It’s the personnel. So drop Lyanco, trust Lavia-JWP to protect, and give yourself an extra man to build a functioning attack.

I say I ‘suspect’ because I didn’t watch the games and there are many ways for good managers to skin a cat. Perhaps Jones will find in his back three what Ralph did not. We have to hope. Marx wrote that history happens twice, the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce. I think Ralph’s end was tragic, but it depends who you ask. Conversely, Saints fans can all agree that so far Jones’ tactical experiments have delivered on the farce.

I’ve been writing a piece this week called in “In Defence of Ibrahima Diallo”. It was already heavily weighted down with caveats and is hugely reined-in by comparison with what I might have written a year ago, but after yesterday’s Sheffield-Wednesday-Night shitshow I’ve totally lost confidence in the piece. I was really keen to publish this weekend, so fortunately the England squad announcement gives me a chance to offer a quick word on the man who plays next to him, an uncomplicatedly great footballer who has again been harshly overlooked for the national side.

There is a feeling among Saints fans that the skipper has had a poor start to the season and that this is a factor in his omission. Jacob Tanswell rightly points out that his diminished influence is a result of being saddled with increased defensive responsibility in Lavia’s absence. This is entirely accurate, and it’s probably also why my Diallo article is dead in the water. The Frenchman just cannot cover. That said, it’s still probably a fair assessment that James Ward-Prowse has been slightly off the pace in some games this season.

But I don’t think this has anything to do with his omission from the England squad. It’s worth remembering that Southgate has known Ward-Prowse longer than any other player in the England frame. In 2013, newly appointed England Under-21 manager Gareth Southgate gave Ward-Prowse his first call-up, and started the 18-year-old for his first game in charge against Moldova. For three years, Southgate’s entire tenure, he was a permanent fixture in the team. The two have already won tournaments together: Ward-Prowse captained Southgate’s side to victory in the 2016 Toulon Tournament, shortly before Southgate was named caretaker of the senior team after Roy Hodgson’s dismissal. Ward-Prowse narrowly missed out on England Under-21 Player of the Year to — fun fact — Nathan Redmond. So, aside from JWP being one of the most hard-working, consistent, flexible what-you-see-is-what-you get midfielders I could name, if Southgate is willing to overlook the form of trusted players like Luke Shaw and Harry Maguire, I think it’s unlikely he’s suddenly lost confidence in Ward-Prowse.

In fact, the longevity of his association with Southgate is likely a big part of Ward-Prowse’s problem. Having worked with him for three years, I suspect Southgate now has an incredibly long-standing and fixed perception of the skipper, such that he is unlikely to easily revise that opinion either up or down. Truthfully, as someone who’s watched him play since he was eighteen, I’ve been just as bad. It took me a long time to adjust to the idea that JWP was no longer the handy, workhorse, utility squad player that I’d known and was instead the complete all-round, all-action midfield talisman that churns out ridiculous numbers in every corner of his game.

However, I do think there’s also some substantive and fair reasons that Southgate has passed him over. In my view, JWP’s principal problem is that he offers too much of what England already has. One reason I was slow to uprate my opinion of Ward-Prowse was that his chance creation still owes mostly to his crossing and set pieces. There is nothing wrong with that — chances are chances. But you have to ask, does it benefit England that much to have another right-footed player who is even better at crosses, corners and free-kicks than Kieran Trippier (who is now guaranteed to start)? England already have this in spades, but conversely, historically their biggest deficiency is a midfielder who can reliably progress the ball into the the final third. For all his quality, Ward-Prowse does not carry the ball up the park like Declan Rice, or slip passes between the lines like James Maddison, or drag teams out of shape like [redacted player from Portsmouth] or, do, well, all of the magical shit that Jude Bellingham promises. This is the best way I can think to explain the inclusion of Gallagher, who though vastly inexperienced and less versatile, is at least a radically different kind of midfielder to Ward-Prowse. Henderson on the other hand, I just… I have no words.

In that respect, coming full circle to my dead-ass Diallo article, Southampton and England have this in common. Both sides lack a creative spark behind the front line, a way to pick the lock in a defence, an idea about how they are supposed to break teams down when they have the ball. But where Southampton’s only alternative to Ward-Prowse is Diallo, England have a wealth of other tools in the box. If the skipper is going to be passed over, I will be fuming if Southgate doesn’t at least figure out how to use them come November 21st.

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It’s been a good week for Saints. The men’s hard won point against Arsenal, the women are up to third in the Championship, and The Lyanco Show™ is giving us somebody to love again. Points are still low but there’s good characters around the club right now, and that matters. Even Nathan Tella and Harrison Reed can’t stop bagging!

Strangely, this has me on tenterhooks, because at any minute now, new Prime Minister Rishi Sunak might use our fair weather to try and ingratiate himself with the public by milking his alleged love of Southampton Football Club. I could deal with this, through ridicule, I could get by. Except, excruciatingly, I know for a fact that it’s true. Rishi Sunak’s red and white.

Probably not hard to guess my politics but surely lot of fans of different persuasions are put out by politicians making political hay out of football. All whilst Bury Town folds, European Super League plans are paraded in public and Newcastle is converted into a vehicle of Saudi soft power. There are actual, non-tokenistic ways that politicians could engage more with football but they limit themselves to cringeworthy one-liners in scripted speeches and interviews, and sad, awful photo-tweets of themselves watching headline games. If I have to see one more photo of a single, suited man, smiling pleasantly while nursing a bottle of Corona in front of a TV set in a vacant Parliamentary meeting room I may actually go full Lyanco-Nketiah.

I’ll get to how I know Sunak is a scummer but first some context. Rishi has touted his love of Saints on several occasions. Earliest and most incredibly, Rishi listed Southampton Football Club is as one of his interests on his Stanford University alumnus page, alongside Star Wars and the “History of Coca-Cola”. A insane combination, but it was hardly likely to be “Mags, bags and slags” from young Rishi.

In 2019, speaking to the BBC about his identity, Sunak said, “In terms of cultural upbringing, I'd be at the temple at the weekend — I'm a Hindu — but I'd also be at the Saints game as well on a Saturday. You do everything, you do both.” This lit the fire for every subsequent profile on the up-and-comer to make a point of his Saints credentials. He has not tweeted about Saints ever, as far as I can tell,1 save for the instance above.

During his leadership campaign this year, things picked up. In August, when asked what he would be if not a politician, Sunak said “If I could run Southampton Football Club, I'd be a very happy man.”. In the same month, when asked how he’d turn our fortunes, he replied “I'm going to be unpopular for saying it here, starting by beating [Manchester] United this weekend.”. That weekend we were in fact playing Leicester, United were scheduled the weekend after.

As he predicted, Rishi turned out to be really unpopular for this, the United-mad Tory membership passing him over for Liz “Mortgage Hunter” Truss. Since his return to the frontbench, he’s been back at his old tricks, engaging in a tiresome exchange of House of Commons banter with Alan Whitehead (Labour MP for Southampton Test) at his first PMQs. Excruciatingly, Penny Mordaunt allegedly mouthed “Play up Pompey” in response. Needless to say this is a disaster for me. I would rather gouge my eyes out with a pipe wrench than listen to these two people engage in playful South Coast club banter with the whole country as witness. I wish I could relay to you that this was the first and only time Rishi Sunak has flaunted his love of Southampton Football Club about Parliament. But it’s not.

Between 2014 and 2017, my girlfriend worked for the Labour Party in their Parliamentary Research Service. People who work on the Parliamentary estate have access to a gym there, and one day in 2016 she was running, when in the wall mirrors that face the treadmills, she saw a man approaching.

The man, genuinely giddy, exclaimed (something along the lines of) “Oh my gosh, you’re a Southampton fan, I can’t believe I’ve found one!”. She was wearing a Saints shirt. He asked her what she did, and she replied that worked for Labour’s PRS. She recounts: meanwhile, “I’m thinking who are you, and I wanna get on with my run.”. When asked the same, he described himself as the “Tory equivalent”, a white lie, he had recently been elected as an MP.

They spoke for a time about football and Saints. He talked about how much he loved going to games with his wife and kids, and suggested that she, him and Conor Burns (Conservative MP for Bournemouth West) should go watch a game together in Parliament’s Sports and Social Bar (they have that too). My girlfriend describes him as very nice and very enthusiastic, and claims his enthusiasm for Saints was genuine. He was clearly ecstatic about having found a Saints fan, in colours, in Parliament, sufficiently so that being engaged by a strange man in the gym was not creepy on this occasion. The next day, Sunak gave her a big wave across Portcullis House.

Before she told me this story, I had my doubts about Rishi’s credentials. Knowing only that he was “from Southampton” but went to Winchester College, I naturally assumed that he was a public schoolboy in need of some political street cred and his scum licence was a forgery. This has precedent. In 2015, David Cameron famously “forgot” he supported Aston Villa when he made a joke about supporting West Ham in a prepared speech. At the very least, Sunak’s support of the club seemed like a tenuous way of connecting himself to a city in which he had truthfully spent little of his time. In a profile in Tatler (a kind of Beano for aristocrats), bizarrely, that I found this too was entirely untrue.

Rishi’s parents are Punjabi Hindus who emigrated from East Africa to Southampton in the 1960s. His father became a GP while his mother ran a pharmacy on the roundabout where Hill Lane meets Burgess Road, at the North-West corner of the Common. It’s not called “Sunak Pharmacy” anymore but it’s still open, and if you’re from that side of the Itchen you’ll probably recognise it. He went to prep school (Stroud, near Romsey, my ends, trust me it’s a weird school) until he was (presumably) thirteen, when his application to Winchester College was accepted but he missed out on a scholarship. Determined, his parents made sacrifices to pay his way through one of Britain’s most famous schools. His brother later went too.

From there, his path is a traditional one: Winchester, Oxford, a big bank, Parliament, running the country. I can’t say how much time he spent in the city as a teenager, or how much he engaged with Saints. On the one hand he boarded in Winchester, on the other, his parent’s surgery was a 10-15 minute walk from The Dell. But amazingly, one thing that is known about his young adult life is that aged 18, he waited tables at Kuti’s Brasserie. Kuti himself is a long-time friend of the family. “I saw him grow up,” Kuti says, “His father used to bring him in his carry cot.”.

This really gets me. I cannot count the number of people who told me growing up that they knew someone “who knows Kuti”. Bullshit, I often called, but a lot of my (Romsey) school friends were from mixed White and South Asian communities in Shirley and Lordshill, near Sunak’s Pharmacy. It isn’t unreasonable to think that my school friends, the Sunaks and Kuti all ran in close-ish circles. This suggests Guy James wasn’t bullshitting me, and nor is Rishi. In any case, when I was growing up Kuti’s Brasserie was almost half as much of a local institution as Saints are, Kuti himself an urban legend blown up like a crime boss. For Kuti to have known him as an infant — Sunak couldn’t have a bigger Southampton endorsement if he was captain of the Titanic.

In light of this, it's difficult to conclude Sunak isn’t a committed and long-standing Saints fan, with a meaningful attachment to the city. Perhaps the first real football fan in No. 10 in 25 years (John Major, Chelsea), and one of only five since 1945 (Attlee, Wilson, Heath, Major, Sunak). But then, why does he come off so plastic? I don’t suppose he gets down to St. Mary’s much nowadays, but he should be able to speak the language. Why do his engagements feel so forced?

This is the strangest thing of all, that often the actual football fans in politics are the worst at using it to their advantage. Keir Starmer, by all accounts a genuinely dedicated Arsenal season-ticket holder and five-a-side player, is just as bad. Starmer’s tweets about football are placid, congratulatory gestures doled out to every team and player. Neither he or Sunak seem to recognise that authentic fanhood is impulsive, partisan and more than a little bit petty. He would be so much more convincing as an Arsenal if just once, he’d dig out Granit Xhaka for being a liability or send David Lammy (MP for Tottenham and a close ally) a sarky remark on St. Totteringham’s Day.

This is why ironically, Boris, a Etonian rugby toff without a footballing bone in his body has had much more success using the game to relate to the public. Boris’ primary political skill is tapping into people's associations and making them feel gooey about them. That he has the ball knowledge of Mark Corrigan doesn’t really matter, because when England “you know, kick it up the other end and just put one right in their fucking goal hole”, he consistently finds a good way to say “fuck yeah!”.

Some people have this skill and some don’t. It’s why we all swooned for Lyanco last weekend and it’s why Villa fans were vitriolic towards Gerrard at his end. It is objectively bad play to invite a red card with a deliberate headbutt in the dying minutes while defending a point, and by contrast Steven Gerrard’s professionalism is beyond reproach. But if you don’t make the fans feel you, they’ll never love you back.

Perhaps this is the saving grace of Sunak being a scummer. As long as he continues to express his love of Saints like he’s Mark Zuckerberg trying to get Itchen North to join him in the Metaverse, his connection will always appear phony and the public will never know the truth.

Last week, @yjw_x (Yasmin) asked fans on Twitter what could be improved about catering at St. Mary’s. Among my boring gripes about plastic teacups that melt your hands, there is only one thing that sticks out in my mind as genuinely unnecessary and wrong-headed. The question was timely because I was going to see the women’s team that night. St. Marys had just entertained West Ham, so going to Snows Stadium in Totton for first time, I was looking forward to a pint.

Birmingham City was a symbolic meeting for Southampton FC Women. Last May, on a stellar FA Cup run, they dashed weaker teams aside until meeting Birmingham in the fifth round. It was billed as a chance for the upwardly mobile third-tier promotion hopefuls to test themselves against a WSL team, one that one day soon, they hoped to play regularly. A 3-2 defeat meant we could write it up as a narrow, spirited loss; but the truth was we got bullied hard for 80 minutes by a much more professional outfit — in quality, and also literally. They got paid to batter us, full-time. It was 3-0 until the 84th minute but a couple of late consolations saved our blushes.

Monday's 1-0 win was a chance to see how far the newly promoted and now full-time-professional Saints had closed the gap. Birmingham had narrowed it themselves by getting relegated to the second tier, and early tension was perhaps a reflection of two teams trying to sniff out each other’s new level. The game opened up, slowly but surely. Saints grew and City wilted, but ultimately either side could have snatched a tight game before Lucia Kendall, off the bench on her return, slotted a neat finish into the far post in the 83rd minute.

1-0 was the right scoreline, scored by the right player. Kendall is one of a dwindling number of veterans from the cup game last May as the team’s meteoric rise continues to drive player turnover. It was a hard-earned, cathartic win, narrow but fair, an ode to the gentle, steady progress borne of graft that Marianne Spacey-Cale has cultivated. As a Saints fan, it had parallels to the 1-0 win at Anfield when Ralph cried at full-time: on the surface just a close midweek league victory against one of the division’s better sides; but beneath, a fraught, draw-out vindication of a project similarly long in the making. Kendall did a knee slide under a huge LED screen brought specially for the fixture. Having sold out the ground on a cold Monday night in Totton, in front of over 1,000 supporters, it blinked 1-0.

Anyway so about pints. On entering the ground, I asked the first steward I saw if I could take drinks to the pitchside. This is one of the things I love about certain levels of football, but the rules vary. The steward, a serenely calm man in his early 20s, replied, “Like what?”. I’d assumed my question was simple, but I clarified, “As in alcohol.”. Mulling it, he fixed his eyes on the stands, as if the answer to my question might be gleaned from the terraces themselves. They were not forthcoming. “I don’t think so”, he said conclusively, but clearly by his own deduction rather than memory. I thought about asking another steward, but the game was about to kick off, and in truth his deduction was probably right.

Not to read too much into it, but this felt like a telling response. That he didn’t even know, suggests that he had neither anticipated that somebody might want to drink alcohol at a women’s football match, nor that it presented a possible fan behaviour issue that the stewards had to manage. Not absurd, just… foreign. A foreignness to the idea of coming here to booze. His mind whirred. Alcohol? At an association football match? No longer petrol to flames, but it just isn’t done. It can’t be allowed. But then, a women's match… a different competition, different context, different culture - what are the rules?! Like a schoolboy trying to fathom the norms of female social interaction, his mind boggled. Perhaps the terraces did give him their verdict after all. As he looked up into those concrete shelves with steel standing rails lined with restless men, structures not seen in the men’s pro leagues since Hillsborough, “no”, he conjectured, football is still football, and at English football you cannot drink in the sight of the pitch. And this is a professional team now, after all.

This is not technically true. The legislation that prohibits the sale and consumption of alcohol at certain times and places at football matches applies to specific named leagues, specifically the top six tiers of the men's game. I accept that the alcohol regulation is pretty patchwork across the grassroots. At my hometown club, Romsey Town, Wessex League rules (not UK law) prevent me from taking my drink to the edge of the pitch, or beyond the wooden pagoda (yeah we have a pagoda), outside the clubhouse. This means I can drink in sight of the pitch about ten metres back from the corner flag, over the heads of the fans at the railing, with no elevation. So close and yet so far. Romsey Town are in the 9th tier and get gates averaging a little over 100. At my local club, Dulwich Hamlet, a window running the entire length of the clubhouse bar overlooks the pitch from the top of the main stand, kind of like the hospitality boxes at St. Mary’s, but for punters. On the opposite side of the pitch, a gazebo, some kegs, foldaway tables and a chip and pin machine form a second, pop-up bar. No food, just a pure pint pouring operation. Dulwich are in the 6th tier and average gates are somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000. On hot summer Saturdays pint queues will stretch the whole length of the byline behind the goal. Mad to think to that promotion to the Conference National might mean the end of all that.

So when over 5,000 fans turned up at St. Mary's earlier this year to watch the women’s team beat Portsmouth and win the Women’s National League South, I was surprised to find you couldn’t take beer out of the concourse. I would have expected this to feel normal, given it has been the case for every other visit to St. Mary's I’ve made (excluding a work Christmas do where I got hammered in the Mick Channon Suite having won best pirate costume). But surrounded as I was by families, children and mixture of genders and ages, it all felt a bit unnecessary. When it’s heaving with geezers it all made a lot more sense.

And this is the heart of it. It makes little sense to me that the women’s team, which is growing and the club is trying to grow, should have matchday experience and attendance constrained by a fan behaviour issue that is exclusively endemic to the men’s game. More than that, the different atmosphere is perhaps the unique selling point of women’s football. That, and what easy, cheap, honest fun it is. There is surely an opportunity here to demonstrate the possibility of an alternative culture of football fandom, one that isn’t locked in tension between two toxic and nontoxic poles of masculinity. When I told my sister that I was sad not to have watched the final of the women’s Euros in England because I would have liked a bit of pint-throwing, she replied that actually that’s what she enjoyed so much about watching it at a pub in Peckham — no pint-throwing, just good vibes. Neither of my sisters have been to a football match before. They are both coming to Arsenal on Sunday.

In the second of my “tin foil hat” series, I’d like to explain why I think it’s a good thing that Southampton failed to convince PSV Eindhoven to part with Cody Gakpo this summer for a fee in excess of £30m. Contrary to the opinion of most Saints fans, I don’t think our money would be best spent on a striker at all.

It felt good though, didn’t it? When we were in for him. The Gao years at Saints have been above all else, austere. Not punishing people on the breadline austerity, but real austerity - counting the pennies, knitting together patchwork squads every summer, make-do-and-mend in the winter and ringing every last drop out of a balding Nathan Redmond. All the while there’s a growing sense that financially, the game is moving on without us. Gone are the heady days of 2012 when £12m could get you a flashy creative midfielder like Gaston Ramirez or a Dani Osvaldo. Didn’t work out? No bother, Southampton were one of the more well-heeled clubs outside the top-six. I was such privileged twat back then: we had a prestigious academy, a smart board with an aspirational model, we used “data” to buy players; it was “The Southampton Way™”, I bragged, and it was eternal. Now the Jones’ have caught up, and my shoes have holes in.

So imagine how I felt, after five years playing Oliver Twist, begging Gao for another no.10, when Martin Moneybags Semmens got his wad out, and slammed it down on the negotiating mesa for Gonçalo fucking Ramos?! Do I know who that is? Do I fuck? But his name is Gonçalo Ramos so he’s obviously a massive fucking jugador. A muy, muy fuente jugador. He’s even got that squiggly thing under the ‘c’ in his name. No more Norwegians on the wing for us Linda, we’re moving up in the world!

Ramos did not sign for Saints. The ink was barely dry on his Benfica contract, who, under no pressure to sell, had already parted ways with Darwin Núñez that summer. No matter, because Southampton had been working on a deal for Cody Gakpo, and Manchester United had just skulked away. If you care to relive that saga, Dan Sheldon and colleagues did a really thorough write-up. What matters for us, is the part where Rasmus Ankersen personally drove a dumper truck full of gold bullion to Eindhoven, and emptied the contents onto the floor of PSV’s club shop.1 With add-ons, we know the deal to have been worth at least 30 million (squids not euros).

Because it’s been so long since we had a payday, and because swaggering round the transfer market like Toad of Toad Hall felt fucking awesome, it gives me no pleasure to admit that I don’t think either deal would have been the right business. It is widely held belief among Saints fans that we badly needed to sign a new top-level striker in this window, and failing to do so was a stain on an otherwise excellent summer of business. Given our attempts to do so, it seems that the club agrees.

So why do I disagree? I should probably start by saying that Gakpo, Ramos, or any other business class striker would immediately improve Saints’ attack, which currently sucks balls, again. Dropping a forward of that quality into the team would inevitably produce more goals, and you would think, enough points that the ‘R’ word could go more or less unmentioned all season. But at its core, I don’t think Saints goalscoring problem is the goalscorers per se, but its chance creators.

I don’t intend this blog to be statistically heavy but it’s worth introducing just a few figures. Saints have scored 8 goals from 8.4 expected goals in their first 8 games. This excludes the paltry 0.10 xG they accrued against most recently against City, which Jacob Tanswell thinks could be a club record since recording began in 2014/15. Last season we scored 43 goals from 46.8 xG, an underperformance of 3.8 goals across the whole season. Before that, with Danny Ings, we overperform, slightly. This suggests statistically our chance conversion is about par for the league, and if that was how somebody in the pub described Adams and Armstrong’s finishing collectively, I’d say “yeah mate that’s about fair”. In terms of creating chances, over the last two seasons we have averaged 1.12 (16th) and 1.23 (12th) expected goals per game — similarly unspectacular without ever being quite relegation worthy. So where’s the issue?

In what Ralph calls the “wide 10” position, Southampton employ Joe Aribo, Samuel Edozie, Stuart Armstrong, Mohamed Elyounoussi, Moussa Djenepo, Theo Walcott, Nathan Tella and until recently Nathan Redmond. Cumulatively, those players (present last season) scored 7 goals and 7 assists in the league. Our top assister was Nathan Redmond (5), no longer in Ralph’s plans and departed for Beşiktaş. The highest scorer, Elyounoussi made two assists in over 2000 minutes played, and his goal tally (4), was matched by Jan Bednarek. For players in his position, Elyounoussi is in the bottom 12% of players (in Europe’s big 5 leagues over the last 365 days) for assists, the bottom 8% for shot-creating actions, and the bottom 25% for goals scored. His four goals last season came from 6.0 expected goals, suggesting his finishing was also significantly under par (over a smallish sample). Stuart Armstrong, presumptively the club’s best player in the position, scored two league goals and made no league assists in 1,473 minutes of football. He was middling for shot-creating actions (47th percentile), and was in the bottom 14% for goals scored.

If you want to understand why Armstrong and Elyounoussi play so much for Ralph, have a look at Stuie’s passing and ball-carrying statistics (among the better players in the big 5) and Mo’s pressing game (actually, one of the best in the big 5, by volume). Whereas Ralph has often voiced frustration at Djenepo’s inability to stick to the script, Elyounoussi contributes to the press very well. After starting last season well, Ralph suggested that they weren’t many games coming up that would suit Tella’s speed and desire to get in behind the lines. Armstrong is better at picking the ball up in deeper areas. But despite their systemic contributions, Armstrong and Elyounoussi’s chance/shot-creation is appalling. Neither have scored or assisted yet this season. Redmond, Tella, Djenepo and Walcott have played so little they don’t really warrant statistical inquiry. The bottom line is that together, they offer an astounding amount of bluntness for what must be £15m-£25m in annual wages. Meanwhile, James Ward-Prowse made more goals and assists (10 goals, inc. 4 free kicks, 5 assists) alone than all of them combined, playing as an attack-minded no. 6.

Over the years we have coped with this for two reasons. The first is that when Ralph’s incredibly specific and inflexible 4-2-2-2 system actually works, by God, it works. In our good spells, we have played some blistering football with a frankly awful squad. Hassenhuttl’s capacity to make us more than the sum of our parts is precisely why he has survived this long. The second reason is Danny Ings. When Ralphball wasn’t working, the absence of chance-creating midfield players was offset by a striker who really could just do it all. Che Adams and Adam Adamstrong are passable chance converters, but they don’t have that bit of magic in the box to create chances too.

Much of the belief that we need to sign a striker seems to reflect a desire to recapture that spark. Luke Osman lamented after the City match that nobody in our current group is “capable of creating something from nothing”, as Ings was for years, and Broja was last season. The absence of such a player is a “massive worry”. His analysis obviously absolutely correct. But there are different ways a skin a cat, and I wonder if the best solution is really to break the bank for a new “carry” player in the centre-forward position.

Put it another way, imagine we got Gakpo. And imagine he’s everything we hoped for and he balls so hard it makes your eyes water. What do you think the upshot of playing him in front of our current midfield is? Is Djenepo going to beat the fullback and play him in behind? Is Elyounoussi going to play the telepathic one-two with him? Is Ward-Prowse suddenly going to morph into a deep-lying playmaker and send him defence-splitting through balls? Yes, he would inevitably score some great solo goals, and likely carry us as Ings did. But should we be looking for a world-class striker to carry us, or should we just get like, another quality winger (hey Joe Aribo xoxo), who can play balls to a competent striker like Che Adams? I accept we won’t challenge for Europe with Che up top. But that isn’t where we are right now, and the next stepping stone surely has to be addressing the glaring deficiency in attacking midfield. I have not forgotten how great Ings was for us, but I’ve also not forgotten those games he floated alone, isolated in a defensive block that his teammates couldn’t break down.

Finally, I also thinking its worth considering what signing a fourth recognised centre-forward will do to the talent we are presumptively trying to develop. Che Adams is now our top striker, and broadly agreed to be “good enough” for us at this level. Assuming we play two forwards (not a given), the intention would presumably be to pair Gakpo and Adams, consigning Mara and Armstrong to the bench. Many Saints fans are unmoved by Armstrong’s contribution so far, and wouldn’t object to his being made second string. My personal belief is that Armstrong needs better midfielders, he relies on speed and positional intelligence and wants the ball played into space he can run into. His movement is consistently excellent, but suffers because we do not have the players to feed him (and he’s ickle). What I wouldn’t give for a Tadic to supply him. Not a Koeman-era Tadic, but even just a checked-out, halfway-to-Ajax, Hughes-era Tadic, who would sleep for an hour but roll something through to Charlie Austin at least once a game. Adams has the advantage of being a viable target man, but lacking the Ings-factor, he too I think would benefit from better midfielders to create space for him.

It is reasonable to think I am being generous to Armstrong. But what of Mara? It is worth noting that Mara had a better goals/90 ratio in each of the last two seasons (0.60, 0.39) than Cody Gakpo (0.57, 0.38), at a worse team, in a more difficult league. The big caveat is that he achieved this over a much shorter playing time (34 games, 10 starts), but he has already shown his quality in a Saints shirt with an exquisite assist (Leeds) and a classy (disallowed) solo finish (Leicester). Gakpo’s CV is longer and thus the more valuable player, but I suspect Bordeaux’s financial struggles means £12m undersells Mara and the gap is smaller than we think. We should be really trying, right now, to find out if Mara is future of this team.

Obviously, in a few years Dom Ballard will be on for the Ballon d’Or and none of this will matter. But in the meantime, if Sports Republic are gonna get a bottle in, just once, it will go down all the sweeter in we spend it in just the right place.

Saints fans are alive right now with the possibility that a cricket score is on the cards for tomorrow. The scene was drawn like this: by bottling three of the season’s easiest fixtures on the spin, Ralph has instigated the worst crisis of his controversial tenure. Saints cannot buy a win. Meanwhile, Haaland is taking City’s threat to levels most of us thought out of bounds. Whether or not 9-0 3.0 is actually likely tomorrow, we know it, we feel it, looming over us, like a gawky, blonde Norwegian tanker floating up the Western Docks.

Because it’s 4pm on Friday and I enjoying embarrassing myself, I thought I’d write about why I think there’s reason to hope tomorrow. Not for a win, mind, but maybe a strong performance and a respectable result.

Perhaps a good way to start is to state that against Haaland last season, we would have lost in double figures. The hallmark of Bednarek and Stephens’ failings was a tendency to get dominated physically and positionally by top Premier League centre-forwards (see Jimenez, Wolves (H) 0-1, 2021-22). This, and the ability to score headers with his feet, the is core of Haaland’s game, a game raised to levels nobody in England had even conceived of existing.

This season however, in Salisu and ABK have two of the most mobile, muscular centres-halves in the league. They are young, but possessed of exactly the qualities one would wish for in a defender to mark Haaland. Will they keep Haaland quiet for a whole ninety minutes? No, absolutely not. But we are not in the position of say, Leicester, asking Jonny Evans to do this kind of work, or Manchester United asking Harry Maguire, or Forest, asking Cheikhou Kouyate. Good defenders all, but with different skillsets.

Second, Saints are a better team against high-quality, ball-dominant opposition. When we went to Villa Park two weeks ago, I was salivating to watch Samuel Fandab Edozie run at a 37 year-old Ashley Young. Unfortunately, Steven Gerrard’s team invited us not to press, as we do, but to play. As Jacob Tanswell explains, Villa sat deep and invited us to play out from the back in a way with which we were not comfortable. Instead, like a Russian artillery unit, Bazunu fired balls indiscriminately into a congested midfield and Saints created nothing. But there is a reason City failed to beat us last season, why we held Spurs and United, and why we beat Chelsea this season. We excel against the ball, against teams when they expect to have it. When we can execute our pressing game and win high turnovers, we both threaten opposition directly and disrupt their patterns of play.

I have some reasons to doubt both of these arguments. On the first, it is notable that despite the quality of our individual defenders, Saints are the only team who have failed to keep a clean sheet this season. A particularly damning indictment in the ongoing Hassenhuttl inquiry is that our defensive organisation has been very poor. And having good centre-halves counts for little if your DMs don’t protect them.

Second, I think Pep’s apparent respect for Ralph and his team is real, because they see the game in similar ways. He heaps praise on us often. The funniest example of this was when in March 2021 Man City thrashed Saints 5-2 and Pep was practically in tears, saying after the match that “We faced the most brilliant and the best team we have faced in this stadium in the competition”, that Southampton were “exceptional”, “a joy to watch” and a “present for the spectators”. Hassenhuttl called his players “brave”.

In that shit Amazon documentary, Pep bellows “Shou must play wis coorage!”, alot. Similarly Ralph regularly emphasises “being confident wiz the ball, and being confident wizout the ball”. This is not just inspirational bluster, but an expression of the fact that both Pep and Ralph’s tactical systems require players to perform dangerous and demanding actions in and out of possession in order to function. Unfortunately Saints do not have coorage right now. Under normal circumstances I could anticipate a bounce tomorrow, but certain items in the newspapers make it unclear that some players even want to play for the manager, let alone show him coorage. Let alone a manager who doesn’t know his best team, or his best formation.

But nonetheless, and above all, the reason why I don’t think we’ll get beat 9-0 tomorrow is this. Haaland may well turn out to be the most individually lethal player the Premier League has ever seen. He may break all those records and then some. But as a wisen’d old journeyman of getting battered 9-0, I gots news for ya. The thing with getting beat 9-0, is that it requires the total and utter complicity of all twenty-two players on the pitch. To score every ten minutes, for ninety minutes, it is not enough that Haaland balls out and Bednarek is in the same country. It is not even enough that eleven City players have an absolute rager, for eleven Saints must also bend over. A 9-0 is beautiful, chaotic dance, in which one side’s commitment to be the very best they can be must be matched by the other side’s commitment to being a smouldering pile of goatshit. No player can orchestrate this alone, not even Erling Haaland. Or Jack Stephens.

As the old mushdie proverb will one day go: it takes two to tango, but twenty-two to get fucked like Ralph’s lot did.

I don’t care who reads, but I want to hear back from people that do. I don’t live near the city anymore and I miss being able to engage with people about my club.

I grew up in Romsey and now live in South London. I have a season ticket and get the train down on weekends. Slight crush on Maya Yoshida.

I don’t work in football, but I’m a researcher and mostly write for a living. STATE Mary's is where I write stuff about the ballgame in SO14.

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