Why I don't think we'll lose 9-0 tomorrow.

Erling is an alien but for 9-0 several planets must align.

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.