After yesterday’s shambolic reporting, where Jake Humphrey lost his exclusive interview to Peter Crouch with a greedy Tweet, and a whole swathe of ‘journalists’ opting to use time expired information to suggest that the Bale deal wasn’t done, when it evidently was, let’s continue our path of sanity and look at today’s big lunchtime game.
Southampton away and an early kick-off is no fairy tale, and one can only hope that the Mourinho effect of shipping in starting XI players with winning pedigrees is enough to shake a decent performance out of our lot.
I expect Dele Alli to start, simply n the basis that Sonny travelled to Bulgaria and played the entire game. The cynic in me says that this is a great opportunity for the boy to blow it, given that he’s had the time to get himself revved up for this one.
The Everton game was dire, and judging by Ancelotti’s heavy victory against the Baggies yesterday, that wasn’t all our own fault. Our performance against Lokomotiv Plovdiv was better on paper than it was to watch, so today at St Mary’s we need a match that doesn’t need explaining afterwards.
Prediction is a low scoring/no scoring draw.
Dele not even in the squad.
“Find yourself a lone team for the season Dele”
Ndombele still looks laborious especially when he’s trying to track back. Not ready to start in my opinion. Another player that needs to produce is Moura. He is well overdue a goal.
Stop playing to other teams strengths and play to ours. No crowds so lets be positive and go at them.
Lo Celso on his own doesn’t provide enough quality opportunities as his stats show.Don’t get me wrong I like the lad,but playing N’Dombele instead of Winks surely offers much more offensively.We don’t need two holding MFs.
Plus it takes a whole weight of pressure off Lo Celso,assuming of course that N’Dombele can rise to the occasion.He has to start showing his worth if the rumours of him doing a u-turn on his desire to leave are true.
In the line up above I would give Alli 45 minutes to show he deserves to finish the match.If he can’t hook him and bring Sonny on.In which case that could be him done for some time.
This match could go 2 ways. Dull as dishwater as everyone waiting for the superstar to spark the season, or a fantastic display of players proving their worth, riding high on arguably biggest coup in Europe. I hope the latter.
My prediction though… Early 1-0 lead to us defended for circa 80mins.
I would drop winks for Ndombele