Brentford Home Lost 0 – 5
At the half way point in the season only four of 19 Premier League opponents had failed to beat Southampton but there was a belief that things must surely get better, and very likely with a win against renown poor travellers Brentford. What we got instead was not so much a defeat, more of a humiliation, and only one result looking possible from as early as the sixth minute with one of those typical Southampton goals against: first Onuachu and then Ugochukwu lost tackles that they ought to have been winning, leaving poor old Bree out of position, having expected to have been going forward, and with no pace to get back near Schade who scored far too easily. Ivan seems to think that his team’s response at this point was least OK, if not good, but it was only Ramsdale and the woodwork preventing the Bees going further ahead while little was seen of the home side’s attack. This consisted of Onuachu, now back to doing his Bambi on ice impressions, and Sulemana, acting as playmaker in the absence of the suspended Fernandes – you’d have thought Lallana was best suited for this role, but what do we know? Sulemana has pace aplenty and not much else; pace, though, ought to be all-important in the modern game but we’ve only exploited it once – in Rubén Sellés’ last game in charge. He’ll no doubt want away from this madness and he did seem to be doing his best in a rare ‘shop window’ opportunity, but it’s hard to credit that his colleagues were doing likewise. A like-for-like swap of two defenders at half time was an odd approach and it did little or nothing for the performance. The ball went past Ramsdale again on 54 minutes when van den Berg was unmarked from a corner but the VAR official had concerns about how he found that space and ruled out the ‘goal’ for what seemed to be no less of an offence than that committed by Crystal Palace for their equaliser last week. On came Armstrong and Archer to try to take advantage of this fortune and for a while things did look a bit better going forward. They never looked good at the back, though, and, after Wissa had missed badly, Mbeumo showed a calmer head to convert an assist from Wissa. Ugochukwu then pressed ‘self destruct’ when he lost van den Berg and panicked into a foul leading to a penalty converted by Mbeumo. The ground began to empty at 0-3 with over 20 minutes to go and there weren’t many of us left when the game moved into an ungenerous five minutes added time. What many missed was spectacularly awful, even for this group, as Brentford scored two more, almost at will: Mbeumo continued a passing move that left Harwood-Bellis spreadeagled to set up Lewis-Potter for his side’s fourth, and then Sugawara (who else?!) set up Wissa who this time couldn’t really miss. At least the team weren’t boo-ed off, but only because the few remaining fans couldn’t get away fast enough.
LSSC Man of the Match (my selection anyway) consists of a shortlist of just one:
30. Aaron Ramsdale, and he let in five.
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