‘As You Were’ after the Tussle at the Top

Neither Sam Allardyce nor Nigel Adkins gave the impression in their post-match interviews that they were particularly pleased with a 1-1 draw on Tuesday night, but I suspect that behind closed doors both might have congratulated themselves on a job well done, or at least a setback averted.

Allardyce’s side may have lead for almost an hour at Upton Park but from the moment Matt Taylor was dismissed in the first half the Irons were second best, as you might expect, to their league challengers. Adkins, on the other hand, might have begun to wonder if it was to be ‘one of those nights’ until Jos Hooiveld levelled with fifteen minutes remaining.

In the end, a draw was probably a fair result. The Hammers were straight into their opponents from the off, allowing Southampton no time to settle. Carlton Cole was holding the ball up well, while Vaz Te and Faubert looked like they had the beating of the Saints full-backs. The first chance came after just forty-five seconds; hesitancy in the visitors defence gifted Vaz Te an opportunity at the edge of the area, but Davis denied him his first West Ham goal with a stunning save to his right.

If that was a warning sign, Southampton were slow to heed it. Within five minutes Davis was called into action again, saving at the feet of Cole before Reid fired the rebound over the crossbar. Noble and Collison had taken control of the midfield, and it looked as though West Ham had been rewarded for their superiority on twenty minutes. A quick free-kick found Noble in the penalty area, who went to ground under a challenge from Sharp.

To call the contact minimal would be an overstatement, and Sharp reacted furiously, running over to confront Noble. Former Portsmouth favourite Taylor took exception to Sharp’s vociferous protests, pushing the Yorkshireman to the ground and receiving the obligatory red card, much to the delight of the Saints fans. Noble dispatched the spot-kick, but the complexion of the game was changed.

Within minutes Southampton had begun to dictate play; Adkins had made the switch to a diamond midfield, and Lallana was finding space in behind Lambert and Sharp. They should have levelled on the half hour when Lallana’s shot was parried by Green into Sharp’s path, but he somehow conspired to direct his shot straight at the prone ‘keeper with the goal gaping. Minutes later Green could only watch as Lambert’s free-kick beat the wall, but whistled just past the post. Green also made a fine low save from Lambert's placed effort.

The second half took on a similar pattern; Schneiderlin and the newly-introduced Jason Puncheon dropping deep to receive the ball and setting up attack after attack, but they found West Ham’s resolute defence, in the form of Tomkins and Faye, difficult to breach. Lallana drilled a shot narrowly over the crossbar before Hooiveld directed his header high and wide, and the match just looked to be slipping away from the Saints when they finally found the equaliser that their play merited. Fox’s floated free-kick was headed down by Lambert, and Hooiveld poked home from close range for his second goal against the Hammers this season.

Suddenly West Ham attacked with new purpose, sensing perhaps that trying to see out the final fifteen minutes against an invigorated Saints side wouldn’t be a wise move. Substitute Maynard tested Davis after he was gifted the ball in the area, but the rest of the match played out largely without incident.

The result, coupled with wins for a resurgent Blackpool and third-placed Cardiff City, leaves the race for promotion tantalisingly poised. Southampton will be buoyed by a further game unbeaten and will head into their encounter with Derby County at St Mary’s in good spirits – their promotion push looks back on course after a difficult few months, but a lot can change in fifteen games.

On this showing, West Ham’s steady but relentless progress looks unlikely to falter badly enough to deny them promotion; you sense that the footballing sacrifices made by Allardyce in terms of style of play may be the very things that deliver the fans promotion at the first time of asking. How well this will sit with the Upton Park faithful if results aren’t delivered in the Premier League, however, remains to be seen. If their reaction to the Saints’ fans rendition of ‘Football, you used to play football’ is anything to go by, the footballing philosophy might have to change sooner rather than later in East London.

Nigel's Big Day

Imagine the life of a football manager: You speak almost exclusively in metaphors. Your responses to interview questions consist of perhaps four stock answers, each including a different quote from Sun Tzu’s ‘The Art of War’. You have achieved fantastic success at your club in a short period of time. Recently that success has lead to increased pressure. That pressure has started to affect team performances. League position is under threat. Your side’s home form, at one time devastating, is in danger of becoming something of a mental block. You suffer a further home defeat in a depressing FA Cup replay, afterwards giving a frank and brutal assessment of your team’s display. Next you face a side with eight wins on the road this season.

The crowd will be nervous. They will be looking for any signs of your players ‘bottling it.’ They have been let down before; they are haunted by a past littered with systematic disappointment. They must be reassured. They need leadership as much as the players do. You write your programme notes. They read more like a rallying call. You use the word ‘positivity’ seven times.

This game is massive; it really isn’t just about the three points. You need to win well. You need to send a message, to turn a corner. This is where league titles are earned. They are earned when the goals aren’t flying in, when the opposition keeper plays a blinder. They are earned when doubt has entered the minds of the players. It is your job to remove that doubt, then they can play without fear.

Your players don’t let you down. Your players step up to the plate; Adam Lallana is majestic, Rickie Lambert is faultless, Jack Cork justifies his transfer fee. The crowd are behind the team from the start, you sense they got the message. They know they have a part to play. Lallana heads the opener, the crowd respond again. The doubts are suddenly less prevalent. They remember now; they remember that when their team plays like this they never look like losing.

The chances are flowing now. Lambert almost doubles the lead, but Grant saves well. Billy Sharp makes his debut, and he adds something different. He has touch and vision. He forces a second goal on the half hour, and now there is breathing space. Now you can play. The players are comfortable on the ball. They pass Burnley to death.

When the opposition finally apply pressure your defence is strong, stronger than it has been for weeks. Fonte dismantles attacks and starts his own with efficiency and finesse. Hooiveld wins the headers, he shows you what you have been missing in the last three games. The pressure subsides. The chances start to come again. Somehow Grant saves from Lallana. Somehow Connolly is ruled offside. Somehow the referee doesn’t give a penalty.

But time is almost up now. Your team show no signs of ‘bottling it.’ They pass and they pass. This is exactly what you needed. When the final whistle blows you feel a message has been sent. Now the fans know, the players know, you know that you have the resolve to finish the job. Now you know that when you travel to Upton Park on Tuesday night you can do some damage. They won’t have liked seeing this, on their way back to London from a game postponed at Peterborough.

You go in to see the players and reiterate the need for focus, for stoicism but most of all for ‘positivity.’ In your post-match interview you say ‘positivity’ four more times. After all, ‘a leader leads by example not force.’ (Sun Tzu – ‘The Art of War’.)

Bought or Made?

In an age where every other football fan reckons he could do a decent enough job of managing his own team given half a chance, there are very few universally accepted truths in the game. Originality of opinion is respected to such an extent that fans might find themselves absent-mindedly informing their friends that they’ve ‘always really rated Gareth Barry’ or ‘never understood why Jack Wilshere gets so much hype.’ But some footballing truths transcend the realms of the ad hoc ‘reckon’ or the hastily constructed belief-system. When it comes to things that just don’t need saying anymore, ‘Alex Ferguson has done a very fine job at Manchester United’ is right up there with ‘’Inception’ is quite a decent watch’ and ‘Piers Morgan should disappear down a very deep hole, preferably lacking a 3G signal, lest he tweet his way back into our lives.’

You must forgive me, then, for spending a few minutes explaining what I believe to be some of the more interesting characteristics in Sir Alex Ferguson’s incredible 25-year stint at Manchester United.

To be successful as a football manager you have to win games, obviously. To be a really successful one, you have to win games that you had no right to win. Alex Ferguson has got this down to a fine art. At the risk of sounding like a Clive Tyldesley voiceover (and someone please stop me if I start talking about that night in Barcelona), Sir Alex has installed an all-encompassing attitude, an overarching philosophy at Manchester United; the team that he sends out will exhaust every possible route back into a match before they accept defeat.

As I have said, pointing out that Alex Ferguson has created something very special at United just doesn’t need doing. Trying to pin down exactly how he has done it, though, is a little more interesting. Generations of United players, team after team of them, have been winners. It’s just what they were; if they lost out on the league title one season, they would make it incredibly hard to deny them of it the following year. Robson, Keane, Giggs, Schmiechel, Neville, Cantona, Scholes, Cole, Stam, Van Nistelrooy, Ronaldo; these players didn’t lose very well. For some of them, winning with United lasted the length of an entire playing career, but others came and won for just a few seasons.

But a question remains; does Sir Alex buy winners, or does he make them? When he singled out Roy Keane as the man to dominate the centre of midfield at Old Trafford, he clearly spotted football ability, and plenty of it, in the tough-tackling Irishman. But he must have seen more than that; a grit, a determination, a will to win that would take him just a little bit further in the game than the others. Identify and accumulate enough of these characters and you find that you begin to breed a professionalism, an excellence in attitude, at your football club. Keane was not the first to carry and personify the winning tradition at United; Bryan Robson typified it too, while Giggs and Scholes have been the architects of many a comeback over the past seventeen or eighteen seasons.

So perhaps Ferguson’s genius lies in his identifying the right targets and making them his players. Well, that’s half the story. To attribute all of those league titles just to signing good players would be doing the Scot a disservice. Some may be born winners, but this doesn’t explain everything that has gone on at Old Trafford. When Ferguson paid Molde £1.5 million for a little heard-of 23 year-old Norwegian by the name of Ole Gunnar Solskjaer in 1996, you could hardly have said that Ferguson was making his team out of ready-made winners. Solskjaer went on to score possibly the most famous goal in the club’s history in the 1999 Champions League final (sorry, couldn’t resist) - a season that, above all others, demonstrated that thing that is United, that je ne sais pas that has had them see off every major challenger to their dominance of the English game over the past 20 seasons.

Even then it was accepted: this is just what Manchester United do. Fast-forward thirteen more incredible seasons and you see Ferguson’s men somehow engineer a comeback from 3-0 down at Stamford Bridge. Some of the old winners are still there - Giggs and Scholes were instrumental in the latter stages – but new ones are picking up the mantle and running with it. Javier Hernandez draws striking comparisons to Solskjaer in both his style of play and uncanny knack of snatching late goals. Phil Jones, whilst injured for this latest display of defiance and character, is already being spoken about as ‘one of those players’ that Ferguson can build yet another team around.

Manchester City lead the title race going into the home straight of the league season, but as Arsenal, Chelsea, Newcastle and Liverpool will tell them, they will have to be good - very good – to shake off Sir Alex Ferguson’s team of winners, bought and made.

Saints aim to shake off the Blues

In September I was witness to such a brutal and comprehensive Southampton victory over Birmingham that one could have been forgiven for predicting, as many did, that only one of these sides stood any chance of promotion from the Championship in May. The Saints were on a high, adding their opponents to the growing list of sides swept away in a post-promotion tidal wave of form with an impressive 4-1 win. Five months and twenty-two games later, however, Birmingham’s form has gone full circle – from stuttering to scintillating – while Southampton hope that their January spending is enough to arrest a run of poor form that threatens to derail their promotion push. Ahead of Saturday’s vital clash, the ‘favourites’ tag is quite firmly attached to Chris Hughton’s side.

Birmingham remain unbeaten at home, have won their last six in all competitions and are in their best goal-scoring form for years; King, Zigic, Burke and defender Curtis Davies all weighing in with important contributions at important times. Perhaps just as significant, though, is the club’s activity in the transfer window. While their opponents have added to their squad with the likes of Billy Sharp and Tadanari Lee, Birmingham’s main focus has been on protecting their prize assets in order to keep their promotion push up and running. Liam Ridgewell’s deadline day move to West Bromwich Albion may have left a bitter taste, but some of Birmingham’s top performers in recent weeks have been those of lower profile; Jordan Mutch, a product of the youth academy, is impressing in central midfield while Chris Burke continues to torment Championship left backs as he did for Cardiff City. Add to that the retention of the highly rated Nathan Redmond, and, for a team starting to feel the inevitable pinch following Premier League relegation, Birmingham City can look back happily on their January business.

When Chris Hughton’s was handed the reigns at what was St James’ Park following Newcastle’s relegation in 2009, he went about reinvigorating a club with a disillusioned fan-base and an underperforming team. They collected a record number of points that season and returned to the Premier League looking a far better proposition than the club Hughton took over the previous summer. Despite this drastic improvement under trying circumstances, the decision was taken to remove Hughton from his position with the side sitting comfortably in mid-table. Now he looks to have shaken another club out of its relegation stupor, and their relentless form shows no sign of stopping as the final stretch of the season approaches. Faced with a Southampton side with just four away league wins this campaign, Hughton will see a great opportunity to shorten the gap between them and their rivals to just two points.

Southampton’s season is at a crucial stage; the once unerring home form has faltered and the top spot, held for over four months, has been relinquished to West Ham. The buzzards are circling and words like ‘collapse’ and ‘bottle’ can be heard on phone-ins and read on online forums. But if Nigel Adkins is known for one thing it is his positivity, and he sees no reason why his side cannot be the first to topple Birmingham at St. Andrew’s this season. Whatever the statistics say, Southampton have a forward line that is the envy of any side outside the top flight; Lambert, Lallana, Guly and now Billy Sharp could all be on show in front of the Sky cameras and it might just be the toughest ask yet made of the Blues’ defence to keep them out. Add to that the return of Jose Fonte and Frazer Richardson from injury, and Southampton’s prospects on Saturday look healthier that their recent form belies. They, too, see an opportunity to inject fresh impetus into their season.