Match Report

IBO Reporter : THE BEAST

Beautiful day for a game of football, going to be disgusting tomorrow, so it's really good it's today, I love going to watch football in a T-shirt and sunglasses.

The football however was not quite so shiny, 5 minutes of reasonable endeavour gave way to 20 minutes of boredom and another 10 minutes of hack and slash from both teams. saying that, Saints were on top, there was a couple of chances for Leicester, but apart from our obvious lack of threat, we pretty much had them where we wanted them.

2 shots on target, that's all there was in the first half. Arguably, while Saints had the best of the possession, and far more chances really, the best ones were probably Leicester ones. Thank heavens Jamie Vardy got himself sent off last week is all I can say.

In the first half, Mario, Nathan & to a lesser degree, Wesley (for his distribution) were probably my pick of the players. Unfortunately, Danny Ings looked like a man slowly remembering how to be a footballer, he didn't really remember and was replaced by Charlie Austin in the 2nd half, not much difference in the outcomes there so that tells you everything you need to about how easily our strikeforce was handled by Harry Maguire (why didn't we buy him from Hull?) And an ancient Wes Morgan.

Anyway, 2nd half kicked off, Saints looked good very briefly and then Leicester started to come into the game and missed a couple of chances and all of a sudden, someone who had had not very good game up to this point by his standards, Bertrand, popped up with Bertie's belter, I really thought that was the game won for us as to be honest, this game needed something classy to score with as nobody really looked like scoring otherwise

A few minutes later, can't remember how many, a fecking easy header was bollocksed about with by Cédric, Gray pounced and scored a nice, if far too easy, goal for them.

After that it was all much of a muchness really, Leicester were more in it than in the first half, which was nearly all Saints, and then, for some inexplicable reason, Pierre threw himself to the ground in the penalty area in a manner that will make him a pariah to football commentators, pundits and a laughingstock with everyday fans to boot. 2nd yellow card, sent off.

Fecking twat!

Well, I was expecting to be deluged with Leicester streaming forward, thankfully though, it was Claude in charge and he settled for a point. We couldn't really tell we had 10 men and everything was, relatively speaking, comfortable.

Then Harry Maguire, who had an almost flawless game, decided to be a striker and fired in a right-footed shot from outside the area. It was an okay shot, not a worldy or anything, however our new Virgil van Dijk Mk2 (as opposed to last year's version 1, who, at long last, had a reasonable game) totally totally screwed up his not clearance and that was all she wrote.

It's going to be another one of those years.

We should have won this, I mean we weren't watching serious quality football or anything, it was just okay, but it was okay enough to have won this game against a relatively uninspiring looking Leicester (in fact, they looked a lot like we did under Claude). I mean we didn't really get close to them, their defence was far better than our cough bluntandunimaginative cough attack.

We had some players that played much better than theirs, Redmond was outstanding for a good two thirds of the game, super Mario, before he got frustrated by the lack of quality surrounding him, was also really excellent (for more than 25 minutes, more like most of the game actually) and looking like a player we bought from Juventus.

And then we HANDED IT TO THEM!

We lost 21 points from winning positions last year and we only just hung on then. They're going to fecking do it again if somebody doesn't do something to their mentality, as soon as we score we are more open than a drunk hooker conducting a flash sale…

… I don't know how to give them a spine, but somebody needs to.