Russell Martin is fighting a losing battle. Southampton might be too.
Who’s most responsible for Southampton’s start and does it even matter?
Every time I watch a football match on television, the rage inspired in me by Micah Richards bouncing around in that piss-poor advert is the answer to a question I don’t know I’m asking.
It finally twigged on Sunday that it’s the same question that comes up every time Richards opens his gob to tell some former pro turned podcast host about all the hilarious shenanigans that went on while he and the rest of Aston Villa’s worst team of the Premier League era were stealing a living.
Given the transactional imbalance between alleged top-level footballers and supporters – players are paid colossal amounts while skint supporters are shaken down every time they interact with their clubs – shouldn’t players who perform badly over a period of years treat the only people who actually suffer their failings with a little more respect?
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Russell Martin is fighting a losing battle. Southampton might be too.
After Southampton's defeat at Aston Villa, the BBC’s Pat Murphy concluded his summary on Sports Report with a comment about them that might have sounded surprising but had about it a ring of truth.
It won't have made Russell Martin feel any better but it was a subtle endorsement of the Saints manager.
“I've seen worse teams than this at the bottom at Christmas,” said Murphy.
On the one hand, that's an easy statement to disprove, or at least puncture. On the other hand, it's the kind of assessment nobody would bother voicing if they hadn't observed within that team's performance some indication that suggests improvement, even survival, might not be beyond the realms of possibility.
Though Martin has reached the staging post in the managerial life cycle at which the most vocal critics within the club’s support have begun to pore over his every post-match word in the apparent belief that what he says must be what he actually thinks, his own reaction to Southampton’s defeat at Aston Villa betrayed genuine irritation.
The frustration of the manager and Murphy's faint praise won't have brought much solace to the Saints supporters whose patience is wearing thinner by the match.
Aesthetics can be misleading. Just as direct football can be unfairly labelled unattractive, so passing the ball around can be mistaken for artistry, appreciated by outsiders despite often being a wholly defensive strategy motivated by fear alone.
The applause of pundits in defeat is seldom a comfort. When the football they're highlighting is actually no more pretty than it is successful, polite nodding from the gantry means nothing.
Southampton’s style of play has become a sticking point in Martin’s standing with supporters, to put it politely. The manager wants them to have plenty of the ball and they do. They average a higher percentage of possession than Arsenal. Only Manchester City, Tottenham Hotspur, Liverpool, Chelsea and Manchester United have more.
In the first fifteen Premier League games of the season, Martin’s team attempted more short passes than every other team but the two from Manchester. Only City had a higher completion rate for passes between five and fifteen yards in the same period.
Saints had the fifth-most touches of the ball in the division but only Brentford had more touches in their own penalty area and no team had more in their own defensive third.
This is the definition of possession for the sake of possession and it hasn’t gone unnoticed by Southampton’s supporters, who’ve also identified two rather obvious and linked failings of the strategy: they don’t have the players for it and it’s not working.
Southampton are bottom of the Premier League with five points. That’s atrocious on the doorstep of mid-December. They’re four points adrift of second-from-bottom Wolverhampton Wanderers having lost two more games. They’re already eight points from safety. This is not a team that’s profiting from possession of the ball.
When a manager is under pressure, the quality of their players comes under scrutiny as a necessary chapter in the debate. Southampton’s squad is miles short of where it needs to be to give Martin much of a chance to keep them in the Premier League – there can’t be too much disagreement over that.
18-year-old Tyler Dibling and newly-minted England international Taylor Harwood-Bellis will be in demand in the summer but they’re among vanishingly few bright spots in a limited playing staff.
This is the point at which opinion divides. Southampton’s poor squad might be the strongest case in Martin’s favour but he’s considered to shoulder some of the blame for its composition and, crucially, is resolutely playing in a way that’s not suitable for a manager with middling players and a desperate need for points.
The situation calls for pragmatism over ideology. Many Southampton supporters consider their defenders to be their weaker ball players, yet they have lots of the ball deep in order to keep it away from the opposition. Whether it’s defensiveness in lipstick or an honest zeal for possession football, it can’t succeed if that one fundamental requirement isn’t fulfilled.
Pragmatism can be a dirty word in football management but it doesn’t mean negativity. Pragmatism is finding a way to make something from what you have at your disposal and Martin’s sheer commitment to his style might be what ends up costing his job.
What’s curious when looking in from the outside is that Southampton don’t bear all the usual marks of the prematurely defeated.
The potential for individual mistakes dribbles from their every pore but Martin, even now, has a team full of players willing to put their bodies on the line and run themselves ragged for the cause.
That he also has a captain who got himself sent off for pulling the hair of an opponent is perhaps an example of the sort of lapse that gets bad teams relegated regardless of any positive attitude their managers might be able to extract from them by not pillorying them in public to assuage angry fans.
Martin faces extensive criticism simply by virtue of being bottom of the league. Many Southampton supporters don’t like what they’re seeing and argue that there might be a better way even if the right way is out of reach without the personnel to play it.
They want blood and thunder – get the ball forward, take a chance, give the other lot something to think about for once. More to the point, they want a manager who might give the possibility of playing differently some real consideration in the absence of results from the path walked thus far.
Five points is a dreadful return from fifteen games. Tempting though it might be to defend a manager who doesn’t deserve the personal abuse and jabs at his private life that come with losing football matches the paying public want him to win, that points total is the bottom line. The manager is responsible for that.
But Martin alone is not to blame for Southampton getting promoted back to the Premier League – under his management, mind you – and immediately shitting the bed.
Southampton have bigger problems than impending relegation if anyone behind the scenes thought a squad of this quality was going to keep them up this season or thinks a comparable one will keep them up in 2025/26 if they somehow bounce back up again.
Perhaps the most worrying prospect is that Southampton’s majority owners Sport Republic might believe some version of that and the club is destined to remain in purgatory, never to adopt a coherent plan of action that brings about a more solid return to the top division. Without a strategy that makes sense, it usually makes little difference who’s in the dugout.
Regardless, when any under-fire manager starts making barbed comments about supporters, the end is likely to be right around the corner.
"We played out and got pressed just before that, which then makes Joe [Lumley, goalkeeper] kick and it gets a cheer from the supporters, and we concede within about ten seconds, so it is what it is," Martin said to local radio after Saints’ defeat to Villa.
"They have a right to criticise everything else but it's really important to understand why we do things. We kick it to our two smallest players and it comes back."
The truth in those sentiments doesn’t matter. Logic counts for nothing. When a manager’s dressing room complaints find their way outside like that, it can be every bit as damaging as losing the dressing room itself.
It takes a damned sight more than five points to escape the wrath of supporters scorned.
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Salty beef extracts
The tale of two pubs that represent Everton's past and future (i)
The football club owner who hates money - and won't even play Monopoly (i)
Fifa’s Infantino and Saudi Arabia 1, Football and human decency 0 (The Guardian)
Come on then, Mr Guehi, Mr Morsy and Mr Mazraoui, what do you really mean? (Unexpected Delirium)
Analysing Aston Villa’s Defensive Issues From Transitions (The Analyst)
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Dessert
The next generation of the iconic adidas Predator football boot is here and it’s (a) gorgeous and (b) launching in a champagne colourway that will tickle the nerve-endings of boot nostalgists everywhere.
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