The fight for survival
Saints can expect no favours from serial escape artist Sam
SAM ALLARDYCE has always appreciated a decent escape act, but his Everton side have every intention of keeping Southampton firmly in the relegation zone this evening.
Mark Hughes’s side arrive at Goodison third from bottom in the Premier League with three matches to save themselves – a situation Allardyce admitted he could never have envisaged at the start of the season. But with personal experience of the dogfight between the sides in the mix at this stage of the season, Everton’s manager says he owes it to the other teams to heap further misery on the struggling Saints. “We are facing a team that is going to be fighting tooth and nail trying to get a result against us, particularly following their win last time against Bournemouth,” said Allardyce, above. “But we have to try and stop that and be fair to everybody else and try and win the game.
“I have to admit I’m surprised to see all three [Southampton, Stoke and West Brom] in the bottom three, very surprised. But it can happen for many reasons.”
Allardyce has never felt the rush of air through the trapdoor. At Sunderland in 2015-16, he replaced Dick Advocaat with the side on three points after eight games and hit the turn of the year with 12 points from 19.
Seven points from their final three games kept the Black Cats up and sent Newcastle down. And at Crystal Palace last season, he succeeded Alan Pardew in December and had to wait seven games for his first win.
But victories over Chelsea, Liverpool and Arsenal during the run-in, and a 4-0 beating of Hull in the penultimate game, confirmed a second great escape.
Allardyce refused to point the finger for Southampton’s plight beyond observing their managerial gamble, Mauricio Pellegrino, who replaced Claude Puel last summer, “had not worked” – offering no judgment on either man. With his League Manager’s Association hat on he made the same observation about the sacking of Tony Pulis at West Brom and Hughes at Stoke.
The trouble for Hughes in stepping into Pellegrino’s shoes at St Mary’s was the timing of the arrival, coming in mid-March and with just 12 matches to play.
According to Allardyce’s template for turning a club around, that left precious little time – and crucially no activity in the transfer window – for the former Stoke boss. “The manager’s job is to instil confidence in the players and staff that work beneath them, trying to lead them to be better than what they were before you arrived,” he said.
“When you get that first reaction on the field it is extremely pleasing but only when that feeling comes back in have you started your plan. You have then started the process and have started to deliver on a constant basis. You also have to make signings who add something that is missing to the team, like Cenk Tosun and Theo Walcott have here at Everton with goals.”
Southampton have reinvested so little of their transfer income, with just Mario Lemina making any sort of impact after his move from Juventus, they may yet struggle to rise from 18th.
A battling win at Bournemouth has kept them afloat ahead of the meeting with Everton, but if Allardyce has anything to do with it they will return to the south coast that little bit closer to the Championship.
And Hughes has warned that priceless victory – only their second in 22 league matches – must not give them a sense of safety.
“I don’t think we’ll fall into the trap of thinking that we got job done last weekend because we haven’t, nowhere near it,” said Hughes.
“It was a moment in time where we felt that emotion. Everyone in the stadium felt that emotion and there was an outpouring but I felt it wasn’t a bad thing. “It brought everyone closer, it brought our fans closer to the team and maybe that distance had started to increase over the course of the season. “It was only right that we expressed ourselves as we did as that helped the crowd as well, but we have to go again and we don’t want to disappoint our fans by losing at Everton.”