NO GOALS, NO HOPE NO CHANCE!
Newcastle’s worst start for 120 years, Southampton’s worst goal run for 17 years, ...no wonder the fans were booing
WITH grim and unintentional irony, a mascot they were calling ‘Mr Monopoly’ was paraded around St Mary’s t o promote a new Southampton FC edition of the board game, being billed as the ideal Christmas gift.
For Newcastle, any such merchandise would be the ultimate indignity, given supporters’ sentiments about their club’s owner, which require little elaboration.
For Southampton, whose time without a win on home turf now extends beyond 172 days, it was a reminder of days when this club actually scored goals, since Kevin Keegan, Matt Le Tissier and Rickie Lambert are allocated squares on the board.
Theirs was the manager looking the more uncomfortable last night given that Mark Hughes, unlike Rafael Benitez, has not exactly been ‘ shopping in Aldi,’ as Alan Shearer has described Newcastle’s player acquisition policy.
Though a game between two sides who had previously managed only eight points and 12 goals between them never promised an avalanche, the absence of football’s essential commodity is beginning to haunt this stadium.
For the first time this season, muffled boos rang out at the end. It does not seem a happy place.
There is no shortage of striking personnel. Benitez would give a lot for the collective Southampton resource of Danny Ings, Shane Long, Charlie Austin and Manolo Gabbiadini — the latter of whom he signed at Napoli and has always rated. But a symbiosis between them is missing.
Hughes, whose points-per-game ratio is poorer than any other Southampton Premier League man- ager bar Steve Wigley, tip- toed around the fact that the partnership of Ings and Austin simply did not work.
One passage of play encapsulated things early in the second half. Ings wasn’t present to collect an Austin knock- down. Then he ran into Austin while advancing into the same area of turf.
‘We have to find a way… for them to create moments for themselves,’ Hughes said of a pair who first played together at Burnley.
‘It a question of whether I feel a different combination would serve us better.’
It didn’t. A minute of the 90 was o u t s t a n d i n g when substitute Gabbiadini slid a clever ball into the right hand penalty box channel from which Cedric Soares laid a cross at the feet of Long, another replacement.
The forward had time and space but slid his shot wide of the left hand post. He was not the only one left staring into the evening night sky in disbelief.
Southampton required better because Benitez — whom Hughes has still beaten only once in 14 Premier League games — came with the shrewd tactical game-plan and the resolute defence which are his stock-in-trade. Newcastle were prepared for an attempt to press and played long out of defence, turning the home side’s defenders around in the process.
And then there was that defensive shape which was the first thing Benitez drilled into his squad after stepping into the chaos that his predecessor, Steve McClaren, left behind two and a half years ago.
A block from Paul Dummett to repel Nathan Redmond’s shot just before the hour was the best of half a dozen from the visiting team.
It’s the other end of that side which reveals the consequences of the Ashley school of football club management.
While Hughes spent £13.5m on a reserve goalkeeper Angus Gunn this summer, Newcastle paid a mere £9.5m for the forward Yoshinori Muto, who was selected to lead their front line here.
Lead, in the loosest sense of the word. Muto provided occasional pieces of intricacy but no material threat. Kenedy, one of the few of Benitez’s players capable of affecting the course of a game, wandered around with his socks around his ankles, assisting very intermittently and conceding possession just as much. The act of robbery inflicted on him by Redmond on 50 minutes was shocking to behold.
The Brazilian’s diminution is a mystery to Benitez and his management team. Some within the club feel fatherhood seems to have affected his intensity.
Jonjo Shelvey was the only Newcastle player of genuine Premier League class.
Whether Benitez can somehow muster enough from this limited resource to save Newcastle may be one of the most absorbing plots in this season’s narrative. Do not put it past him.
Hughes searched into the memory bank for how he felt when goals were eluding him in his playing days, as he reflected on what feels like the first knockings of another managerial crisis.
‘You’ve got to keep doing things you remember. Consistent work, repetition, reminding yourself what it sounds like when the ball hit the back of the net.
‘It’s just a little bit of anxiety at the top end of the pitch.’
The boos were borne out of the general lack of goals, he admitted,
clutching grimly at straws by talking up back-to-back clean sheets.
‘The longer it goes on the more people are going to be frustrated. It’s going to be there until we get rid of it.’
‘We had 22 shots and we weren’t able to convert any of them.’
But his side have scored once here in 16 games and failed to find the net in their past five Premier League games.
The Monopoly set is retailing at £35. Best of luck with shifting that.