Sparky tells his mishits to listen to the sound a goal makes
MARK HUGHES has prescribed a ripple effect for his misfiring forwards – listening to the sound of the ball hitting the net.
Only four Premier League teams have had more shots than Southampton’s 124 goal attempts this season, but none has a lousier conversion rate than their 4.8 per cent ratio.
If you were a condemned man facing execution, you’d want Hughes’ strikers to be the firing squad.
One win in nine games, and 385 minutes without a goal, has left Saints boss Sparky under pressure.
Manolo Gabbiadini’s glaring miss in added time, and fellow substitute Stuart Armstrong’s dithering six yards out, left Southampton with a rare clean sheet for comfort.
Matron has been on her rounds in the ward, and it was business as usual: Nil by south.
When Newcastle, another team who can’t hit a barn door with a muckspreader, arrive at St Mary’s next weekend, it will be a riot of binary. Asked how he cured scoring droughts in his heyday as a robust forward, Hughes (above, with Wesley Hoedt) said: “I was a bit streaky in my time – I was a 10-to-15 goals-a-year man, which was a decent return because I was usually pointing in the wrong direction, away from goal.
“When you’re on a run of not scoring and getting frustrated, you go back to basics – things like repetition of work.
“You have to remind yourself what the ball hitting the back of the net sounds like.
“Then, when things do fall for you, because of the work you’ve done on the training ground, you do it naturally – and that’s when you score. We’re getting in good areas and we have good moments. With a bit more guile, we should have converted more chances than we have.
“Our chance conversion rate is poor so we’ve got to try to address that.”
Rippling nets? Between them, Bournemouth and Saints couldn’t have made a ripple in the surf on Boscombe beach.
The Cherries, normally so fluent, we can deal with summarily. They were laboured and off the boil.
But for Hughes, the lack of goals is a big concern. The clocks go back on Saturday night and, if Saints can’t back up a hard-earned derby point with a home win against rockbottom Newcastle, the dark ages will bring forbidding gloom at St Mary’s.
Winger Nathan Redmond, who laid Gabbiadini’s late chance on a plate, said: “Nine times out of 10, Gabbi scores that in training, but today wasn’t his day and we’ll take the point. Those are the small margins you live with in the Premier League.
“Our next game is another opportunity, but Newcastle were excellent for 45 minutes at Manchester United and you can’t take anyone lightly in this division. We have to keep plugging away.”