SOTON
RALPH HASENHUTTL had urged people looking for guarantees to buy washing machines, but his first game as Southampton manager ended with him tumbling through the full throttle Neil Warnock spin-drier.
The Saints boss – dubbed the “Klopp of the Alps” – also wants to be someone other than his Liverpool lookalike.
Maybe he should choose Warnock. The Bluebirds boss was particularly pleased by Callum Paterson, who scored the decisive goal – not bad for a makeshift striker who was signed as a right-back.
Warnock said: “You only have to look at the statistics for him – he can do anything and play in any position.
“If I asked him to run through brick walls, he probably would.”
It was a filthy, dark day in South Wales when Hasenhuttl’s cycle setting should have been dialed in to heavily soiled, the kind of afternoon Warnock was born for.
But Southampton were just far too pure and lilywhite for the task.
By the time they fell behind to Paterson’s ludicrous, 74th-minute goal – after a horrible error from Jannik Vestergaard – Southampton were already looking far too pristine when they should have been mud-splattered.
Austrian Hasenhuttl must have expected more of the grimy and gritty work required when you are mired in the relegation zone, but got the same kind of flat, passionless display that earned Mark Hughes the sack.
Hasenhuttl admitted: “I always said we would either win or we learned – and here we a b s o l u t e ly learned.
“It ’ s not easy to play here, in a very pas s i o n a t e and emotional atmosphere, but I was not disappointed with what my team showed me.”
He may be the Klopp of the Alps, but even Hannibal and his elephants would have had a hard time climbing the mountains if they had harmed themselves as badly as Southampton did with 16 minutes to go.
Referee Jeff Moss played a brilliant advantage – instead of giving a foul on Victor Camarasa by Oriol Romeu – but what happened afterwards was a Danish disaster by Vestergaard.
His back pass was pitiful and gave forward Paterson the perfect chance to put away his fourth goal of the season.
“The ball wasn’t difficult to deal with and I think Jannik is very disappointed about that,” added Hasenhuttl. LEE JOHNSON claimed match-winner Famara Diedhiou’s goal was the just response to the spitting row against Birmingham.
Bristol City’s £5.3million record signing Diedhiou, 25, bagged the only goal to end Brum’s nine-month, unbeaten home record, a sequence of 16 League games stretching 277 days.
The last time the sides met, a 3-1 win for the Robins on April 10, Diedhiou (right) was hit by a six-match ban for spitting in the face of David Davis. Johnson said: “That was important after the spitting incident. We felt that was unjust.
“I’m delighted for him because he felt that was very unjust and he was hurt that he got punished.
“The best way to answer those critics is to put the ball in the net, not fling your elbows around or to hurt people in tackles, but to punish people by scoring.”
Johnson added: “I’m sure he would have kept the motivation inside.
“There was no video evidence at all, it was his word against someone else’s, but we came out the