Arsenal V Southampton recent form and the visitors’ interesting managers

By Bulldog Drummond

From 2014 to 2016 Southampton were one of those sides who adopted what we might call a “certain style” which Arsenal, believing that the game was football and not elbows, did not like the result one little bit.

Date	Game	Res	Score	Competition
23 Sep 2014	Arsenal v Southampton	L	1-2	League Cup
03 Dec 2014	Arsenal v Southampton	W	1-0	Premier League
01 Jan 2015	Southampton v Arsenal	L	2-0	Premier League
26 Dec 2015	Southampton v Arsenal	L	4-0	Premier League
02 Feb 2016	Arsenal v Southampton	D	0-0	Premier League
10 Sep 2016	Arsenal v Southampton	W	2-1	Premier League
30 Nov 2016	Arsenal v Southampton	L	0-2	League Cup

There have been 13 games in all starting in September 2014.  In the first seven, shown above, we won two, drew one and lost four.  If you saw any of these “exhibitions” you might recall they were far from resembling much to do with football in the normal sense of the word.

Then from 2017 onwards things took an upwards turn starting with a 0-5 away win.  Arsenal’s team for that game was

David Ospina

Héctor Bellerin    Rob Holding     Shkodran Mustafi    Kieran Gibbs

Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain   Jeff Reine-Adelaide  Ainsley Maitland-Niles

Theo Walcott  Lucas Pérez  Danny Welbeck

It was three for Theo and two for Danny.

And so moving on to part two of our recent games against Southampton…

Date	Game	Res	Score	Competition
28 Jan 2017	Southampton v Arsenal	W	0-5	FA Cup
10 May 2017	Southampton v Arsenal	W	0-2	Premier League
10 Dec 2017	Southampton v Arsenal	D	1-1	Premier League
08 Apr 2018	Arsenal v Southampton	W	3-2	Premier League
16 Dec 2018	Southampton v Arsenal	L	3-2	Premier League
24 Feb 2019	Arsenal v Southampton	W	2-0	Premier League

As for the management, the results below show that the not lamented Mauricio Pochettino’s Southampton did not manage to beat Arsenal (he only had a win ratio of 38.33% during 60 game tenure at the club – a huge decline on the success ratio of his predecessor Nigel Adkins.

It was the successor to El Poch, Ronald Koeman, who took the win percentage up to a more respectable 48.35% and his successor Claude Puel who gave the club its one glimpse of a trophy (although they were only allowed to look).

Since then it has been downhill much of the way, with the hilariously incompetent Mark Hughes, who still likes to think of himself as knowledgeable about football, taking the winning ratio down to 18.52%.  Unsurprisingly no one has dared offer him a management job since.

Here are the recent Southampton managers…

Manager	Joined	Meandered off	P	W	D	L	win%
Nigel Adkins	September 2010	January 2013	124	67	25	32	54.03
Mauricio Pochettino	January 2013	May 2014	60	23	18	19	38.33
Ronald Koeman	June 2014	June 2016	91	44	17	30	48.35
Claude Puel	June 2016	June 2017	53	20	13	20	37.74
Mauricio Pellegrino	June 2017	March 2018	34	8	13	13	23.53
Mark Hughes	March 2018	December 2018	27	5	10	12	18.52
Kelvin Davis	December 2018	December 2018	1	0	0	1	0.00
Ralph Hasenhüttl	December 2018		40	12	10	18	30.00

Now the present boss, who is Austrian, although not too well known in England, is certainly no mug, specialising as he has done in getting unfancied teams up the league.

In October 2013 for example, he took over Ingostadt 04 (of whom you may never have heard) and took them from the foot of the second division to mid table, and then moved them on to be champions the following season.  In their season in the top league the club kept a decent mid-table position, but the manager chose not to stay on.

Instead he repeated his trick with Leipzig who had just been promoted to the top league, and amazingly he took them to runners’ up.  After a very decent 6th in the next season, he decided to move on and joined Southampton in December last year.

His first win as Southampton’s manager came was in his second game on 16 December, the 3–2 win against Arsenal, ending our 22 match unbeaten run.

We’ll take a look at the team in the final part of our roundup tomorrow.