Harwood-Bellis enjoys career-first brace
Taylor Harwood-Bellis was celebrating a career first after scoring his first ever brace in Southampton’s 3-0 win over Leicester in the Sky Bet Championship at St Mary’s.
The defender got the ball rolling with a thumping header from an outswinging Ryan Manning free-kick, delivered from the left flank, before doing the same to meet Manning’s inswinging corner from the right three minutes before the break.
By that point Finn Azaz had added Saints’ second from a fluid breakaway, before Leicester were reduced to 10 men with the dismissal of debutant Olabade Aluko, as Harwood-Bellis took Saints’ tally of first-half goals to eight in two games to rub salt into the wounds of the depleted visitors.
“Never,” he grinned, when asked if he’d ever scored twice in a game before, “hopefully it’s not the last, I enjoyed it.
“I’m just happy to help the team, obviously the two goals were nice, we’ve worked on a lot of set-pieces and how we’re going to score from set-pieces because there’s not been enough goals from set-pieces, so to help and to put into practice what we’ve done was good.
“He puts a great ball in, Rhino. We’ve worked a lot on them, I’m not going to lie, they were worked on, I’ve attacked the space that I’ve been told to attack, other people have done their jobs and it opens up.
“If the ball’s in the right place, we’ll open the space because we work a lot on it and everyone knows their jobs, and it makes my job easier if the ball’s in the right spot, so a lot of credit to Rhino.”
On Saints’ happy habit of starting fast, Harwood-Bellis, twice promoted from the Championship before, admitted there has been a recurring message inside the dressing room ever since the 5-1 victory at Charlton on Saturday.
“I think it’s just ‘no complacency’ – that was the big message. In any successful team I’ve been in in this league, you have to be a little bit robotic in the way you prepare and the way you put the last game to rest, figure out what you’ve done well and what you can do better, and move straight on to the next.
“Recovery, training, detail, and then you’re into the next game. Especially the last two days, you can’t even think about the Charlton game, it’s done, you’re just focused on a big game at home against Leicester, and I think that was the big message from the manager as well.”
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