Still laments "wasted" first half
Will Still was left frustrated by a “wasted” first half, as his Southampton side were held to a goalless draw by Portsmouth in a forgettable south coast derby at St Mary’s.
The visitors came closest, with Andre Dozzell rattling the crossbar from distance early on, but each team only managed one attempt on target in a game that lacked rhythm throughout.
Still lamented the stop-start nature of things, although the manager did feel better about his side’s second-half performance than the first.
“I thought it was quite a poor derby,” Still reflected. “I thought our first-half performance wasn’t good enough, it wasn’t up to the standards we wanted to set, and it was quite a bitty, broken up first half – fouls, throw-ins, free-kicks, goal kicks that took forever and ever – so there was no real rhythm to the game, there was no real intensity in it.
“But we weren’t at the levels we wanted to be, we wanted to stretch them in the first five, 10 minutes and then play through them, but we didn’t get our foot on the ball, didn’t show enough bravery or personality to do that, which we corrected and tweaked at half time. The second half was more positive, we were at least playing forward and totally dominated.
“We knew they were going to come and play long to their forward players and play off second balls, and we dealt with that better in the second half, but we’ve wasted 40, 45 minutes and then you’re playing catch up on what you really want to do and where you want to be going.”
Still admits Saints must get used to visiting teams wanting to slow things down at St Mary’s this season.
“We need to learn how to take a game by the scruff of the neck and play, and impose what we want to do on the opposition, which I think we did better in the second half,” he said. “We’ve got to deal with that, because Wrexham tried to do it in the first game as well, which was quite chopped up and bitty and not very attractive.
“We’ve got a lot of new players in, and we looked a bit like a team that were searching ourselves and looking for the right pass lines, the right areas to play in and where to receive. We’ve got to get back on the training pitch, analyse what we need to analyse, keep building and keep moving forward.
“We’ve got good players in but there are quite a few of them and it’s a changing team, it’s a team that’s going from one identity to another. There’s a big turnover, so I knew everything wasn’t going to be perfect, but we need to stop wasting time, looking at each other and finding excuses, like we did in the first half, and just get on with it.”
