Local beauty queens due at Upton Park but match could decide Championship title and a thriller is in store
Fans at Upton Park for Tuesday night's match between West Ham and Southampton will as an extra bonus get to see two local models who between them have been named Miss Commonwealth International, Miss Galaxy UK, Miss Galaxy International and Miss Essex. The two teams can only dream of being so garlanded.
It still seems likely that one of them will end the season as champions, but the race to that goal is turning out to be more bare-knuckle fight than beauty pageant. And if Southampton started the season with a cocksure catwalk strut ? since a 3-1 win over Leeds on the opening day they have never been out of the top two, and have mostly been the top one ? more recently they have developed a worrying limp. Saturday's 2-0 win over Burnley was just their second league success since Boxing Day.
Having at one point been five points clear at the top of the division, by the end of November Southampton had averaged 2.2 points and 2.2 goals per game, conceding 1.1. But in 10 games from the start of December until last week they won exactly one point per game, still conceding on average 1.1 goals but now scoring just 0.9. Then they conceded a 92nd-minute goal to get knocked out of the FA Cup at home by Millwall.
Thanks to their early-season successes the Saints remain within the promotion places, just a single point behind West Ham having played a game more. But on current form they will not be there long: Birmingham, 16 points behind them at the start of December, are now just five points away with a game in hand. Blackpool and Hull have each turned a 15-point deficit into a gap of just six.
Nigel Adkins, the Southampton manager, downplayed the depressing statistics. "You can spin it whichever way you can spin it. We led the Championship for over four months and West Ham have clawed us back and gone top, but if we win the game then we go back above them," he said. "It's swings and roundabouts whichever way you look at it."
But Dave Merrington, the former Southampton manager who now works on their matches as a summariser for BBC Radio Solent, says the club's season is at a critical stage. "When you've got a five-point lead, you can have a couple of bad results and still be up there. You're not too worried about a the odd match," he says. "But when you have a wobbly period like Saints have all that starts to change. Now they are seriously under pressure. I don't think Southampton can afford any slip-ups any more."
In could be that their performance on Saturday, against a side with the division's third-best away record, proves to be key. "When you lose at home like Saints did against Millwall, it can have a detrimental effect on the dressing-room in terms of team spirit. What concerned me was the next game," says Merrington. "But in fairness I thought they were terrific on Saturday. And that's set up what I would call a classic at Upton Park. With West Ham having overtaken Southampton to go top, everything is set up for an absolutely cracking match."
Both sides will feature unfamiliar strikers: Saturday saw Southampton give a first start to their �1.8m January purchase from Doncaster, Billy Sharp. On Tuesday night Nicky Maynard, a �2m arrival from Bristol City, should make his debut for West Ham, whose captain Kevin Nolan is suspended. Maynard's arrival should offer some encouragement to the fans whose discontented mutterings about the team's negative playing style, particularly at home, have accompanied West Ham's ascent to the top. "Any criticism of the way we play doesn't make any sense to me," their manager, Sam Allardyce, said last week. "All this team did before was lose."
Their preparations for tonight's game were aided by the postponement of Saturday's visit to Peterborough (despite 200 fans turning up at 7am in temperatures of -11C to clear the London Road pitch of snow). And if Southampton aren't fatigued a look at their away record, just the 11th best in the division, could induce an ugly headache on its own. "If they can improve that away record they should be OK," says Merrington. "I think if they could win tonight, that would really be a confidence booster. What West Ham will not be able to do is stand off Southampton in midfield, like Burnley did. They've got very, very good technical players who can knock the ball around and interchange [positionally] very well. If West Ham do that they will be in trouble."
If they don't Southampton could be: should the night go badly for Adkins West Ham would be four points clear with a game in hand with Birmingham, having also played one game fewer, just two points behind and closing fast. For that to happen Blues ? the division's form team having won six, drawn three and not lost at all since Christmas ? will have to beat sixth-placed Hull at home. "I think we're within striking distance," Blues' midfielder Wade Elliott said. "We've managed to move ourselves into a decent position and hopefully in the second half of the season we can come strong."
Southampton's long stay at the top, and the more recent eminence of the pre-season favourites, has lent this season's Championship an air of stability. It remains to be seen just how deceptive that was.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2012/feb/14/west-ham-southampton-championship
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