Five Things We Learned from This Weekend's Football

Southampton's bid to look like a proper team and not a collection of decent players on a good run beating a load of shit sides took something of a hit this weekend, as they were pretty terrible in losing 3-0 at home to Man City. Really, though, it was written in the stars. Southampton were cursed from the start, because of one terrible decision by Ronald Koeman.

This isn't a tactics blog, so we're not talking about team selection. It's something more mysterious, less tangible, a taunt that the dark forces of football never take well. We all know about the "Manager of the Month" curse, but we can now add to that the Broadsheet Interview Hex, whereby a high-flying manager decides to have a career-boosting chat about his philosophy and daily routine with a dewy-eyed hack, and his team promptly forget how to defend or pass.

Let's look at the examples from this season alone. The off-season: Roberto Martinez explains how brilliantly Everton are doing under him and how he's surpassing David Moyes in big interviews with the BBC and ESPN, before suffering the worst case of second-season syndrome since Heroes. September: Aston Villa ride high in the table and Paul Lambert is chatted up by the Telegraph, before a shocking run sees him cast down into the traditional relegation scrap. And now, Koeman ​has added another tragic victim to the pile.

Of course, you can't be too harsh on any manager wanting to give his profile a boost. We all have ambitions, even beyond living in Birmingham and bellowing at Kieran Richardson. But like a pasty, flabby Icarus, when mid-table Premier League managers fly too close to the Guardian, they get burned. There's a lesson in there for us all.

Any PRs reading this in their hard-earned breaks between calling up journalists and asking them if they've started putting together their "Christmas gift guides" yet should note a theme from this weekend's football. It's a lesson in how to spin a tiny positive blip in an otherwise inexorable downward spiral of despair.

Somehow, Man United and Liverpool – the two biggest club sides in English football history – respectively managed to present a 3-0 home win over Hull and a narrow, late 1-0 victory over Stoke into epoch-saving victories. They were bread-and-butter wins for clubs their size, but instead each was hailed as a turning-point, a triumph in a titanic battle that proved their mettle, quality and how great a job I'm doing, please don't sack me.

It's not even two years since Ferguson cleared his wine cabinet out of Old Trafford, yet there's now a Manchester United manager freely admitting fourth place is the target. And any team like Liverpool would've been expected to go on a renewed challenge for the title this season, regardless of losing Suarez – the "well, nobody expected them to do anything" stuff is hasty revisionism.

It's no wonder that people go giddy for arrogant pricks in football when 90 percent of the media game appears to be telling the world how shit you are. No, no, fourth place was always our aim. No, Aldershot will be a very difficult tie. No, I'm sure that Faroese fourth-choice teenager is just as good as their first-choice keeper. Wasn't Van Gaal supposed to cut through this bollocks?

Farewell, Roy Keane. If it wasn't for that ​highly publicised autobiography you recently brought out, we'd have hardly knew ye. The once-bearded Irishman has decided to forego the temptations of the lively, exotic Sodom that is Birmingham to focus on his job at Ireland, and we can't, or rather daren't, fault him for that.

Keane's ship-in-the-night departure was predictably greeted by reports of training ground bust-ups and that old bugbear: his inability to cope with average footballers. Given that Villa's man in his position is Carlos Sanchez, the worst player in the league, that's fairly understandable, but still, had he never watched Villa before? Did he not expect them to be diabolical?

It's only recently that Steve Bruce was winning plaudits and doffs of the cap for building a pretty great squad at Hull City. Despite him having the sense not to do a broadsheet interview, his team have been pretty rancid lately, and they're right in the thick of the relegation battle – despite having Andrew Robertson, Hatem Ben Arfa, Tom Huddlestone and Gaston Ramirez classing the place up.
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The problem for Steve Bruce is that he has built a team that is not a Steve Bruce team. He can't get the best out of the great players he's signed. I'm just a critic, and I don't know the precise way to get the best out of Hatem Ben Arfa, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't involve subbing him off after 30 minutes.

A quick sojourn to the continent now, to check up on how Max Allegri is getting on at Juventus; by far the weirdest managerial appointment of the summer.

The table might show Juventus pretty comfortably ahead of the pack save for an in-form Roma, but while the table doesn't lie, it does tell a few fibs now and then. Take this weekend – a home game against their intra-city whipping boys, Torino, 15th in the table. Allegri has a reputation for out-of-the-box thinking, and not a good one. You want your best playmaker played at left-back? He's your guy. There's not much worse than a tragic figure who thinks he's a maverick, and this is very much of the ​David-James-up-front school of thinking.
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So, drawing a derby against a pitifully weak team at home, Max decided to withdraw his most in-form player, Carlos Tevez, and replace him with a defender. And it worked! Well, it worked because Pirlo decided to fire in a last-second 30-yarder that had nothing to do with the switch, but it worked.

If a team managed by Allegri are doing this, there's not much hope for the rest of the league. This is a managerial pact with the devil of Pardew-Newcastle standards, which will probably be voided as soon as they play anyone half-decent in Europe. But fair fucks to Juve – if you can't win the Champions League, you can at least prove how good you are by making the stupidest possible managerial appointment and not getting any worse.

​@Callum_TH​