The final match of Gameweek 19 marked the halfway point of not just the festive period for Premier League sides but also the 2018/19 season as a whole.
Felipe Anderson registered his fifth double-digit haul of the campaign – that’s more than Mohamed Salah, Harry Kane and Raheem Sterling have managed – as West Ham United secured their third successive away win and moved up to ninth in the table.
We round up the key Fantasy talking points, manager quotes and injury news from last night’s encounter at St. Mary’s.
Southampton 1-2 West Ham United
- Goals: Nathan Redmond (£5.2m) | Felipe Anderson (£7.4m) x2
- Assists: None | Michail Antonio (£6.8m)
At half-time of the Thursday night encounter on the south coast, those Fantasy managers who ditched Felipe Anderson (£7.3m) ahead of Gameweek 19 – and there were many, 166,386 in all – would have been quietly satisfied, such was the Brazilian’s unremarkable first-half display and relative lack of goal threat.
One solitary shot off target was the sum total of Anderson’s endeavours in a goalless opening 45 minutes, as the two sides on show traded half-chances while demonstrating a lack of cutting edge at the business end of the pitch.
By the hour mark, we had seen three goals, with Anderson the scorer of two of them.
Both were superb strikes, the pick of which was the goal that brought West Ham level at 1-1: collecting the ball after a headed clearance, Anderson caught Alex McCarthy (£4.5m) out at his near post with a rasping shot from a difficult angle just outside the Southampton box.
Anderson then converted a Michail Antonio (£6.8m) through-ball after a swift counter-attack and had two more chances to complete his hat-trick on the break late in the game, being denied by McCarthy on both occasions.
It was a scintillating second-half display from the Brazilian on the left flank and while a fair number of his sellers won’t have been punished this week – the “upgrade” to Paul Pogba (£8.0m) was a popular move ahead of Gameweek 19 – this was a timely reminder that Anderson remains an excellent mid-price midfield option, particularly with a porous Burnley defence to face next and Brighton then visiting east London before FA Cup third round weekend.
No player has scored more Premier League goals than Anderson (seven) since the start of November.
Manuel Pellegrini said of his star midfielder:
I always say that Felipe is just knowing what is the Premier League, in every game he is improving, it is not easy for a midfielder to score seven goals in the middle of the season, I am sure that he will continue improving in the second half.
I don’t know that [he is the best player outside of the top six], I think for me it is more important that the team plays well and that Felipe is playing well in that, in that you always need high individual performers to win. Tonight he played very well but he is not the only one.
Anderson and West Ham’s performance was all-the-more commendable given their injury crisis, with ten senior players – including Javier Hernandez (£6.4m) and the ill Pablo Zabaleta (£4.3m) – unavailable for this encounter.
Pellegrini indeed could only name six substitutes on the bench for this match, but the lack of competition, at least for now, means security of starts for the likes of Anderson and Robert Snodgrass (£5.4m).
Snodgrass curled a first-half effort just wide of McCarthy’s post but perhaps unsurprisingly didn’t pose the same menace that his more expensive midfield colleague did going forward.
Lucas Perez (£6.2m) wasted an excellent chance midway through the first half on a rare start up front, but the 30-year-old striker didn’t suggest he’d be any long-term threat to Hernandez or Marko Arnautovic (£6.9m) upon their recoveries from injury.
The predominantly left-footed Grady Diangana (£4.5m) struggled on the right flank, while Antonio – as good as he was going forward – really struggled with the defensive side of his game at right-back.
Owners of Lukasz Fabianski (£4.7m) would certainly have been concerned about how much space Southampton were getting down the West Ham right in the first half, so the hope for their sakes is that Zabaleta recovers from illness in time for the trip to Turf Moor.
Speaking of the Polish custodian, he was in fantastic form again on Thursday.
The former Arsenal shot-stopper produced a superb save to deny Mario Lemina (£4.8m) in the second half (that stop being somewhat spoiled by an offside flag) and was also blameless for Southampton’s only goal, having made two blocks from Nathan Redmond (£5.2m) and Oriel Romeu (£4.3m) before Redmond controversially bundled the ball into the net via his hand.
Redmond and Stuart Armstrong (£5.1m) were bright early on in the supporting roles either side of Danny Ings (£5.6m), though that the Saints didn’t test Fabianski once after Anderson’s second strike said much about their lack of killer instinct in front of goal.
Ings, the most-bought budget FPL asset of each of the last two Gameweeks, only had one early shot into the side-netting to show for his efforts before being hooked just after the hour-mark.
Southampton looked susceptible to pace and movement at the back, meanwhile, and this was their ninth straight match without a clean sheet – hope for owners of Manchester City assets ahead of the Citizens’ trip to the south coast on Sunday.
A frustrated Ralph Hasenhuttl said:
If we had the ball the decision was a little bit slower. It’s always about turning forward and playing forward but we played a lot to the side and behind.
We saw a lot of old behaviours today and that’s not what I want to see in my game.
It’s not like one or the other you turn completely off but if you get a bit tired in your mind you fall back in these old manners.
It was intense the last games. We came out of a position where we changed a lot, it was an intense time and I was expecting there would come the time where you feel the fresh is gone and the speed slows down.
Today we made not so much deep runs, we made a lot of times the decision to play back and that was a great difference to the games before against a team which is so physically strong like West Ham where you don’t have time to play back.
If you want to create chances like we did a few times you play quick in the deep and have deep runs and create chances. When we turn back and wait until they are in their shape and they are balanced it is very difficult to score and to create chances.
Southampton XI (3-4-3): McCarthy; Bednarek, Yoshida (Austin 80′), Vestergaard; Valery, Lemina (Elyounoussi 87′), Romeu, Targett; Redmond, Armstrong, Ings (Long 62′).
West Ham United XI (4-2-3-1): Fabianski, Antonio, Diop, Ogbonna, Cresswell, Obiang, Rice, Diangana (Carroll 55′), Snodgrass (Masuaku 90′), Felipe Anderson, Pérez (Noble 78′).
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