Southampton v Brighton: Premier League – live!

5 min Trossard has two shots blocked in quick succession. A goal wouldn’t have counted as Maupray was fractionally offside in the build up, but Brighton worked the ball really nicely to create the chance.

4 min There was a suggestion that Brighton would play a diamond but it looks more like a standard 4-4-2, or maybe 4-1-3-2 with Bissouma slightly deeper. I love tactics, me.

3 min “I can confirm it is chilly,” writes Ben Fisher, our man at St Mary’s.

2 min An early half chance for Adams, who heads Bertrand’s cross wide of the near post. He was backpedalling and couldn’t get any power on the ball, never mind direction.

The players are out on the field. It’s a chilly day on the south coast, or maybe it just looks that way on the TV because my hands are freezing.

On Southampton, am I the only one who thought Alex McCarthy got the ball when he tackled Phil Foden on Wednesday? It should still have been a penalty because of his follow through, but I’m pretty sure he got a very slight touch on the ball.

“As a losing team, looking at your xG is the sorry equivalent of looking down the order in a futile run chase and saying ‘if they could all just bat their averages…’,” says Niall Mullen. “In the words of both Clint Eastwood and Felicia ‘Snoop’ Pearson, deserve got nothing to do with it.”

You’re just angry because Liverpool didn’t really win the league last season.

Pre-match reading

This is a typically classy, perceptive piece from Paul Doyle on where it all went wrong for Chris Wilder at Sheffield United.

Southampton (4-4-2) Forster; Walker-Peters, Bednarek, Vestergaard, Bertrand; Armstrong, Diallo, Ward-Prowse, Minamino; Adams, Tella.
Substitutes: McCarthy, Stephens, Salisu, Ramsay, Redmond, Djenepo, Ferry, Watts, N’Lundulu.

Brighton (4-1-3-2) Sanchez; Veltman, White, Dunk, Burn; Bissouma; Gross, Lallana, Trossard; Welbeck, Maupay.
Substitutes: Steele, Moder, Mac Allister, Alzate, Propper, Jahanbakhsh, Izquierdo, Tau, Zeqiri.

Referee Stuart Attwell.

Hello and welcome to the latest instalment of Brighton’s quest for just deserts. They have been comically unlucky this season, ever since Leandro Trossard hit the woodwork 47 times against Manchester United in September. If you’re into the whole Expected Goals thing, Brighton deserve to be fifth in the table with 45 points. But in the actual table they are 17th, with 26 points, and in serious danger of becoming one of the best teams ever to be relegated from the Premier League.

While Brighton’s bad luck has been on the field, Southampton’s has been off it. A grotesque injury list derailed them after a brilliant start to the season, and they have lost nine of their last 11 league games. They should have enough credit in the bank to stay up. For Brighton, there’s still a lot of work to do.

Kick off 12pm.