Long taking positives from away loss

Southampton forward Shane Long has said that he is looking to take positives from today’s clash with Manchester City, despite losing 3-1 to the side who now sit top of the Premier League.

The Irishman started as the central striker today due to the absence of Graziano Pelle, who was suspended. He did his cause no harm with a fantastic header early in the second half to pull a goal back for Southampton and looked positive throughout.

However, the rest of the team let him down as a number of mistakes in key areas led to Manchester City strolling to a fairly comfortable win in the end. Goals from Kevin De Bruyne, Fabian Delph and Alexandar Kolarov secured all three points for the home side, who ended Southampton’s unbeaten away record this season.

Southampton had yet to lose a match away from home in all competitions this season coming into the game. A run that had included away trips to Stamford Bridge and Liverpool.

Here is Shane Long’s take on the match:

After 20 minutes they went 2-0 up and it would have been very easy to just roll over and let them get four or five.

We were confident in ourselves to get the ball passed again and get around the pitch and cause them problems.

Kolarov’s goal to make it 3-1 kind of killed us off a bit, but I think even after that I thought we caused them a lot of problems, so we can take a lot of positives.

Obviously, it’s not nice to lose a game, but when you lose it playing well it’s a little bit more easy to take.

Long nearly scored again when it was 2-1, but his strike from the edge of the area appeared to divert off Fernandinho’s arm and go behind, after the rebound from Willy Caballero’s one-on-one save from Dušan Tadić had fallen to him.

I think all the home fans were nervous.

You could see our away fans were bouncing as well, expecting a bit more, and Dušan had a great chance and it came back out to me, and a foot either side and it might have gone in and those little things could have changed the game, but we can hold our heads high.