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Saints At Wembley The Verdict

Manchester United fans will claim this was only justice for Bobby Stokes goal in 1976, but the truth is Saints were hard done by and deserved more.

Saints showed that they are a different team these days with the addition of Manolo Gabbiadini and took the game to United from the start but it was not just the 11 in red shirts that they had to contend with.

There won't be a Saints fan who wont now have seen that Gabbiadini's "goal" early in the game was onside and it was Bertrand behind him who was off, as he did not become active in play the goal should have stood .

But for all Saints attacking flair, the harsh reality of why we lost was the fact that we did not stay switched on at key moments in the game.

The first goal perhaps was not a free kick and perhaps the wall should have been a little more to the right, but it cannot be argued that Ibrahimovic put the ball right in the corner and it was a decent strike.

The second was slack marking with Lingard just left to casually line up his shot and stroke the ball home.

At this point Saints looked down and out and it needed something to stir the troops, that came in injury time of the first half when Gabbiadini lost his man and stabbed the ball home through De Gea's legs to give hope.

There was even more hope when the Italian equalised minutes after the break when he held off his man and swivelled and fired home.

Suddenly the dynamics of the game had changed, in the first half the Saints fans had been flat, now they found their voices and the team found a new confidence and for long period there looked to be only one winner.

But luck was still not with Saints or Romeu who saw his header come back off the post.

Gabbiadini seems to have been the missing link in Claude Puel's formation, the team now look like they believe they can score goals and this has given them confidence, Nathan Redmond in particular looks to be benefiting from having a more mobile strike partner who can get on the end of his crosses.

Fair play to Claude Puel who brought on Long to replace Gabbiadini who had run his socks off, with the French manager looking to win the game rather than take it to extra time.

But it was ultimately to be more heartbreak for Saints with less than four minutes of normal time to go, Ibrahimovic headed home from close range and you have to ask why he had an unmarked header from barely six yards out, someone should have been marking him, but we had switched off and it cost us dearly.

On came Rodriguez for a last throw of the dice but it was not to be and Saints fans headed for the exits feeling they had been cheated.

It was hard to take, but we can take pride in the performance that we put up and in the manner in which we accepted defeat, we took it with good grace and took it on the chin.

The real disappointment was that not only have we not won the trophy but we will now probably not qualify for Europe and that hurts too.

But there are a lot of plus points, we have shown that we are still moving forward, still progressing and we have taken another big step to showing that as a club we are capable of challenging for honours.

In December we were a shadow of the team we were last season, the stuffing had been knocked out of us, but now we look like a team again and we can start to kick in to the Premier league and get a run of results together that will propel us up the league.

There are some who say that this defeat didn't hurt enough, there is some mileage in that, we have had little to cheer about in terms of cup final appearances, this was a welcome distraction from the League, but now we have tasted it we want more and next time we will have that much more experience as a team.

There is a lot of pride to be had this morning in being a Saints supporter and there is also a lot of hope that we can now continue our journey onwards and upwards, we march on !

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