The first half of this season has been peppered with supporters ranting at manager Claude Puel and his tactics, but now we are within 90 minutes of a making this season the best in 41 years.

If there is one thing Saints supporters should have learned over the past 3 years or so, it is that patience and remaining calm is normally the best course of action, in that time we have seen supporters go into meltdown every summer and now this season right into January.

Claude Puel has been the subject of vitriol on a scale not seen since the days of Ian Branfoot and much of it has been undeserved.

I am not going to try and claim the Frenchman has not made mistakes and that being the case, it has to be said at times his rotation policy has not been applied correctly, however no account has been taken by some supporters for the fact that whoever was in charge or whoever had stayed and not left in the playing squad, sometimes you hit a plateau where you have to take a step back in order to be able to take more forward in the future.

That has been the case this season, but some have been too quick to go into meltdown before a real chance has been given and no account has been given for the horrendous injury issues we have had.

So to put this season in perspective, we are in our first major cup final for 14 years and indeed only our third in 38 and fourth in 115.

In our entire history this is only the sixth occasion we have reached a major cup final and that in itself means that in our 132 year history we have only had six seasons where we have come within a 90 minutes of winning a trophy.

That is what we as football supporters want and this club has had scant opportunity for its fans to watch a game with truly a trophy at stake, but this is one of them.

If we win the final on Sunday Claude Puel will go down as at worst our second most successful manager in history after Lawrie McMenemy and one of only two out of literally dozens who has managed a trophy, call Puel what you want but that will be the case should we beat Manchester united.

Some will say that Claude Puel has got lucky and that the League Cup is a mickey mouse competition where clubs play there reserve sides,there is truth in that to a degree and indeed in the early rounds we did so itself, but look at the sides who have won it in the last dozen years, only twice has it been won by a club not considered one of the so called big six in the Premier League.

That shows that the trophy actually means more than many would assume to those top clubs, there are six big clubs yet only five European places attainable through the league, at least one club from that group has to miss out unless one of the domestic trophies is won by one of them.

So this is a big big game in the club's history and supporters should wake up to that fact and see it as such.

Once again the club has shown that it can keep achieving with each successive season and we can set three milestones this season, the first that we can win only our second trophy, the second in doing that we will qualify for Europe for three seasons running for the first ever time and the third is that if we can manage a top ten finish, then that will be the first time that we will have managed that feat four seasons in a row.

So to put this season in perspective, it is not the one that so many where telling us it was on social media, that Puel was our worst ever manager and that this was a team destined for a relegation battle, it is in fact the first season in 14 years that we are in line to win a major trophy, this football club continues to march on.

So as I said the lesson to be learnt its patience, Rome was not built in a day and every year we lose ground financially with those big six clubs, that is a fact of life, but we can continue taking them on, on our own terms though and by doing that putting ourselves us not as a big club of the size of Chelsea, Spurs, Arsenal, Liverpool, Manchester united and Manchester City, that is stretching things a little far, but we can make ourselves the top club outside of that group and look to keep growing and make weekends like the one coming up. more the norm and not something we averge every 20 years if we are lucky.

Photo: Action Images

SanMarco added 11:35 - Feb 23 "The first half of this season has been peppered with supporters ranting at manager Claude Puel and his tactics" and also increasingly with rants like this one that rant about people ranting. Surely the idea before a great day out is to unite everyone rather than to have a go at half the support. Puel has been rightly criticised but has also been given credit where credit has been due to him. Of course there is always a fringe who go well over the top but other than that I think most criticism has been within the bounds of decency and often the critics have had a point. Personally, I never (quite) joined the 'Puel Out' brigade but if you look at the history of the last few years Puel would usually have been gone by now at most clubs, even Saints. In a sense he has been lucky with the league cup run but good for him - WGS was lucky in 2003 and everyone loved him, even after a damp-squib of a final. It has been pointed out that Lawrie Mac would not nowadays have still been manager to take us to Wembley and I think it is good that the club didn't indulge in the usual knee-jerk reaction when things were going badly (and let's not rewrite history - it has NOT been a brilliant season other than the Liverpool semi). Puel has his chance now, just like Lawrie all those years ago.......

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RogerToye added 11:49 - Feb 23 Get behind the team !! Koeman and Poch both threw away cups and europe (however the footy was great at times) With Claude we have gone further in Europe then ever before we have got a cup final, we have a manager prepared to give the youngsters ago try diamond formation .. get it wrong, get it right especially v liverpool We know a stable team is the best but look at the top teams they are all rotating. doing a fine job.. the cup and tenth and above will be good with all the changes last few summers . Balanced article thanks

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SaintNick added 12:24 - Feb 23 San Marco, in any story it is important to put it in context, should I have just airbrushed the first five months of the season and pretended it didnt happen, as the headline suggested it was about putting it into perspective. You say at most clubs Puel would have been gone by now, even Saints, that is very misleading, of 92 league clubs only around 6 would have been sacking a manager for being in or around 9th -12th place at Xmas and given that Puels position in the league in December was almost identical to Koeman's 12 months earlier, the answer is that Saints most certainly dont sack managers for being in that position. You miss the whole point about perspective, you say it hasnt been a brilliant season, what is a brilliant season then ? are you saying that 6th in the league is a brilliant season but winning the league cup isnt ? You say that Puel has been lucky as Strachan was , but what is lucky ? we have only had 3 managers in the modern game in around 100 years who have got us to a major final, I would say that there are an awful lot with bad luck then. I judge seasons by what we achieve and the fact is that in this one we have got to a major final for only the sixth time in our history, that is the perspective

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ronrulesok added 12:34 - Feb 23 As you can see from my username I was a great Koeman fan from the start. I actually changed the user name from redandwhite to try and emphasise my support of a new manager who was getting no help from our large group of bedwetting fans for whom nothing is ever good enough. Now we have Claude and they are all at it again. Two bad results and Katerina should go along with Les. The manager hasn't a clue etc etc. I am off to a cup final on Sunday and will enjoy it regardless of the result. It will be a great day out and the pity is Marcus Liebherr won't be here to see it. So what about these fans. Like spoiled children who as soon as they don't get their way are screaming vitriol at anyone who disagrees with them or happens to care about the people who do their best trying to run the club. My message to them is for goodness sake grow up and behave like adults and civilised people. Will probably change my handle to clauderulesok now!

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bstokesaint added 12:37 - Feb 23 You can certainly tell when we haven't played a game for a while ;). I do agree though that the long and short of it is our season will be evaluated on silverware and this is Puel's chance to put himself amongst Southampton's greatest managers based on that single fact. Skip the subjective stuff the record books (if we win) will show a major cup in our name and football fans across the world will care more about that then where we finish in the league. If I had to evaluate Puel's performance to date, I'd say he has some good games and some bad ones, much the same as his predecessors. The 'Puel Out' brigade (mainly on social media) have been in the main well over-the-top without giving the man a proper chance. On Sunday I hope all fans will unite behind him and the team both before and after the game, whatever the result. That's what being a supporter is really all about.

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bstokesaint added 12:50 - Feb 23 @Ronrulesok I think you've highlighted the main difference between a "fan" and a "supporter". For me a fan is someone who just fancies a team. Bob Smith who lives in Torquay and is a fan of a Man U isn't a supporter. Unlike John who live in Moss Side and has attended virtually every game since the 80's, prior to the glittering Fergie era. I've highlighted a more extreme example, but it's the same at Southampton and every club in the country. There are those that keep the faith when times are rubbish, or results are going against and that's when victory really feels that much sweeter.

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SaintStu7 added 13:46 - Feb 23 Spot on again Nick. I wouldn't waste your time trying to educate Sanmarco he's always negative. I generally feel depressed after reading any of his posts. I might be expecting too little but I am delighted with our performances over the last 5 or 6 years and this season has again been great with a cup final to enjoy. We could always do better but there are other teams in the league trying to do the same thing so we all can't have the perfect seasons.

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Sanguin added 17:05 - Feb 23 Great article Nick. I'm really excited about what Puel will do with a pre-season and a couple of new signings in the summer, even if we do lost VVD.
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SanMarco added 21:32 - Feb 23 'Perspective' it comes in long-term, medium-term and short-term doses. The latter is the one that usually affects my mood when I post on here and I am of the honest opinion that with the glowing exception of the League Cup I have not enjoyed this season - if that depresses you SaintStu then too bad. What's the point of TUI if people can't say how they feel? Yes I am a glass half empty kinda guy and that is sometimes reflected in my posts - the thumbs down button is there for you if you don't like it. As for 'luck' - there is always an element of it in getting to a cup final. Hugh Fisher's equaliser 15 seconds from the end at the Dell, WGS' 1-1 with Millwall and that penalty not given against Yoshi vs Sunderland + the team Wenger put out in the quarter-final. Any club needs things like that to get to a final but plenty of managers have that luck and still blow it on the way (Koeman at Sheff Utd?) so well done to Puel, I am glad the club didn't sack him, I still say I am slightly surprised they didn't though. And also I wouldn't be particularly sorry if he went at the end of the season

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BoondockSaint added 17:55 - Feb 25 I for one feel San Marco's posts are a breath of fresh cynicism to cut through the Stepford Wive posts. The up/down button is there for you to agree or disagree as you wish ( I sometime use the up button to let a poster know I acknowledge their post even if I disagree). All this "perspective" talk is something you can argue a thousand ways depending on what you use as a barometer. As in: If you change Puel's name to "Pochettino" and Les' to "Cortese", would Nick's "perspective" be different? Let's just win on Sunday so I don't have to hear about "another for the cabinet" from my ManU friends ! (Although, if we win, they will say "Didn't want a second-tier cup anyway!")

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