One thing the draw at Newcastle United highlighted was the fact that Saints need to tighten up at the back.
In many respects it would be easy to forget the number of players Saints had missing from the game against Newcastle, new signing Jordy Clasie and Ryan Bertrand to name but two, but the real problem was the amount of possession we gave away cheaply.
Put bluntly we had two many lapses in concentration and the two biggest culprits were the two central defenders Yoshida and Jose Fonte.
Now we know the standards that Fonte can play too and most of last season he was outstanding, but he looked a different player against Newcastle in the second half and on one occasion sliced an easy clearance for a corner.
Yoshida was worse and his failure to do his job lead directly to the first Newcastle goal, his miss with a free header was also bad.
Cedric Soares was struggling to deal with the pace and could have easily have been booked twice in the first half and had to go off for his own good at half time despite putting in a great cross for the opening goal.
There will be many who will point to the fact that Morgan Schneiderlin is not there to sit in front of the back four, but I dont feel this was the problem at Newcastle, this was a case of individuals lacking concentration and making errors that they really should not be making
When player miss kick balls, miss hit passes or just fail to do their job, that is not the fault of anyone else but themselves and it has o be nipped in the bud fast.
Yes football is a team game but a successful team relies on each individual member doing their own job and that just did not happen defensively on Sunday at St James Park.
The good news is we were still good enough to fight back and get a point and I dont think we would have done so last season as was shown in our appalling osing streak on the road at the end of the season.
But the fact still remains that too many were sub standard, we already have sSteven Caulker in the squad and we need to bring in another central defender with Virgil Van Dijk the favourite, when we have done that they their will be competition for places and that will help, but we need to concentrate for 90 minutes and do our jobs, if we don't then we will continue to ship cheap goals.