Our resident reporter Dan takes a look at Saints start to the season and what things we have done right and what things wrongly !
With the second international break of the season on the horizon, Saints will be out of action for two weeks. Because of this, it seems like an appropriate time to assess how well or poorly they’ve started the season.
In terms of defence, we’ve been pretty solid. With three league clean sheets thus far and seven goals conceded, we haven’t been too shaky at the back. The return of Van Dijk on Saturday was good to see even though he didn’t really help us much of the game and the partnership between Romeu and Lemina seems to be gelling nicely.
However, in terms of attacking, we haven’t been as brilliant. With only five goals in seven games (eight games if you include the cup defeat) we really need to find a source for goals. Shane Long has started the last three games and, despite getting an assist against Stoke, he is yet to get on the scoresheet. I think he’s a great player to have in the side as he works so hard for the team but we have two strikers who are already off the mark this season on the bench and maybe Pellegrino needs to find a way to integrate Long and either Gabbiadini or Austin.
As for the results, if you compare eight points from the first seven league games with previous seasons then it is actually one point worse than this time last season. Also including that we were top of group in the Europa League and had reached the fourth round of the Carabao Cup then it really is something to think about. Around this time last season, we started that run of six consecutive clean sheets in all competitions and were also unbeaten for a while. Our next set of fixtures could allow us to start a run like this but we need to be scoring the goals in order to do it.
At the start of the season you would’ve said that the fixtures we were given to start the season with were very kind but then you could’ve also said that it puts pressure on the team to get the points. I don’t think that winning and drawing twice and losing three times is a good enough tally from those fixtures. What’s more is that five goals really isn’t good enough either (two of those goals were penalties!). Not only that but exciting the cup at the first stage to a lower division side at home really didn’t help. Hopefully we can have a run in the FA Cup but these competitions are the ones that teams like us should try and do well in, as we saw last season.
After the international break, we have three winnable games in the month of October. Obviously, having lots of players away over an international break doesn’t help but hopefully Pellegrino will have driven the idea of improvement into the minds of the players before the game at home against Newcastle. I doubt that nine points from those three games will happen but saying that we should pick up six or seven really is the bare minimum. We have been playing well the majority of the time so as soon as the goals start flowing so will the points