With Southampton failing to gain a point in their first three games of the season back in the premier League, it is natural questions will be asked about Russell Martin's management. but are stories of discord behind the scenes mischief making, or do they have substance.
The first thing to consider in the above statement is that it is the international break coming after the start of the season and the transfer window shutting, suddenly the media is struggling for gossip and stories.
So that makes it very easy to turn their focus onto the clubs that have started the season badly and produce a few headlines.
The latest one that has emerged as peddled by footballinsider247.com is that "Russell Martin is fighting for his job"
They say:
"The 38-year-old faces the sack by the end of September if he does not turn around the results after a dismal start to the season.
"Some in the Southampton boardroom want Martin to adopt a more pragmatic style to churn out Premier League results.
"However, Martin is adamant he won’t change the playing style regardless of the results that his team suffers."
Tell us something that we don't know !
But does the substance of the story match the shock horror headline and that is the case in most stories of this nature, the headline will say that the manager's job is on the line, the story itself will involve just an opinion, usually from a pundit who has no real knowledge of the club he is talking about and is just putting two and two together.
Russell Martin will be well aware that football is a results driven game, he will know that if he loses another three games in a row, then his position will be under pressure, but that doesn't mean that he is fighting for his job in any way other than his fellow football managers at every club in the country.
I would suspect that there will be some board members at Southampton FC who like many of the supporters would be happy to see our possession football game tempered a little to suit the playing squad we have, but that is normal and it doesn't mean that there are emergency board meetings about the situation.
Likewise the viewpoint that Russell Martin is adamant that he won't change the playing style, I don't think he has actually said that, what he did say was that he would not change his footballing philosophy and that is quite a different statement.
I would not want him to change his philosophy, no club wants a manager who is willing to change the way they do things to pander to a board or the fans, a manager has to believe in what he is doing and be prepared to live or die by it.
But you don't have to change your philosophy to fine tune the playing style, at the top in the possession football playing style, you have Manchester City, they have the best players so can play it.
But every other side in the Premier League is playing it to some degree, the difference is knowing your weaknesses and knowing where the line is that you can play your way out of trouble.
This is where we seem to have gone wrong this season, of the five goals conceded this season, four have been from either poor passing or getting caught on the ball, the fifth was just poor marking.
It is not about changing our philosophy, it is about fine tuning our game and knowing our limits, at the moment it looks like our players are scared to do anything other than pass the ball and keep passing it, from the stands it looks like they feel that if they launch it long. they feel they will find themselves dropped or worse.
The truth is that if some of those goals were just down to human error, the goal at Newcastle United was not a flaw in our passing game, it was a simple pass that Alex McCarthy was well capable of making, he was under no pressure but he fluffed his pass, he is far from the first player to do that in any position in the field.
So some of our issues are not down to Russell Martin's possession football tactic's as in the third goal at Brentford, they are down to players just not doing simple things that they should have done.
But when you are daubed with having a certain way of playing and not in a good way, it is always going to be a stick to beat you with, whatever the reality.
No one, not even me is saying that we are not playing possession football, the issue is not that style, but the degree to which we are playing it, watch Liverpool play, they play it, but they are not frightened to play long when they are under pressure, they don't over cook it and they are continually looking for the killer ball forward rather than yet another pass sideways or backwards.
So the issue for Southampton is not Russell Martin's footballing philosophy, it is the way that he is currently applying it.
The evidence though is that he can be flexible, at the end of last season after a run of poor results, including a 5-0 drubbing at Leicester City, he knew that he had to change his strategy if we were to go up, he knew that Alex McCarthy could not play with his feet and at Elland Road in the final game of the season, we saw a different style of possession football and the change beat Leeds on that day and also at Wembley a few weeks later.
It showed that Martin isn't so single minded that he can't change the way we play and he did so without changing his philosophy.
This season is a little harder to implement change, he is trying to implement his playing style, but with a squad that was changing constantly as the month went on.
He had to stick to his style otherwise it might have been chaos with players not knowing what to do week to week.
Now as happened last season, the transfer window is closed and now he knows what he has to work with and he can implement his style and fine tune it.
He has given those that got us up their chance, some have taken it, some not so far, but that doesn't mean they are finished yet. Now he has to blend in our signings late in the window and assess just what he can and can't do in the possession based football game.
Now we will truly find out whether Russell Martin is going to be Southampton manager for more than just a season and a bit, can he pull us clear or will he fail.
Having lost the first three games, his task will be far harder, put bluntly if we lose the next 3 there are few managers who can survive 6 straight defeats at any point in a season, let alone at the beginning, the pressure is on.
So is he fighting for his job, as the headlines suggest, I would say not, at least not in a way any different than any other manager in the Premier League, it is results driven.
Disgruntled board members is nothing new in football, there isn't a football board in the country that will be completely happy with every performance and all will have an opinion on why their team is going through a bad run, but that doesn't mean that they are planning to sack the manager just yet.
But football is a results driven game, end of and from that perspective Russell Martin is no different than anyone else, he has to win games of football, if he does then he will keep his job, if he doesn't then the clock is always ticking.