Saints now head into a seven day period that will see three games played and by the end of it the way forward for the rest of the season well and truly clearly mapped out.
There have been few weeks in the history of Southampton Football Club where in such a short period of time three important games have been squeezed in, I can remember ones where perhaps two came together, but not a period such as this one.
We start with a trip to Prague to take on Sparta, a defeat would not be fatal, but a win would see us at the least on the very cup of winning the group, it would be certainly in our hands.
Then at the weekend there is the little matter of the return of Ronald Koeman with his Everton team, although this is perhaps the least important of the trio of fixtures, it is still vital to win and propel ourselves up the table and indeed within two points of the Toffees and handily placed to continue our quest for a fourth consecutive top ten placing and hopefully even better a third in a row top seven finish, either would see that as the best run of final top flight placings in our history.
Then on Wednesday we head to London to take on Arsenal in our third attempt in a row to secure a League Cup semi final spot.
This highlights just how well we have built the foundations of the club over the past three seasons, at this stage in 2013 we would have been ecstatic to have been in the top ten and in the quarter finals of the League cup not to mention Europe, but there are some who can't seem to enjoy this fact but prefer to point out incessantly that "We can't keep on selling our best players etc etc repeat ad nauseum"
Well the good news is that this way of doing things has produced just about our best ever sustained period as a football club, so we must be doing something right, of course we would have liked to have held on to all our players, but the reality is that when the process started in 2014 we had a side that finished 8th, it needed investment to finish higher and without selling players that would not have happened.
Those Saints fans who believe that it is as simple as just telling players they are staying and they accept it with a smile need to look at the state of football in England today, it is a game riddled with corruption and with money at the root of that evil, we are succeeding not by trying to outspend clubs that have wealth beyond our means, but by taking them on on our terms.
That has worked very well and brought us success, more to the point it has enabled us to build a squad with 20 International players in it of Premier League standard and not just 10-12 as we had three seasons ago.
So lets go into this crucial week right behind the team and indeed the club and it's structure, the only football supporters in England who don't seem to admire our structure are ironically a proportion of the Saints fans themselves who say we can't keep doing it and prosper.
Well we tried the other methods and couldn't prosper so i'm not going to slag off a structure that works.
This is perhaps the greatest week in the 131 year history of the club in terms of where it could leave us if we were to win all three games, football is all about aspirations, we Saints supporters have had plenty of those over the years, but rarely have they come off or indeed all come together in a single week with our fate in three competitions all in the balance.
This is an exciting time, we cannot change the past but we can change the future !