Saints fans have always loved to have a scapegoat and with the departure of Danny Fox and Guly the situation was vacant, however some sections of the support have wasted no time on filling that vacancy.
Ever since I have supported Saints back in the 1970's there has had to be a scapegoat for some Saints supporters, even when things have been going well some people have never been happy unless they can throw some verbal abuse at somebody, of course as a club Saints won't be alone in this situation, but it seems that over recent years it has got worse.
I am not talking about having a rant in the pub here or venting your fury on internet message boards, from time immemorial football fans have loved to get together and give their opinions on teams and players and as much as anyone love to do this and football would be rather boring if we all had the same opinion.
What i am talking about is those people who decide that they don't like a player and whatever he does they are going to give him stick whatever he does.
Yesterday's draw against West Brom was remarkable for perhaps only one thing and that is how quickly a section in the crowd, mainly in the Northam End had decided that Graziano Pelle was going to be the new scapegoat.
Barely 15 minutes had gone before an audible groan emitted every time he was beaten to the ball and when he won a header in the 20th minute there was a very loud ironic cheer.
Did this help the player trying to adjust to a new team and league, or did it indeed help the team these people profess to support, here we are 15 minutes into the first home game of the season and some people have already decided that Pelle is rubbish, he might well turn out to be, but for god's sake give him a fair crack of the whip.
Many of those Pelle abusers were also of the same opinion that this would never have happened with Rickie Lambert and that had SRL still been here he would have scored a hatfull and generally won every ball etc, what they forget was that a year ago Saints were just as woeful in the opening home games, they started with a 1-1 draw with Sunderland relying on a last minute headed equaliser from Jose Fonte to save a point and we followed that up after losing 1-0 at Norwich by drawing 0-0 with West Ham, in the first 5 games last season we scored only 3 goals, one a penalty and the other two headers from dead ball situations.
It was the sixth game of the season before we scored from open play, that being Osvaldo's goal against Swansea, the point here is that it is all about perception, that everything last year was great and everything this year isnt.
The difference between now and a year ago is that back then Rickie Lambert being the hero of the fans was given the opportunity to show he could start scoring, whereas Graziano Pelle has been given 15 minutes before some fans have decided he is not up to the job. A year ago Jay Rodriguez was sneered at as being average, yet now he is seen as an England player, but right up to his injury there were some who could not accept that he was now the main scoring thread ahead of Lambert.
Pelle's performance yesterday was not great, but in defence of him he was not given the greatest of service and he did show some good touches, he needs to be given a fair crack of the whip before he is derided.
The problem is though that once a few people get on a players back it quickly esculates, not only affecting the player himself but the performance of the team and it is here that people need to ask the question of themselves, do they want the team to succeed ? or would they prefer to see it fail just so they can give an individual a bit of stick.
So lets have a bit of patience for Pelle and indeed all of our players, last season showed that if you get behind a struggling team and support it, it can come good, like two seasons ago it would have been easy for Saints fans to get on the teams back, but to their credit they got behind the team in both of our dodgy starts of the past two years and we have recovered and moved forward.
Now we need to do the same, let's learn from history and realise that we support a team not individual players and all of those players should have our support on the pitch to encourage them to do well, leave the slagging off for the Pub and social media sites.