Ralph Hasenhuttl has spoken about his sides failure to get results at home and is now coming desperately close to setting a new record for the club.
Ralph Hasenhuttl has spoken about his sides poor record at St Mary's and blames the levels of expectation on his players as one of the contributing factors to a rare season when we are much better on the road than we are at home.
The Austrian said:
"Sometimes it is a little difficult to play at home, against Burnley everyone expects that we are 3-0 up after ten minutes. It is a little hard to show this, this is a pressure guys aren’t used to carrying."
"In away games no-one expects anything from us. Maybe that’s the reason we perform better in away games"
The words expectation and pressure come hot on the heels of comments by former Saints player Charlie Austin who was more explicit in his condemnation of the support at St Mary's inferring that the crowd there failed to get behind the team when it most needed them and created a bad atmosphere to play in.
Hasenhuttl's words are more politely put but they seem to infer very much the same thing, that the crowd is demanding victory rather than trying to encourage it.
This is something I have been concerned about myself over several season's now, for some supporters the default way of supporting the team is to criticise not encourage and over the last 6 years or so there have been many scapegoats.
Charlie Austin was blunt, Ralph Hasenhuttl is being a little more tactful, football is a team game and it is hard for a team to pull together and win games when some of it's members are receiving abuse from their own fans.
In an indirect way the Austrian manager is trying to make the fans see that they are an important part of the winning process, of course it isn't the supporters fault if the team plays badly, but they can help it through bad periods and indeed when things are going well.
But there is a more important reason why Saints need the fans right behind them in the last third of the season at home, aside from needing the two wins that would see us safe, we need to avoid our worst ever season in terms of home defeats.
So far we have lost 8 of the 13 we have played and won only three times, with six games left we now don't have a lot of margin left to avoid our worst ever season at home.
Even back in 2009 when we were relegated to League One and spent the last part of the season in administration we only lost 9 at home and we will match that if we lose to Aston Villa on Saturday.
But that is not the record, at least certainly not in the post war era, that belongs to the 10 home games we lost in 1993/94 when we lost 10 at home in a season that saw us revive under Alan Ball and eventually stay up by just a single point with a last day draw at West Ham.
But that season saw us also win 9 games at the Dell and draw another 2 in a 21 game home season, so overall the record was far better at a ratio of 1.38 points per game.
This season it is a shocking 11 points out of 13 games at 0.84 per game.
So with six games left we cannot afford to lose more than one of our remaining games if we are to avoid equalling this record, the only problem is that we are playing just the type of teams we don't do well against, Aston Villa, Newcastle, Brighton and Sheffield United are all the types of team we have too often failed against because we push them back and they catch us on the break, it sounds strange but we probably have a better chance against Arsenal & Manchester City the two other games.
But surely we can win at least two of these games, we need 9 points to probably ensure safety with a margin to spare, if we can beat Villa on Saturday then that is a huge step, it would put us 9 points clear of Villa who are currently 4th from bottom and that is a big margin at this stage of the season.
As Ralph has mentioned we need the support of the team, I am sure there will be a deluge of replies saying that they are being paid vast amounts of money they should not need help from the stands, but this is football and although it is a big money game these days, the fans still count, whether you play Sunday morning football or for Liverpool or Barcelona there is always a little extra something that gets you a win or a draw when it looked unlikely and the this is where the fans play their part.
Are you going to St Mary's on Saturday to encourage or just to put pressure on by moaning ?