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Saints At Hull City The Verdict

This was not a great result not a great performance, but it was not the sign that Saints are heading towards freefall either.

All football teams have poor results, indeed Manchester City after beating Barcelona could not despatch Middlesbrough on Saturday and it would be a similar case for Saints at Hull City.

But this was not a bad Saints performance overall it was a case of a few minutes of madness where Hull City turned a game around that they seemed to have no chance of winning and made Saints pay dearly.

Up to that moment Saints had looked comfortable and that was perhaps the problem, we had plenty of chances, in fairness most had been taken well but the Hull keeper did his job, but perhaps complacency crept in.

The warning sign was there with a shot flashed across goal and the Saints defence seemed to lack concentration, Hull then scored with literally there first effort on goal and then 125 seconds later made it two.

They would not look like scoring again but now the damage was done and although Saints would have well over half an hour to turn the game around, inspired form by Marshall in the Hull goal as well as more than a little luck kept the score at 2-1.

Indeed with virtually the last kick of the game Hull had to hack of their own line Jay Rodriguez was rushing in, the ball hit him, there was nothing else he could do but try and block, it could have gone anywhere but it went over the bar.

That perhaps summed up Saints day.

But it was one where lessons were learn't by both Claude Puel and his team.

The manager disappointed me a little bu his substitutions, given the possession we were enjoying and the little trouble that Hull were causing after they scored , we went like for like which was a little disappointing, on 66 minutes Boufal for Tadic was a like for like, but at that stage we could have sacrificed Jordy Clasie and gone for the jugular.

The double substitution with 13 minutes remaining was again one that lacked a little bit of daring, Ward Prowse for Clasie made sense, but at that stage Hull were penned back, I would have taken Yoshida off at this stage and gone three at the back, Yoshida did not have a bad game, but he had plenty of room on the right, but he is not an attacking player, so he did not exploit this room either by beating his man not putting in meaningful crosses, not the Japanese defenders fault, he is a defender not an attacking one at that.

If we had gone for it in the final 15 minutes by keeping on Redmond and employing him in the space Yoshida had we might have created more than we did.

But this is an observation rather than a moan at Puel, he is new to the Premier League he will make mistakes.

That is the thing to be taken from this game, teams lose games they really should have won, indeed we had a run like that last season in December and early January, but it did not stop us finishing in sixth.

We have had a lot of transition this season and we are also having to play so many more games, that is the price of success, we will have results like this from time to time, we have to take them on the chin for what they are, temporary setbacks and not fatal blows.

Saints will bounce back, we win as a team and we lose as a team, this defeat was not about a lack of strikers nor just about the defence switching off for a awful three minute spell, it was about not doing the job as a team.

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