The first half of this season has been peppered with supporters ranting at manager Claude Puel and his tactics, but now we are within 90 minutes of a making this season the best in 41 years.
If there is one thing Saints supporters should have learned over the past 3 years or so, it is that patience and remaining calm is normally the best course of action, in that time we have seen supporters go into meltdown every summer and now this season right into January.
Claude Puel has been the subject of vitriol on a scale not seen since the days of Ian Branfoot and much of it has been undeserved.
I am not going to try and claim the Frenchman has not made mistakes and that being the case, it has to be said at times his rotation policy has not been applied correctly, however no account has been taken by some supporters for the fact that whoever was in charge or whoever had stayed and not left in the playing squad, sometimes you hit a plateau where you have to take a step back in order to be able to take more forward in the future.
That has been the case this season, but some have been too quick to go into meltdown before a real chance has been given and no account has been given for the horrendous injury issues we have had.
So to put this season in perspective, we are in our first major cup final for 14 years and indeed only our third in 38 and fourth in 115.
In our entire history this is only the sixth occasion we have reached a major cup final and that in itself means that in our 132 year history we have only had six seasons where we have come within a 90 minutes of winning a trophy.
That is what we as football supporters want and this club has had scant opportunity for its fans to watch a game with truly a trophy at stake, but this is one of them.
If we win the final on Sunday Claude Puel will go down as at worst our second most successful manager in history after Lawrie McMenemy and one of only two out of literally dozens who has managed a trophy, call Puel what you want but that will be the case should we beat Manchester united.
Some will say that Claude Puel has got lucky and that the League Cup is a mickey mouse competition where clubs play there reserve sides,there is truth in that to a degree and indeed in the early rounds we did so itself, but look at the sides who have won it in the last dozen years, only twice has it been won by a club not considered one of the so called big six in the Premier League.
That shows that the trophy actually means more than many would assume to those top clubs, there are six big clubs yet only five European places attainable through the league, at least one club from that group has to miss out unless one of the domestic trophies is won by one of them.
So this is a big big game in the club's history and supporters should wake up to that fact and see it as such.
Once again the club has shown that it can keep achieving with each successive season and we can set three milestones this season, the first that we can win only our second trophy, the second in doing that we will qualify for Europe for three seasons running for the first ever time and the third is that if we can manage a top ten finish, then that will be the first time that we will have managed that feat four seasons in a row.
So to put this season in perspective, it is not the one that so many where telling us it was on social media, that Puel was our worst ever manager and that this was a team destined for a relegation battle, it is in fact the first season in 14 years that we are in line to win a major trophy, this football club continues to march on.
So as I said the lesson to be learnt its patience, Rome was not built in a day and every year we lose ground financially with those big six clubs, that is a fact of life, but we can continue taking them on, on our own terms though and by doing that putting ourselves us not as a big club of the size of Chelsea, Spurs, Arsenal, Liverpool, Manchester united and Manchester City, that is stretching things a little far, but we can make ourselves the top club outside of that group and look to keep growing and make weekends like the one coming up. more the norm and not something we averge every 20 years if we are lucky.