Saints Chairman Ralph Krueger has been speaking to both the Daily Echo and BBC Radio Solent about the club's season and also about the plans going forward.
After talking about his disappointment over the season just gone, Adam Leitch of the Daily Echo asked the Saints Chairman a direct question.
What went wrong?
"Somehow the mix of the players and the expectations, the goal setting, the management of the team, all of that had trouble finding harmony."
"Sometimes there is no clear black and white answer for that."
"I have been in sports professionally for 40 years and sometimes it just doesn’t fit and it’s not just one person to blame. This type of season is absolutely not blameable on one human being. That’s the easy way, to say it was that player, that coach, that manager or that board member. That’s the easy answer. "
"The hard one is for everybody to take responsibility in some shape or form and get better."
"What went wrong was we got the mix wrong somehow and we were able to get it right down the stretch and now let’s get it right right off the hop next year."
"You waste energy on blame, you invest really well energy on looking for improvement and for understanding that we made multiple mistakes, a bunch of little mistakes."
The Premier League, the difference between eight and 18th is percentage points and we got them right for four years in a row and we got them wrong this year.
"We accept that we made multiple little mistakes but what went wrong it would be totally false to mention one name, one event or one set of circumstances because it’s all of them combined."
"It started in the first game against Swansea, outplaying them as much as we have ever outplayed a team, a 0-0 draw."
"It was a season where we kept thinking we were making the turn and had that game bringing us back in and we went flat again and we drew ourselves to death."
"I used to think it was only important to hate losses, but I have also learned you need to hate draws because we are in tenth place as far as losses go but you can see where that got us. You’ve got to win football games and that’s certainly something we learned this year."
"All the draws left us at points in time in a state of limbo and it would have possibly have been better to lose some of those games to make more dramatic steps towards winning."
"We got into that momentum and the January and February drop was disappointing but the recovery and what we did in the stretch gives us the chance to reflect in an optimistic way to take what was good at the end into the new season."
"I cannot say one thing went wrong."
With regard to the answers to this question Krueger could be referring to either Les Reed or Mauricio Pellegrino and indeed both at some points, however although some would consider this a stock answer glossing over the problems, in essence he was right, this season was a series of little set backs and catastrophes that in themselves were not big but when added up put us right in trouble.
Whether it was the continual failure to mark players in the box at vital times which cost us soft goals, the inordinate number of times when we conceded in the final minutes, the poor refereeing decisions that seemed to go against us ranging from the disgraceful hand ball incident at Watford that bizarrely combined all three issues down to the simple failure of referees to enforce the rules of taking free kicks in the proper place, from this respect Krueger is right, the fact that we stayed up despite these set backs is testament to the fact that or squad was a lot better than the position implied, but that does not mean that there weren't several big issues on top of this that were the root cause of the problem.
In my opinion the to major causes were appointing the wrong manager and the failure in January 2017 to replace Jose Fonte which was the root cause that continued into this season.
Adam Leitch did not let it lie there and asked "But the flip side Ralph is that therefore nobody is accountable for what went wrong"
"No I am accountable.I told you that in January.If you want to blame one person, blame me."
"It’s not about blaming one person, but who is accountable, and people want to know how are they accountable? What happens? Whether it is the right or the wrong culture, when things go very badly somebody’s head rolls
In most clubs, and it did with Mauricio this year, but he wasn’t ultimately responsible alone for our situation."
"Quite clearly, as I said in January if you want to take a name or face I have to be ultimately responsible because that’s my job and if I can’t handle that I’ve got to get out of here."
"I didn’t try to make a sarcastic statement. My job as chairman is for the owners to be their representative here and here you go Ralph."
"Then we have specialists in all areas of the club and what you have to see is that the fan has the right to put all his emotions into the moment, and that’s why people come and pay for tickets to watch on a Saturday. They are only present there and they have a right to boo and to cheer and to do all those things."
"Then it expands into a larger area and into a season.In my role we have to look at bigger picture things. We can’t say we finished top eight four years in a row and we are going to forget all that. That’s not fair."
"It’s not fair to say the club did well to go from League One without me here and then it did this and then this so now we have to roll heads. No. We have to see what the lessons are."
"The biggest mistakes a lot of clubs do is that they look for individuals, as you said heads roll, and you lose all the experience, so whatever you just went through becomes lost in space if that person leaves."
"I am a person who believes that in my past as a leader in sports every single medal I won, championship I was a part of, anything special that ever happened, came off the heels of something really difficult and challenging. We went through the most difficult challenge possible in sports and we survived."
You have every right to look for defined things to improve…
"As a coach I know you sometimes end up with teams you just can’t get connected and we could end up with a book rather than an interview but I say maybe we didn’t get the leadership right last summer."
"Maybe we didn’t deal with the transfer policy right because we wanted to consolidate the team and for the very first time we didn’t sell a player we didn’t want to sell and we left the Southampton Way a little bit. Possibly that was a reason."
"Maybe it was fate that two goals go off a post and so on and so forth…."
"We are not giving up on our ambitions because of the situation. We want to reach for the top half of the table, to find a pathway back to Europe and reach for that and we are not embarrassed about this season that we now hide from our lofty ambitions."
"We have to improve everybody, everywhere, every step we take and in the end we saw we had a good football team which we felt all year but couldn’t connect them."
"Mark Hughes was able to connect that group at the right time and we need to strengthen that group and go forward."
Leitch then asked "You stay. Les Reed stays. Ross Wilson stays. Martin Semmens stays. The people at the top stay to learn from the future?"
"Ownership has been extremely supportive of us all season to learn from good and bad times. For Mr Gao it’s been good to have the experience of Katharina there. It’s a good example of how valuable it is in an ownership change for the experienced owner to stay part of the process so we are thankful for that."
"The dialogue was always very strong, the support was always there and Mr Gao watched every game he wasn’t here live in China, even if it was the middle of the night."
"I was permanently messaging with him so I can answer that question in that the management team we have here is staying in place, or the board or whatever you call it."
"Accountability is one of our five values…"
Leitch - But if every time you keep saying when things go wrong ‘we learn from it’ is that accountability? I’m not sure that is in most senses of the word. We aren’t talking every little decision, we are talking sacking two managers in less than two years and surviving relegation by the skin of your teeth. That’s a pretty dramatic and sustained period of under performance
Krueger - "I don’t think last year finishing eighth and the cup final was a disastrous season for Southampton Football Club…"
Leitch - But you sacked the manager
"That we ended up sacking the manager was a decision on principle, a long term decision and it’s not fair this year to blame everything that happened on Mauricio Pellegrino."
"It was part of a storm that evolved in the timing of it all, the locker room difficulties made it difficult for him with his style to get the potential out of the team."
"Accountability is number one that you are willing to take responsibility for the good or the bad. It’s also holding others accountable."
"That means each and every discussion we have in the boardroom put all the truths on the table and don’t stick our heads in the sand."
"That’s why we were able to save the season in the end because we did look at what was happening and didn’t try and hide it or colour code but we rolled up our sleeves, we got together, we stuck together and that is also accountability that you then take responsibility."
"Ultimately we as a board are responsible for whatever happens to the club and we need to make some changes which we are now in a position and a period of reflection, analysis and we will certainly make adjustments out of this."
"The Premier League is ever changing, ever getting stronger and it’s more difficult to be a competitive team and get into the top half so we automatically have to improve and if we don’t we aren’t going to be able to sustain our position."
"I think it’s unfair to say we have made a lot of mistakes."
"I think we have made some transfers also of players that we still see have potential growth and no club in the world will ever hit 100 per cent on purchases and selling but if you do the net on buys and sells possibly one of the biggest things we got away from was the pathway to the top clubs last summer."
"When Sadio Mane came and he told us he wanted to be the best football player in the world he truly believed that. He came and played his two years and he went and now he’s playing in the Champions League final."
"We allowed that pathway and we were an important part of that and we should be proud of that but we got away from that."
"Maybe our ambition made us reach for a pathway that wasn’t ours."
"The consolidation of a team and the not selling of any players possibly exactly was one of the biggest mistakes we made as a board last summer. That might be where we got it wrong but nobody will ever know."
"We don’t have any of those transfer situations in the air. They could evolve naturally but we don’t have that urgency."
"That’s just one example of analysis we are doing right now and you will see it in our behaviours throughout the summer…"
"I think our club decision to consolidate last year and hang on to core players was for Southampton Football Club wasn’t the right time to do that. That definitely hurt us."
Fair play to Ralph Krueger for coming out and saying it how he sees it rather than telling the fans what they want to hear !
But the danger is that these words will be twisted, from a business point of view for a football club Krueger is absolutely correct in what he is saying, in football you should win and lose as a team and that means off the pitch as well, of course you have to look at individual members of that team and their performance, but it is still a collective ownership of a problem, be it conceding a last minute winner or transfer issues.
Krueger is also shackled by what he can say publicly and again this is right, in any workplace issues between staff should not be aired publicly, they should be dealt with in private, that is right.
But for some supporters this will not be what they want to hear, they want a public hanging rather than a reasoned approach, they want to see someone pay a price for our woes this season.
Perhaps that may yet be the case, but before that can happen the issues need to be analysed and blame apportioned and in football it is rarely simple to do that as it is a big chain.
When Yoshida for instance failed to mark Giroud against Arsenal back in December he was to balme for that error which cost us a goal and two points lost, but Mauricio Pellegrino has to take some of the blame for picking him, Les Reed has to take some of the blame for failing to provide Pellegrino with better options in the centre of defence, Ross Wilson has to take some of the blame for not identifying those option, Ralph Krueger has to take some of the blame for not bringing Reed to task for failing to deal with a position in the transfer market that had clearly been coming since August 2016 when Jose Fonte returned from the Euro's demanding to go.
So one goal and five men in the chain who have to have some culpability.
The right thing to do now is to not panic, this is a lesson that many have failed to learn over the past four years, in a crisis you need steady hands at the helm, perhaps Krueger is too "American" for some in his interviews, despite being Canadian. But he is a steady reasoned man with a grasp of not only what make sports teams tick, but also the business side of running things.
I have aid this many times, in any problem if you apply a scatter gun approach then you merely cause more problem's, you have to identify what the problem is, how it can be fixed and then take the right action.
Ultimately Les Reed is the biggest culprit to most and there is truth in that, but Reed's job is not as simple as just appointing managers and signing players, whatever his faults he was responsible for the building up of the infrastructure of the club, the scouting network and the training ground from virtually a field in Marchwood to one of the best facilities in the Premier League, if you think that a Swiss Financial Advisor had the knowledge and contacts to do all that then Reed might as well build his own gallows now.
Over the last four years every summer I have constantly urged for calm, it has always proved the best way forward, I have also always said that it is never about what you have just done, but always about what you do next and this is as true today as it has been in the last four summers.