If you read social media then you would believe that Claude Puel is the most hated Southampton manager since Ian Branfoot, but is this mob mentality or has Puel done a good job under the circumstances, here we look at both sides of the story.
Social media brings out the worst in people, it enables them to spout off their views, often on the spur of the moment meaning that because the more conservative in the supporter base are not so outspoken that their view is the populist view.
The wisdom of crowds is an economic theory that suggests that it is not the populist or individual view that is often the most accurate, but that of the average.
ie That if the crowd at a county fair guessed the weight of a cow individually if their guesses were averaged the average was closer to the cow's true weight than the estimates of most crowd members.
That could be said of the views of football fans, it is not the wild comments aimed at an under fire football manager that are closest to the truth, but by taking the average and in these modern times it is usually only the extremist views that are heard.
If Manchester united had listened to their crowd back in 1989/90 season when Alex Ferguson had failed to win a trophy in three years then would they have gone on to their domination of English football for the next 20 years or so, the answer is probably not.
So are those shouting the odds on social media right or should we consider that a far bigger number are silent and that they may or may not feel the same way about the manager ?
In the interests of fair play lets take a look at the plus points of Claude Puel's reign and the areas that he has fallen down in.
Before we start though, let us see ourselves through the eyes of others, of the entire English game, only six other clubs would be considered to have had a better season than us, Everton being in Europe next season might not swap a defeat at Wembley for not going on a European tour, but ask a West Brom fan and he would tell you firmly that he would rather the Baggies had our season than theirs.
So the casual observer would look at our league position, our run in Europe and our appearance at Wembley and then say what have they got to moan about ! but then again they don't see what we see week in week out.
So let us look at the case for Claude Puel.
1. Jose Fonte, Puel walked into the job to a situation not of his making, before he had met Fonte, the players agent was trying to engineer a move out of the club for his client for no other reason than money, Puel was caught in the crossfire.
2. Puel was let down by Les Reed & his backroom team in August, they failed to land a striker who suited Puel's system, ie Gabbiadini or such and they failed to sign a decent central defender given the Fonte situation. This left the manager having to shoe horn in players up front to try and play his system who did not suit it.
3. Injury Issues, this was not in Puel's control, we have suffered the worst run of injuries of any club, right from the start we have had problems, be in Jeremy Pied, Charlie Austin, Virgil Van Dijk, Matt Targett, Alex McCarthy have all been long term injuries whilst the list of shorter team injuries has been endless.
4. Despite the above issues we go into the final games with a good chance of finishing 8th and a Wembley Cup Final appearance to our name, we would have bitten the proverbial hand off back in July for this season, on paper at least.
5. Puel was let down in the January transfer window by Les Reed's failure to replace Fonte with a quality central defender which was compounded by the injury to Virgil Van Dijk, if this had been dealt with then the second half of the season might have seen us win the League Cup and challenge Everton for 7th.
6. At times the Puel system looked to be exciting and score goals, without the issues mentioned he might have been able to play it to it's full ability, on it's day it scored goals and was attacking, but like Koeman's system it relied on having a strong defence, we did not have that.
7. Backroom staff, Koeman had a good team alongside him including Sammy Lee who knew the Premier League, Puel got Eric Black whose
All in all this season could have been different for Puel, perhaps he has just been an unlucky manager, certainly there are things he has done wrongly, but there are those who would say he has certainly done enough to suggest that given the breaks he could go on and be successful going forward, if he gets the team to a top ten finish and a Wembley final with all these issues that are out of his control, then what could he do with a full squad suited to the system.
Having looked at the case for Claude, now let's look at the other side of the coin and why people would consider that he is not the man for the job.
1. Communication, he does not come across well in interviews and his English is not the best, this seems to be the bug bear of many, but I will say in his defence that Mauricio Pochettino did not even try to speak in English publicly in 18 months at St Mary's , so this is perhaps not as big an issue as some would claim.
2. Rotation policy, this was applied too much in the first half of the season and to be blunt it seemed to bear no relation to the form of the players who were in and out of the team, he seemed unable to identify the core of the team and the benefits of keeping this intact and resting those around it rather than those in the core.
3. Lack of tactics, certainly at times Puel has remained too rigid, many substitutions have been like for like and have not been game changing, even when he has tried to change the formation mid match he has too often got it wrong as he did in the home game against Bournemouth which saw a game comfortably controlled for an hour suddenly seeing us hanging on for dear life and only spared defeat by the Cherries inability to his the target from close range.
3. Selections, strange at the best of times, players like to know where they stand, that if they play well they keep their place, with Puel form does not seem to be part of his selection process, Jordy Clasie found this out recently after coming back into the team, putting in a man of the match performance and scoring the winner at West Brom, his reward being to be dropped the next game and now not even in the squad for the last three games, Shane Long can point to similar treatment.
4. Martin Caceres, despite seeing his team go from one of the tightest in the Premier League to the worst in terms of goals against and shape since the injury to VVW, has not seen one single minute of first team action, Puel has seemingly been happy to see the defence leak goals and give away chances not taken week in week out and does not have an issue with this, despite having other options he could try.
5. Failure to adapt, Puel was let down by Les Reed in August in terms of a striker suited to his system, but he chose to enforce this system rigidly rather than adapt it to the squad he had, thus we had Nathan Redmond shoe horned in to the central striker spot when he was not suited to this role and Charlie Austin often forced to play wide before his injury.
6. Issues with the team. Recent interviews out of St Mary's have tried to give the impression that all is well between manager and his squad, but that is clearly not the case, Dusan Tadic's outburst and Shane Long's gestures at the bench after the substitution debacle suggested that they are not happy and surely Jordy Clasie cannot be enamoured of the way he is being treated, that is just on the surface and if that is what we can see, then what is below the water mark could well be more with rumours of rifts between other senior players, the board will know what is going on and whether this is as serious as the fans would claim or as insignificant as the club pr would have you believe.
7. Style of play. Our failure to score goals does not sit well with the crowd, on the face of it why we are not scoring goals is hard to pin point, at any given time we have at least 3 or 4 players on the pitch that are capable of getting 10 goals a season, the fact that none of them will is testament to the way the team is playing.
The issue at the moment is that the defence cannot handle breakaways, we either have to sit deep as we did at Liverpool and make sure that the opposition don't get space, in which case we can have a chance to keep a clean sheet, but this is at the expense of being able to commit men forward to attack, the game at Anfield was proving this point where we rarely got three men over the half way line in an attack and therefore could not muster one shot on target.
Puel has failed to adapt and try other formations, he has the options, he could play Bertrand in the middle of the defence, or Caceres or Martina or even Florin Gardos, but we have done the same thing and got the same result, we can either choose to defend in depth and protect the centre of defence from being ripped apart on the break or we can try and outscore them, when we have done that as we did at Chelsea and against Manchester City and Arsenal we look disjointed and have lost heavily.
8. Issues with the crowd, unfairly in my opinion Puel was being slagged off by a section of Saints support virtually two games into the season, I have always said that he should be given a fair crack of the whip, but a certain section decided that he was useless from word go for reasons that are unexplained, remember these are the same people who were on Pelle's back from word go and up till March of last year were telling anyone who cared to listen that Sadio Mane was the worst signing the club had every made, bizarrely the same people now claim the whole downfall of the club is down to selling the very players they detested.
The crowd should not be underestimated, season ticket sales must be slow at present and the board will be taking note of this, they know that so many are disillusioned with the manager and the style of play, the question is whether his position is retrievable.
9. Inconsistency. We have not won more than two games in a row and even that number only a couple of times, that tells you about the manager and his system, you can never predict a result week in week out because of the way that the team is selected, keep the core of a team and you can rotate it, you build team spirit and confidence, that in turn brings consistency.
So in summary, it is a sorry situation, some of which is not of the manager's own making, but plenty is, I said right up to recently that the manager should be judged on the full season, I said that he had the opportunity to show leadership qualities in the last 10 games or so and prove to the supporters and indeed his own squad that he knew what he was doing and in control of the situation.
It perhaps would not have seen us much better than we are, but he had to show that he had a way forward, that he has what it takes, it is in adversary that you see the mark of a man or in footballing terms a manager, I am afraid to say I don't see that in the way that Puel has handled the last two month's or so, anyone can pick eleven players for a team, but not everyone can pick the right eleven nor can anyone know when they need to change their original selection and what they need to do to get it right.
I am afraid that it is looking increasingly like Claude Puel's days are numbered at St Mary's, indeed they may have been for some time, there have been rumours going back to January that he was not happy in England, that he could not settle and wanted to move back to France.
If that is the case then perhaps he is going through the motions, perhaps he and the board already have a mutual agreement, but that they have also agreed that the best option was to see the season out and then part company amicably, certainly that would make sense and give the board the chance to make the right appointment after the season ends and their target perhaps becomes available.
It would have been hoped that perhaps Puel would have got a few points ended the season comfortably in the top ten and could have left with dignity, that now does not look like the case.
From the fans perspective we have to rely on the board to get things right, we owe them the chance to do so because they have never let us down before, of course they get things wrong and they perhaps have with Claude Puel, but as I have said in each of the last three summers, it is never about what has just happened, it is always about what you do next.
Saints fans need to have a little faith and realise that sometimes a step backwards needs to be taken to move forwards, the problem is we haven't seen a step backwards in 8 years, we have forgotten that every season cannot keep being better than the last, no club can ever do that.
When I see social media saying that this is the worse season ever with the worse team ever then I think that the person writing either hasn't been going very long or has a short memory, this is a decent squad being led badly, the league position backs that up in that we are inconsistent yet still 10th, I have seen far worse squads back in the late 80's and 90's to name but a few.
If this is a disastrous season then I wish we had had a few more !