Ronald Koeman didn't ride a horse when he galloped around Europe and put together a brand new Saints team, but he still has his Magnificent Seven.
Now that we are over a quarter of the way through the Premier League season we are now starting to work out just how Ronald Koeman works and what his philosophy of football is, in many respects it is quite simple, build the spine of the team and then tweak it as the situation demands.
Koeman has already built that spine, some were already in place when he arrived, but most he has had to bring in out of neccessity, luckily enough as i write this article exactly seven players have played in every Premier league game, so it makes finding a title for this article easy.
So the Magnificent Seven are Fraser Forster, Nathaniel Clyne, Jose Fonte, Ryan Bertrand, Morgan Schneiderlin, Dusan Tadic & Graziano Pelle, three already at the club when Koeman arrived and four whom he had to bring in.
These are the players who are at the core of the way he plays, he seems to believe that a degree of continuity is key to success and that having the core of a team who play week in week out leads to the players knowing each other and the way that we play, this can perhaps be emphasised by the start that Graziano Pelle had for the club, his first two games were not great, you could see that he had something, but it wasn't yet firing on all cylinders, what the problem was, was that his team mates had not become used to how he played, too often the ball was played above his head etc, once they became used to just where he wanted it, then the goals came flooding.
Its a system that in many respects harks back to the time Koeman was a player,back then it was less of a squad game given that there were barely more than around 17-18 players comprising the actual first team squad and a couple of them would have been youngsters.
Nowadays there seems to be this theory that teams have to be tinkered with on a regular basis, that players become tired if they have to play too many games with people forgetting that their counterparts up to the early nineties played more games and without the diet, nutrition and training methods we have at our disposal today, not to mention that the pitches back then often resembled mud baths not the billiard table surfaces we have today.
That doesn't mean that modern day methods are wrong, just that some changes are not always for the better.Back when English teams dominated Europe, those great sides often played a core team that rarely changed especially as there was only one sub allowed back then.
But although Koeman has his magnificent seven, that doesnt mean that the rest of the squad is not as good, in some cases ie Toby Alderweireld, he would probably have made it a Great Eight if he had been here at the start of the season plus the game he missed through injury, then there are the likes of Wanyama, Jack Cork, Steven Davis, Shane Long, James Ward Prowse, Sadio Mane & Florin Gardos, they are another Magnificent Seven in their own right who could get into most Premier League sides but for mainly tactical reasons have had their game time varied, the benefit of this can be seen in the performances of Wanyama and Jack Cork, they are often a straight swap for each other as the game demands, but this competition has seen them both up their game as they vie to show the manager that they can both do the job as well as the other.
But it doesn't end there, we have a third Magnificent Seven, Jay Rodriguez, Matt Targett, Harrison Reed, Sam McQueen, Yoshida, Sam Gallagher, Lloyd Isgrove, again players who for one reason or another have played little part in this season so far, yet have the potential to do so as it progresses and have the ability to be as good as those in the first two Seven's mentioned.
So Ronald Koeman's philosophy is becoming clearer and as it does the future looks brighter, however as i said it doesnt tell all the story, in some positions we look to have less cover than others in the case of injury, but if we scratch the surface that isn't the case, Koeman signs his players carefully, most of his signings are able to play in more than one position, Toby Alderweireld can also play as a full back or in front of the back four, as can Florin Gardos, Ryan Bertrand can play as a wide player in midfield, Sadio Mane like Shane Long can play wide midfield or up front as a more conventional striker, Dusan Tadic, he can play out wide as he has done or he can play as a number 10, although with him you get the feeling he could play anywhere and do it well.
So although we might appear stretched in a position or two in respect of cover, we can mix and match if we have to and this is Koeman's Dutch way of doing things shining through.
So unlike Yul Bryner in the famous 1960 film, we don't just have one Magnificent Seven, we don't just have two so the Magnificent Seven can ride again, we actually have three and that bodes well for not only the rest of this season but hopefully season's to come.