During late June & early July Saints were being linked with every player on the market, now as it should be hotting up, the rumours are cooling down.
Football fans get excited by rumours, well at least rumours linking their team with a new signing rather than those suggesting that your star player would like to move to another club, therefore June was an exciting time to be a Saints fan as the club was linked with foreign international players galore and all for gloriously inflated prices.
The reality of the situation though was that only two arrived, firstly Dejan Lovren followed after a prolonged chase, Victor Wanyama, apart from those two though there hasn't been anything near a sniff of a signing and more to the point the rumours linking us with a player seem to have tailed off dramatically.
Now some would say that this is the way we do things, certainly the club like to pride themselves that they keep everything private, the reality though is that in todays modern game its difficult to do so, certainly none of the players that Saints have signed since promotion from the Championship were secret, in fact the opposite, all of them were linked with the club long before they actually signed. This isn't just a Saints thing before anyone claims negativity, when was the last time any Premier club signed a player out of the blue ?
But as we head out of July and into August and indeed into the last two weeks before the start of the season the lack of activity starts to become very worrying, in essence any signing made in the next fortnight isn't going to have long to assimilate himself into the squad and perhaps something that few football fans take into account, he will find himself thrown into a strange environment, living in a hotel room and not only having to concentrate on playing football, but getting his family over and finding a house, there are many things that effect form and on the field issues are only a part of that.
What we don't want to see is a repeat of last year when we spent six weeks chasing shadows and rushed into things in the last few days, spending big but on reflection not getting value for our money, back then we concentrated on perhaps making a statement transfer fee wise and didn't concentrate on what the squad needed.
So here we are again with time running out and key areas not addressed, the Premier League is all about continual improvement and indeed the club mission statement sent out with season tickets said as much, but at the moment in terms of transfer business we don't appear to be doing much leading, so far the squad hasn't been improved by much and indeed in Wanyama we are only adding to an area where we actually were strong, we need to sort out key areas otherwise we will repeat the same mistakes as last year.
So the silence on transfer activity could be good, but in today's media lead frenzied football world, im not sure, these days agents hawk their players around and use one clubs interest as leverage, if we were truly making offers on players I think that it would now be common knowledge, our transfer policy has seen a definite switch over the summer, a year ago we started by looking at the likes of Nathan Clyne & Jay Rodriguez, young players available at a good price and with the potential to do well, when the focus changed our problems started, this year it seems to be all about big names and big fees right from the start.
Ive said this before but its getting louder and more urgent now, every other club has improved their squads to a higher degree than us, if we don't address certain key areas we might find ourselves struggling.