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Saints Board Want To Use League Cup Final As A Springboard

Katharina Liebherr and Ralph Krueger have both been very vocal after Sunday's cup final and it is positive news for Saints supporters.

On Sunday night the playing staff and their families stayed in London for a dinner hosted by Katharina Liebherr after which in a speech to them she outlined the fact that she and the club board saw reaching the League Cup Final as a springboard that would end with the 41 year trophy drought finally being over.

She further outlined that she saw any future partnership with investors as something that would only happen if it would benefit the club and that it would not be allowed to jeapordise the club's progress.

Ralph Krueger also spoke and he reiterated Ms Liebherr's sentiments and further expanded that the club wanted to keep this squad intact this summer and further expand it to one that could truly push on next season and win a trophy.

"We would like to keep this group together,” he said.

"We don’t want to do what we did in the last three summers every year. We would like to move away from that and we feel confident this summer will be a lot quieter in Southampton and we can keep the core of this team moving forward for a few years.”

These sentiments from Krueger were also repeated the next day on a national radio interview and it is what Saints fans who have become fed up with three consecutive summers of upheaval want to hear.

But why should this summer be any different ?

The answer is that now Saints finally have a squad on long term contracts, back in 2014 the club were caught out by circumstance and then the following two summers saw them have to sell players on because they were coming to the final year of their contracts.

But that is now not the case, in the main it is a squad that has bought into the vision of the current board and is not left over from the former Chairman Nicola Cortese.

The onus is now not so much on having to sell players to bring in further money for squad development, but on keeping the squad together and improving it with a couple of key additions in the coming summer.

This has always been the way forward as seen by the board, however they have not been in control of their own destiny and now they have.

Too many supporters these days want instant success and the moment something goes a little astray they start to panic, the Saints board has not done that, it has quietly got on with doing things in a certain way and accepted that it can only change things within it's power.

Of course there will be players move on, as they will at any football club, one thing that can't change is that there are six club's out there with more money than the rest and can afford to pay a lot more to entice players away, but we can't change that, however we can now manage it a lot better than we were able to over the past three years.

Reaching the League Cup Final is a culmination of three years hard work at St Mary's and it has cemented Saints as being a club that is seen as being a top ten challenger for a European place and as we saw on Sunday one of the domestic cups.

Although we did not bring the cup home, what we did bring home was the pride of the club and the fact that we have had three good seasons of progress.

We now have to aim for a top ten finish in the Premier League, that is totally within our grasp, indeed we win our game in hand we go up to 9th.

Sadly perhaps 8th is the highest we can now reach, Everton in 7th are 14 points ahead and that is a big gap to overcome, but the three places behind Everton are well within our capabilities.

If we can manage that then that will be the first time as a club that we have finished in the top ten for four seasons running, that is progress and given the issues we have had this season a top ten finish and runners up in the League Cup final is satisfying, if someone has predicted that back in June 2014 we would have thought they were mad.

So it is good to hear that the club still have ambition, now the supporters need to do so as well, the addition of Manolo Gabbiadini was another inspired signing and perhaps the missing link in the way that Claude Puel wants to play, sign a quality central defender in the transfer window and we could be a true force next season.

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