Once again Saints failed to fire on all four cylinders and find the inspiration to break down a West Ham side who had clearly come to defend and look to sneak a goal on the break.
Saints left more questions unanswered as they again failed to score, yes Jaaskelainen in the Hammers goal made a couple of good saves, but in the end it was another game of a lot of possession but a lot of huff and puff with no real rewards.
Risking the charge of repetitivity being levelled at me, I have once again got to say that we seem to be sticking square pegs in round holes in order to accommodate at the expense of the system that was tried and trusted last year and looked to be fine up at West Bromwich Albion.
Of course Saints are a far better team than they were a year ago, but the cold hard fact is they aren't playing as one yet and that has to be worrying.
The problem is they are trying too hard to fit in both Lambert and Osvaldo in the same side, it isn't working, neither player is comfortable, Mauriccio Pochettino has to make a decision soon and that is who is going to be the lone striker out of the pair of them and who is going to sit on the bench, he has to make that decision next week at Liverpool as we wont be able to play an attacking line up like this one up there, its a tough one to make, but that's what the manager is paid to do, he has tried the mix and match route, he now needs to get back to doing what we did well.
For me against West Ham we just didn't gel, we had a lot of half chances as shown in the stats with 15 being recorded, but how many of them were truly created and fashioned out, only 5 were on target and that's just not enough, yes the keeper made a save or two, but truthfully we rarely put him under the sustained pressure that the statistics would point to us doing.
Why didn't we do it ? it all comes back to the same thing, team formation, after all we had three players on the pitch who were strikers, all capable of getting well into double figures in a season, add to that Adam Lallana, another who although a midfielder spends most of the time in the opposition half, four players who could deliver, should deliver, but to put it bluntly aren't and the reason is a constantly rotating style of playing that means that at any given time you are never quite sure who is supposed to be where and when, our success over the last few seasons has been based on playing through Rickie Lambert at any given time you knew exactly where he would be and where the ball needed to be put and so did the players, now that seems to have changed and whilst I am all for having different options and using them, I think at the moment we are trying too hard to use all our options at once, it seems that Pochettino is trying to keep both Osvaldo and Lambert happy and it isn't working in terms of benefitting the team.
For those who would disagree I would point to the goals for column, only two in four games, one of those a penalty, the other from a corner, this tells us a lot about creativity and our lack of it in open play, strange that in this game, one that had a lot of dominance and possession that we didn't bring Ramirez on to the pitch at some point of the game.
These are the sort of games we need to win if we are to improve on last year, some would say that we have made a reasonable start gaining five points from our opening four games, but in my reckoning we should have had six based on who we were playing, three of those games have come from sides below us, indeed Sunderland and West Brom are bottom and Norwich would have joined them if they hadn't beaten us, between them they have seven points, four of those came against us, the warning signs are there to see, we are failing to beat sides who are shaping up to be in relegation trouble, we will join them if we aren't too careful.
So the verdict for this game is the same as it was against Norwich, the same as it was against Sunderland and the same as it would have been against West brom if a last minute penalty hadn't given us all three points and there is the food for thought, without that penalty the start to this season would have been poor not average as it now is, yes its better than last season, last term these four fixtures yielded us three points, this year five, that is the only real positive we can take, there is improvement, but that has to be tapered against where each side is compared to last year.
Some tough games coming up, we have the players to cope with them, we just need to get back to what we do well.