Mauricio Pochettino now has a headache as he looks to replace Jay Rodriguez in a Southampton formation that had come to rely on his attacking play.
The loss of Jay Rodriguez is a major blow for Saints as it would be for any team suddenly finding out that their leading scorer would now be out for the remaining five games of the season, but in the case of Jay Rodriguez perhaps only missing Adam Lallana would be as big a blow, not just because of his presence but their is really no one who can play in his position.
Saints formation is quite innovating in that it relies on a system that allows J Rod and Adam a free role to cut in from out wide and go to all out attack supporting a central striker, in other areas of the pitch Saints have like for like replacements as when Jack Cork came back into the side for the injured Wanyama but the real truth is that there is no similar option for replacing either Adam or Jay and now we are going to either have to play a different sort of player out wide instead of Jay, or completely change the formation.
Options to replace him would include Gaston Ramirez, James Ward Prowse Steven Davis or going for an untried youngster like Harrison Reed or Omar Rowe, in the case of the former three they are totally different to Jay and although Gaston is an attacking player, he doesn't have the speed of Rodriguez, the latter two youngsters are perhaps more suited to playing in that they are speedy and its a position they can play, but its the lack of experience.
So what does Pochettino do ? does he try and shoehorn in experience, try something different with Ramirez, throw in the youngsters or change formation.
A 4-4-2 line up isn't usually in Pochettino's mind, but sometimes you have to adapt and for a game like Cardiff where we are the home side, perhaps going two up front and a solid bank of four in midfield might offer different options.
One of the criticisms levelled at Pochettino in the past though, both at Espanyol and here is his rigidity in sticking to his preferred formation and that might be difficult now that he doesn't truly have the personnel to play it to its full attacking potential.
A win against Cardiff however might create a gap between us and those behind us that will loosen up the need to play to win and allow him to experiment, the two teams directly behind Saints are Newcastle and Stoke and they meet in the Midlands on Saturday, if Saints beat Cardiff and those two draw then that would leave us 4 points ahead of Newcastle and 10 ahead of Stoke with 4 games to play, that would virtually assure us of 9th place and in a pretty good position to pip Newcastle for 8th, but more importantly it would loosen up the urgency for points on the board and allow the manager to perhaps try some of the promising youngsters we keep hearing about.