Forget the pre season friendlies this game is the real deal and Saints will find out just how good their preparation will be.
Saints have had a good pre season so far and have managed to step up a gear with each game they have played, but the fact still remains that friendlies count for nothing and the only real barometer of how well we are shaping p is in competitive games.
I expect Ronald Koeman to play a full strength side tonight and take the game to Vitesse, after all we do not want to let all that hard work put in last term to go to waste.
I suspect that the game plan will be to go for the jugular, our strength at the moment is in attack given the fact that Ryan Bertrand is out and we are unable to play Steven Caulker.
But that should not be a problem at the back, Koeman has plenty of options and they are ll tried and tested against opposition of the level of Vitesse with both Yoshida and Martina no strangers to the Eridivisie.
But emphasis will be on going forward, two players sure to start are Mane & Pelleand it will be interesting as to how the manager plays it from there, he has three options for the other wide attacking role, he could go for Dusan Tadic or he could opt for Shane Long, Jay Rodriguez will be the third but I think that we will be wary of rushing him back too fast so he will be used off the bench and we also have Juanmi.
This is lot of fire power and it will all depnd on whether Koeman opts for total attack by perhaps using one of them as the third midfielder sitting just behind Pelle or whether he goes for JWP or Steven Davis in that role.
Ether way it is good to see the array of talent that we have at hand.
So that being the case we should have nothing to fear if the results against Feyenoord & Groningen are anything to go by, indeed our biggest problem may be the weight of expectation brought from a full house at St Mary's tonight, many of whom ill be expecting a display in the same vein as when we played Aston Villa in the final home game of last season.
If we can get an early goal and get the crowd rocking then we can look at finishing off the tie in the first leg, but we should be cautious and remeber that we have not won a home game in Europe since Anderlecht were beaten in 1977, since then an array of teams like Limerick, Sporting Lisbon, Norrkopping, Hamburg & Steau Bucharest have played in Southampton with the expectation that Saints would win at home, only Sporting managed to win, but the rest were disappointing draws.
So Saints start massive favourites for this game, however as much as it is well within our capabilities to win and win well we have to remember that this is Europe, the first job is not to allow an away goal and the second is to make sure that we then impose ourselves.