Saints don't just have a big week ahead, its a BIG BIG week with two home games that will go a long way to deciding how this season goes.
By 5pm on Saturday Saints will know if they face looking over their shoulders for the rest of the season or whether they can harbour hopes of a top ten finish for a third consecutive year.
This terrible run is nothing new in Saints top flight history though and in the main we have played through moments of crisis like this and come out stronger at the other end.
This is a funny year for the Premier League though and the table is very condensed, we are still just as near 7th place as we are the relegation zone and when you think we have taken just 4 points out of the last 24 and are still only 7 points off of Palace in 7th, 8 off West Ham in 6th and 9 off of Manchester United in 5th, even just a poor return from the past 6-7 weeks rather than p*** poor would have seen us breathing down the necks of not only the top 5 but even Spurs in 4th with 36 points.
This tells us that although perhaps we have now left ourselves too much of a gap to make the top 5 we are still very much capable of a top 10 finish.
But we have to start winning games and the next two are great places to start in that taking six points won't perhaps move us up the league that much in terms of position, but it will drag us right back into the pack that is chasing 5th -10th place.
This has been a run that no one could have predicted and we just need to win a couple of games to get the confidence back and this is a great opportunity to do it, with respect to both Clubs both West Brom and Watford are games that most club's in this division would target as home wins, indeed early in the season when we were yet to get our full squad up and running we went to both and came away with a goalless draw, we need more of the same in defensive terms this week, then we can start to score again with ease.
I say this every time, but if the crowd stays behind the team then eventually we will break this awful run and climb the table again.
This is a better squad than the one three years ago that finished 14th, so that is a minimum, but it is good enough for far more than that and with the return of Fraser Forster imminent that might be the boost we need to tighten up the defence, cut out the sloppy goals and move up the table.