Saints take on Watford hoping to end a goal drought that the origins of which can be traced back to the final minutes of our visit to Vicarage Road back in March
It has been a solid if not spectacular start but it could have gone either way in all three games, if Swansea, West Ham & Huddersfield had taken their chances then the league table could have looked a lot different today.
That is why Mauricio Pellegrino has to put sentiment out of the window this weekend and put out his best and strongest side, that means that Wesley Hoedt has to come in for his debut, which in turn means that one of of central pairing for the opening games has to go out of the side, assuming of course that he does keep a back four and does not try a back three as he did against Wolves.
We spent £15 million on Hoedt for a reason and that reason is that ultimately the club do not see either Yoshida or Stephens as the answer, tht being the case Mauricio Pellegrino needs to be ruthless, he has to put out the best side to win the game, if Hoedt sits on the bench and we concede a sloppy goal that costs us points then he has not done his job.
If we do put Hoedt in the team I think we have gone a long way to helping solve our goal scoring problem, last season the goals dried up virtually overnight back at the start of March, ironically after we had hit 4 away to Watford and it was this game that changed Claude Puel's way of setting out his team.
Including the game at Vicarage Road we had scored 13 goals in the previous 5 Premier League games, plus 2 at Wembley, we were not struggling to score goals, we did not lack goalscorers, so why did they stop scoring ?
The answer was that we were conceding too many at the other end and Puel was aware of this having nearly seen a 4-1 lead thrown away in the final minutes at Watford.
He knew that we had to protect a weak central defence who were too slow when attacked on the counter, so that meant stopping men getting forward in such numbers when we attacked ourselves, that meant the full backs who had been such a potent force getting down the line, could not bomb forward so much and in the centre of midfield we had to sit and hold rather than commit men forward.
So the goals dried up at both ends in the final games of the season, in the final six league games we only scored 2 goals, but we only conceded 3, there was a direct correlation ! in the six games before this we had scored 7 but conceded 10, can you see the pattern ?
As much as our strikers hadn't become bad players overnight, our defenders hadn't suddenly become world class either, there had been a big change in the way we were setting out the team and ultimately it cost Claude Puel his job, in that we didn't become a bad team overnight but we did become a boring one.
Mauricio Pellegrino's problem in his first few matches was that he had the same issues that his predecessor had, if he attacked then he would see the same things happen, as much as attack is the best form of defence, it could be said that defence is the "first" form of attack, in the past few years we have built our attacks on being able to absord the opposition attacking and then hit them swiftly on the counter getting men forward quickly, but to do that you need central defenders who have pace and can handle swift counter attacks.
You also need central defenders who can read the game, stay organised and keep concentration, Puel knew he did not have that and so does Pellegrino after the opening three games.
Pellegrino put the first piece of the jigsaw in place in signing Lemina to get control of the centre of midfield again, in signing Hoedt he has replaced Fonte and put another piece in place, the final one will be the return of Van Dijk, albeit temporarily if the media is to be believed.
That will give us a strong spine to the team again, it means that we can stay strong and resist counter attacks, which in turn will enable us to commit men forward and this will lead to our central striker not becoming isolated as he did so much at the end of last season as he will have much more support in and around the box, not to mention that Soares and Bertrand will be able to get down the line and overlap.
So sentiment has to go out of the window, Mauricio Pellegrino has to show he is a pro active manager and not a reactive one, that he can deal with a problem before it costs us dearly.