Saints Executive Director Of Football Les Reed has spoken of how the club's squad building is almost complete.
Les Reed has confirmed that Saints are still targeting a central defender in the next week or so, but after that they feel that the squad will be virtually complete, but he did add the coda that should the right players come up at the right price they would not be afraid to bring them in.
Speaking to the Daily Ech Reed said.
"Ronald and I have discussed it, and we’re both on the same page where that’s concerned," said Reed.
"I think a lot will depend on the progress of the young players that we’ve got, and the reports back at the moment are that they’re progressing really well.
"Now, they’re not all going to get in the squad, so there might be a few that we say, like we did with Jack Stephens and [Jordan] Turnbull last year, a good loan — probably Championship level.
"We’re getting enquiries from top Championship clubs about loaning our players — clubs who feel that they’ve got a chance of promotion, so that will be good experience for them, so it’s a case of Ronald at the end of it saying ‘Well, I’m going to keep him, him and him and him,’ so when you add up the squad it’s probably going to be a decent size, but also we haven’t bought problems.
"It was interesting when we qualified, the two things that everybody threw at us, or even internally, was ‘We need a bigger squad’.
"That was one thing, and the other thing was ‘How are we going to manage playing Thursdays and Sundays?’ "Essentially, I don’t buy into the bigger squad thing, particularly going out and buying lots of players.
"Whilst some clubs will say ‘The travelling killed us, it meant our season wasn’t very good because we were in the Europa cup,’ I think that other clubs who went and bought more players than they needed in order to cover for that get knocked out where we are, get knocked out in the early rounds, and you’ve still got all those players left for the rest of the season and then you’ve got a problem keeping them all happy and so on.
"So I think there’s a balance to be struck between a sizeable squad and actually having the right players in the right positions and the right cover for when you need it.
"I don’t hear Jose Mourinho complaining that he didn’t use a lot of players last year and [he] still won the Premier League, because I think Chelsea are one of those clubs who manage it very well, so I think it’s about managing it.
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"The difference between playing Wednesday in the Champions League and Saturday, and Thursday in the Europa League and Sunday is the same length of recovery time, so manage your travel properly, get your recovery strategies in place right and you should be able to manage it.”
Reed added: "The other thing is, one of the advantages of using the young players — they have to be good enough. This is not a case of ‘Under other circumstances you wouldn’t be in the team’. They have to prove themselves, like Harrison Reed and Matt Targett and Prowsey, and Chambo and Luke before — is that they’re more resilient.
"So I have seen teams who want to supplement their squad going for experienced players, players who’ve played Champions League or Europa League before, but are now in their 30s, thinking ‘Well, that’s alright, because now he’s in his 30s he’s cheaper anyway. We’ve got a top Italian player who’s now within our budget.’ "Actually, they get injured more often and it doesn’t actually do what you intended it to do, so we’ve planned all that quite carefully.
"Ronald and I are right on the same page with it, but it doesn’t mean that when we’ve hit our targets and we’ve got players in that if there was an opportunity that presented itself to do something a bit special — and by a bit special I mean a real good quality player.
"Not a big name player, but someone you go ‘Yeah, we need to snap that one up,’ then we would try and do it.
"But we know what positions we want, we know where we want to fill it, and the other thing is the last two seasons we’ve built a squad that’s really tight and what we don’t really want is to try and have to adapt with a lot of new players coming in again, so we can build on what we’ve done, and that’s the way we’ll move through the window.”
Wise words from Reed and ones that Saints supporters should be glad to read, yes perhaps those who hanker for Charlie Austin to arrive will be disappointed, but the reality is that replacing Alderweireld aside, the squad is bigger and stronger than last season, especially when you consider the younger players who will have improved that little bit more with experience.
Of course you can always improve a squad, but essentially Saints have lost three players from last season and so far have replaced them with Cedric Soares, Juanmi, Jordy Clasie, Cuco Martina and Maarten Stekelenburg, add to that Jay Rodriguez who played no part last season and that means the squad has seen an overall addition of three experienced players with it set to be a fourth when they land a central defender.
Now of course there is no guarantee than any of them will be better than the three who departed but most have the potential to be and if perhaps a point or two is dropped because of this factor it will be offset by the extra point or two gained by having a bigger more experienced squad.