What is currently going wrong at Southampton?
The 1-0 defeat at Stamford Bridge on Saturday means that the Saints now haven’t won in five Premier league matches.
They are in 12th place, just three points from the drop zone, however at the start of the season their ambition was to push on from the 8th placed finish of last term under Claude Puel. 12th would be good for some teams, however we have had a favourable run of fixtures early on and have only managed to win four of our 18 league games this season.
The person currently attracting the most blame is manager Mauricio Pellegrino. The reason being that since he has arrived, our play going forward has not improved from under Puel. The strikers are not the problem, it’s just that the midfield cannot seem to pick out key passes to them and chances have been restricted to a minimal.
However, what could be regarded as another problem is that the defence looks less solid than it was under Puel, with times of real disorganisation like the 4-1 defeat to Leicester and 3-0 drubbing at Liverpool. Virgil van Dijk is probably going to leave in January and the whole situation with him has caused uncertainty at the club, which seemingly isn’t helping our form.
The players also have to take part of the responsibility. At times this season their commitment has been pretty shocking. Defeats to Watford, Leicester, Stoke and draws to Brighton and Bournemouth suggest that our players are struggling to find motivation out of Pellegrino. I believe that we do have enough quality in the squad to finish in the top 10.
Even if we aren’t replacing our best players, it’s just about work ethic and teams wanting it more than others. Look at Burnley for instance, they have a no better squad than us however Sean Dyche has guided them to 5th place after 18 games.
Some players do have to be questioned though. Nathan Redmond, for some reason, never looks like he is confident enough to take the ball forward. He has the pace to beat players however for some reason he always opts to pass backwards to the full back or the midfield and the opposition defense then regroups and we have no way through.
Dusan Tadic has also been very questionable of late, popping up every 10 games or so with a goal, or assist before descending back into the darkness again. Whenever Manolo Gabbiadini plays nobody seems to be able to pick out a through ball pass to him and therefore he becomes isolated and has to drop back to receive the ball, which effectively leaves us without a striker.
The board, however, can also be questioned. It was incredibly clear that we needed a winger in the summer transfer window and some extra firepower going forward. What do we do? We spend money on two centre-backs and one midfielder, who is admittedly a good signing, however we needed goals.
Les Reed is receiving a lot of stick for this as, after last season, it was clear that we were not scoring enough goals. We should have simply replaced Mane, not with Redmond, and bought another top class striker after Pelle left. Les Reed should have also been quicker to sack Puel, as it was obviously going to happen, as then he would have had a larger selection of managers, one of which may have matched our criteria of attacking football and bringing through youth better than Pellegrino.
The January transfer window is key for us. We need to build some pace going forward. We need a winger and an attacking midfielder worth at least £15 million each. Redmond and Davis are not going to cut it much longer, with the latter mainly because of his age.
We can then judge whether our negative football was because of Puel and now Pellegrino or whether we just didn’t have enough quality going forward.