After narrowly avoiding relegation last season, Southampton will be hoping for a better 2018/19 campaign under Mark Hughes, the man who successfully helped Saints beat the drop when he was brought in with just a few games remaining, after the club decided to part ways with Mauricio Pellegrino.
After a few promising years, including a run to the League Cup final in 2017, Saints fans went into the 2017/18 season feeling optimistic, but things unravelled pretty quickly.
Not only did star defender Virgil van Dijk effectively go on strike in order to get a transfer to Liverpool, a move which he completed in January 2018, the team kept losing games as the players failed to fully get to grips with what Pellegrino wanted them to do.
The poor start snowballed to the point where Saints were scrapping for their lives come the end of the year and Hughes and his staff must ensure that the same doesn’t happen again this season.
Whilst no Premier League game is ever easy, Southampton don’t play a team who finished in the top six last year until late September and whilst Burnley, Everton, Leicester City, Crystal Palace and Brighton and Hove Albion won’t be pushovers, they’re all teams who Saints should feel confident of taking points off and there’ll be plenty of football tips about which will suggest that Hughes’ men will do well in a few of those clashes.
After that run of fixtures, Southampton face a 12-game stretch which includes games against Liverpool, Chelsea, Manchester City, Manchester United, Tottenham Hotspur and Arsenal; the sides who finished as the best six teams in the country last year.
If Hughes doesn’t have Saints ready to go from the off in those ‘more winnable’ games, the club could find themselves in another dire situation when December rolls around as that run of games against the league’s best sides will not be easy.
Hughes did well to get the side playing how he wanted last year, in a short space of time. Saints fans need him to continue that good work throughout the summer so the team can hit the ground running and get points on the board early, thus easing the risk of the team having to scrap in a relegation dogfight next April.
