The Athletic journalist Carl Anka has made a huge claim by saying that someone close to Southampton said the club would be relegated if Jack Stephens was a regular starter.
Anka, in his weekly Q&A on The Athletic, stated that someone close to the club hadn’t exactly been full of praise for the defender.
He said:
Stephens is a really fun one. At the start of the season he looked like a timid ‘too nice’ centre back.
After that game, someone close to the club said if he started every game this season Southampton would be relegated.
This shows that there was a lack of belief in Stephens’ ability earlier this season, due to his difficult start to the campaign. As Anka says, the person close to the club believed that Southampton would be relegated if he was a starter, which is a big statement.
Of course, it is impossible to know who the individual in question was and whether or not he works for the club or is just a close contact.
Either way, it possibly highlights the mood around the place at the time, with Jannik Vestergaard and Jan Bednarek then starting ahead of Stephens after the 3-0 defeat to Burnley.
Since returning to the team in November, Stephens has been Hasenhuttl’s first-choice centre-back in the Premier League.
n a recent game against Burnley, Hasenhuttl opted to drop Bednarek for Vestergaard, showing that Stephens was his number one option at centre-back.
This just goes to shoe how important Stephens has become to Southampton and why this person close to the club got it so wrong at the start of the campaign.
