Nordic Saint

3 away wins in 3 different competitions in 8 days! Our teams are winning again.

Two away wins in a week! Fan-bloody-tastic. Well done Hughes and all the players. Having a goal poacher like Ings is really making a difference. It gives a lift to all of the team when they know there is someone they can rely on to put the ball in the net. When was the last time we won 2 away games in a week?

Moussa Dembele joins Lyon for £19.7m. What a bargain when you consider what we paid for Carrillo.

Yes, I re-read it. You are right. It just seems to be the opnion of that writer but, as you say, he is a prospect and already attracting attention. He's one of those players who is so good you can't fail to be impressed whenever you see him play.

Sunderland want him. He is one of our best young players and potentially already the most talented young central defender we've got. https://www.footballfancast.com/league-one/sunderland/sunderland-must-sign-christoph-klarer-on-loan-from-southampton-before-deadline

Forest seem to have followed Wolves' example by bringing in Portuguese players, João Carvalho, Gil Bastião Dias, Diogo Gonçalves and Tobias Figueiredo, and it's working for them too.

Largely agree with this. But, I would say Yoshida and Bednarek instead of Vestergaard and Hoedt because I think last night we saw our best central defensive pairing.

Gunn Cedric Bednarek Yoshida Bertrand Lemina Romeu Davis Redmond Austin Ings

Dael Fry You may not have heard of him but watch him over the next couple of years and you will see what I mean. There's no finer young central defender out there. Our own Christoph Klarer will be ready in a couple of years too. In fact, I'd have been tempted to play him alongside Yoshida at Brighton tonight. Great players break into the first team at a very young age. Fry's international honours so far: England U-17 UEFA European Under-17 Championship: Winner 2014 England U20 Tournoi Under-20 Four Nations: Winner 2017 FIFA Under-20 World Cup: Winner 2017 England U21 Toulon Tournament: Winner 2018 Toulon Tournament: Best XI 2018

It must be bloody obvious to nearly everyone by now from the dramatic downturn in the quality of our recruitment since our head of recruitment changed from Mitchell to Wilson who was mainly responsible for our sucess. We got by in the few months after Mitchell left by recruitng targets he'd already identfifed, particularly van Dijk, who we'd been linked with before Mitchell left but since Ross Wilson has had to identify targets himself, the quality of our squad and managers has rapidly declined. Meanwhile, Reed has continued selling all of our best players. The problem is they are now being replaced by dross. It's no surprise that Manchester United are interested in getting Mitchell as their Director of Football, not Reed.

Fonte is off to a flying start in France. No goals conceded in his first two games and his team is 3rd in the league. It would certainly be a great end to his career if he won another trophy. Pied is also in the squad but he's yet to make an appearance.

As you don't bother going to games, how would you know this exactly? Have you visited St Mary's yet this season? Considering the results, the support has been remarkably positive so far this season. These messageboards are where people who go to games and support the team can express their critcism of things they see going wrong. I've noticed that most of the fans on here who don't care whether we win or lose, just as long as they can praise the board of directors and slag off our fans on meessageboards, rarely bother going to games themselves and generally live as far away from Southampton as possible. The ones who are unhappy with the way our club is being run at the moment are the ones who have paid hard-earned money, seen it wasted by the club in the transfer market and had to endure a string of awful results.

We are one of the bookies' four favourites for relegation this season, along with Burnley, Cardiff and Huddersfield, so 17th would be the dream. We are back to underachieving alongside clubs with much smaller fanbases than ours. For a club of our size I think only Birmingham City can rival our history of underachievement so most of our fans have very low expectations anyway and expect next to nothing. We are, in fact, the ideal club for lazy, unambitious owners, directors, managers, coaches and players, which is perhaps why we accumulate so many of them.

Yes, a Burnley team which had just flown back from a tough game in Turkey and a Leicester team missing their goal scorer and focus of their attack, Vardy. In order to stay up these are the home games you need to really target as crucial 3-pointers because we tend to lose both our home and away games against the top 6 teams and our away games against most teams.

A reality check for those who say it's just 3 games: 1 point from 3 games, including two of our easiest home fixtures, means that, in order to stay up we need to average more than a point a game from our remaining 35 fixtures, which include 12 games against the big six. Under Hughes we've picked up just 8 points from 11 league games. We'll go into our next game at St Mary's with just one home league win in 10 months ( a lucky one against the mighty Bournemouth) so unless there is a very drmatic change in our form or Hughes's, there aren't going to be many 3-pointers. It's no wonder that the bookies now have us as one of the relegation favourites. Where did it all go wrong?

Pretty good performance? Unlucky? Get real. When we play our next home game at St Mary's, it will be 10 months since lthe last time we saw our team win a home league game. There's nothing pretty good or unlucky about that. The way our club is being run is disastrous.

He's certainly a threat but so is Ings!

The reason why he'll never make it in the Premier League is his lack of pace. In a slower-paced league he might be OK.

For an 18-year-old, Klarer is an exceptionally mature central defender. He is one of the best prospects I've seen in our U23s in recent years.

Fonte's Ligue 1 debut: https://www.ligue1.com/ligue1/article/falcao-miss-costly-as-monaco-draw-blank-with-lille.htm

If he wasn't one of our most talented players, the club wouldn't have been able to sell him. The ones we are left with are the less talented ones, many of whom no other club would pay a fee for. He was also our joint top goal scorer last season and the club finds buyers for them easily enough too.

One of them being the fact we've won just 1 home league game in the last ten months so a win v Leicester could signal an upturn in our fortunes.

I'm assuming that the mantra that we shouldn't judge a player on the strength of one game also applies to Vestergaard's only league game for us against Burnley's powder-puff attack, arguably the weakest attack in the league? The same would apply to the game in which he was awful against his old club in a pre-season friendly. So, it is clearly far too soon to say wheher he is either the best or the worst of our central defenders. Let's hope for the best if he plays against Leicester. We've seen a lot more of Yoshida and Hoedt and on the evidence so far, I'd prefer to see Yoshida in our team. But, Hughes seems to think otherwise so, again, let's wait and see. It would probably be better to revisit this thread in a month or two, when we'll have seen a bit more of our new players.

Are you saying this man doesn't know what he's talking about? https://www.sportsmole.co.uk/football/southampton/news/reed-southampton-have-best-midfield-in-pl_276561.html

To be fair, most bookies already have us at 7/2 to be relegated. If we fail to beat Leicester, those odds are going to shorten further. The range most bookies and pundits expect us to fall into this season is lower mid table to bottom 3. Judging from the posts on here so far this season, it seems that nearly all of us would be pleasantly surprised if we did any better than that. Let's hope that we beat Leicester and have some real cause for optimism.