The comments section has more insight. I note someone has posted that they feel Southampton have not hit rock bottom yet and think we will be relegated!
We won't go down even if this season is a disaster. Too many other teams who are likely to struggle. I think we will finish something like tenth given where we are starting from. The fact we have got a worse squad than last season and do not have a winning mentality is as much less a disadvantage than Leicester's points deduction. I think the style of football will be good, though.
I think some underestimate how poor the Championship is compared to the PL. It is competitive yes, but a huge drop in standard, where you can make mistakes and even have a slow start. I just hope that we aren't (by we I mean the club not us) thinking 'oh the Championship was 'easy' last time, so we'll walk it'. I'm not in the HMS Piss the League camp, but I would be shocked if we weren't top six even if we have a poor start.
No. 7 The Championship is effectively a set of mini leagues. I think the likes of Oxford, PNE . Bristol City QPR and Wednesday will all struggle. I am guessing the points difference between them and Saints will be quite considerable. The competitiveness for the top 6 positions will be quite intense and I woukd expect a decent quality of football . I think I would be more confident about Saints if we improve the front line.
There’s still three weeks (and always the busiest three weeks, where the dominos start to fall) of the window left. I don’t understand why everyone is getting so weird about “we’ve only signed two players”. We’ll have signed some more by the time the window closes.
I haven't even tried to login since the old 606 days. I made the assumption I'm still banned. Cheers Huddersfield fans.
It’s the whole “get them in for the start of the pre-season/season” narrative we hear every year that never seems to happen. I can understand the logic of wanting everything done as early as possible, but it just never works like that. I do however think you should be really striving to have most things done by the start of the actual season rather than waiting til the last week or whatever of the window. How many games do we play in August? 4/5? That’s a fair chunk of the season to not have much of a clue of what your team is going to look like. You’d hope for us this year that we should have the quality to still be winning games even with the uncertainty over individual players, and not knowing if they will be here/who will replace, but as a general rule I don’t like still being in a position where loads can change after the first game.
I’m sure nobody likes it, least of all Still. But it’s always been this way, sadly, and that’s not the fault of SR, however much people want to hang everything on them. My concern is that we actually have a pretty tricky start, and could do with getting off to a flyer. But either way, I’m not going to judge anything until we know what our actual team for the season is.
The portsmouth game is realistically when we'll have the best idea of the team for the season. The window has shut and we've had two weeks (assuming not many of our team will be away for the international break) for the dust to settle. We could have done with a less pivotal game first but we might as well see what the team does when there is high level of external pressure and expectation from the fans / press / history / need to actually win games.
Have to say the referee has got off to a shocker here. Made a rod for his own back by giving several very very soft and debatable fouls.
