Ok I wil not post on this thread other than this , where do you think Southampton will finish this season based solely upon the players we at this moment ?
17th would do me, but since you ask, I think we'll finsh the season about 14th. There are teams worse than us and our run-in looks reasonable. We have a group of talented, young players who have a few lessons to learn at the moment, but will come back strongly and show the likes of West Ham and QPR what they're missing out on. Swansea have taken a strategy of buying younger and from left field and they look in good shape this season.
There are good signs and bad signs - Lambert looks like he will be able to score goals at this level and cause defenders trouble, but our defence looks fragile and may concede/leak goals by the bucket load. We have players with real potential, and some new kids on the block. Will Guly be a force? Will JRod shine? Ramirez totally untried and how long before he gets used to the pace of the PL? The list is seemingly endless and with so many ponderables my best guess would be the bottom 6, perhaps even relegated if we don't further bolster the back-line in Jan. But, and this is a big but, we could exceed all of those expectations if the new guys click, and the likes of Guly really step up to the mark. Here's hoping they do, then middle table finish and an exiting cup run awaits?
I'm going for 14th. Much healthier to prove you can score goals than keep clean sheets in this league. It was a sub par performance against Wigan but we looked pretty solid. A terrific through ball and finish did us and the second was just one of those things in the context of the match.
If Fox/Shaw step up to the plate and Yoshida is even half decent, I think the defence will be OK. Man-marking players like Tevez and Van Persie is impossible, so the emphasis will be on team pressing and positioning. It's important that we get to grips with the long game. We will be faced with teams who are better on the ball than us and will expect to beat us. If we're going to set an early pace like we did against Man U, we need to work out how to maintain it. Kelvin needs to be very tidy since a misplaced ball from him puts the defence in all sorts of trouble. Good as Lambert is, he's not the fittest player and won't last 90 minutes of every game. He can also be a bit of a carthorse off the ball and defenders on their game can often pick him up. With those things in mind, we need backup plans that don't involve destroying the good shape we've got going. As a team, we're too dependant on him and it's important to shift that dependence so we can comfortably carry on when he does move on or starts declining.
