Now to crack the November-December period. Brilliant season, and hopefully we can take this form into next season. Ideally with one or two key additions to the squad, namely a RB and a goalscoring CM.
Indeed. If we had cracked that then Spurs and Arsenal would have had real competition for second or third.
As a minimum. We may well have even been challenging Leicester. We finished 18 points behind them, yet dropped 20 points during that period. And that's without even considering the slow start to the season we had (can any of that be contributed to playing EL qualifying games? Maybe. Hopefully we won't have to risk that again next season though). As I said earlier this week, that bad week in early March (when we picked up one point from Chelsea, Bmouth and Sunderland over eight days) cost us a shot of top four, and those two bad months in November and December cost us a shot of the title. And that's before you consider that the same two months cost us a shot of top four last season and the season before that. But another year of Tadic adjusting to the PL. Clasie now knowing what the PL is like. Long showing that he can be more than just a sub. No Fraser out injured. Subject to what goes on over the summer, there's a lot to be hopeful of that we finally wont suffer this Autumn-Winter downturn again next time. Although for now it's about celebrating yet another great season.
100% agree with you there, including the player assessments. The only thing I would point to is that every team will take a dip in a very competitive league. On the whole, the best teams take the smallest dips in form. The almost total drop out of results in November and December completely changed the season goals. Just turning that poor form into an average return of say, 12 from 24 gave us 8 more points. You know where that would have put us. Iron out just that one poor period entirely and we were challenging Leicester. Under the radar Saints.
Very hard to judge....we started playing very well after Koeman made changes because of that poor spell.
So would I. LTL, sign that kid up. He's got a folk club future. Just trying to remember what tune that is from. Of course, it's My Way. Appropriate for The Southampton Way.
No, we were going pretty well before that too. You have to remember who we lost and drew to during our bad spell.
I particularly liked the recent stat that only Spurs and Leicester had had a better points haul than Saints since the new year. Then we beat Spurs, and it was only Leicester.
Thats why I think if Schneiderlin stayed, we'd have been top four. He'd have converted a few of those into draws, and maybe one or two score draws could have been wins. Obviously I'm assuming we'd still have every other midfielder in our squad as well, when in reality, we wouldn't have signed Clasie or Romeu if Schneiderlin had stayed.
There were quite a few in the 'give him one or two more games' camp toward the end of that run - that amounts to essentially being ready to get rid. That was one of the more ridiculous sagas on here this season.
