I saw a decent article posted on a Saints blog called the Archers Road End, which
posed the question ‘What were the Board’s expectations for the season?’.
Personally I thought at the start of the season that the target would be Top 7 and
therefore Europa League qualification and entertaining football. One reason I
thought that is because we didn’t sell anyone and another was Ralph Krueger’s
bullish response to the Virgil sale bandwagon – “when the window closes people
will see how serious we are”.  I took
then non-selling as a statement of us being done with operating like that and
now, with players on longer term contracts, we want to push on and just tweak
things rather than having to replace 3 or 4 key players every summer.  I thought it was an acceptance by the board
that running to stand still wasn’t going to be the way any more.  So, we didn’t sell Virgil van Dijk or Ryan
Bertrand when we clearly could have done. I know it baffled the media because
up until the day the transfer window closed, ‘Southampton always sell, it’s
what they do’ was often heard and read. 
I t was annoying to see or read that but you have to say, it’s been the
truth up until now.

So why did we change tack if not to challenge higher? I can’t believe that a
decision was made based on fans getting fed up with players leaving so it must
have been the expectation to challenge higher. That theory falls down a bit
when you look at the fact that we didn’t sign any attacking players and decided
to make do with what we had but then maybe that was because they expected what
we had to do better this season. Feasibly you could have expected Redmond to
get better as he’s young and Gabbiadini and Boufal to improve with
acclimatisation to the English game. You would also expect Austin to stay fit
for longer and that Tadic couldn’t possibly be as ineffective as last season.
Maybe the end of the transfer window was compromised a bit by the sale of the
club to Mr Gao.

On the other hand, Mauricio Pellegrino’s assertion that he was hoping for 17
points from our first 10 games doesn’t support the theory of lofty ambitions.
For that we would have needed 21 points plus from 6 home games and 4 aways
where only one game has been against one of the big boys. Losing at home to
Watford, drawing at home to Newcastle and Swansea and failing to beat either
Huddersfield or Brighton away.  For me,
we’ve left 8-10 points behind there.

I liked the fact that we stood up to the big boys and didn’t sell players but
hindsight is 20/20.  I reckoned without
the mindset of the modern player which appears to be getting worse with each
passing season and after the opening 10 games, I’m beginning to think that
maybe for our own benefit that it would have been better to sell the
aforementioned van Dijk (not to Liverpool on principle) and Bertrand and
reinvested the £100m-ish that they would have brought in. We sign players and
make them better. The players see that and want to play for Southampton but we
are not the final destination and we never will be in todays game. If a player
comes on the radar of a big club then the player is going to want to go… and
if we don’t sell them for a huge fee them then more often than not there’s
going to be a tail off and a negative effect on Southampton FC.  For every Schneiderlin who got his head down
and had a great season, there’s a Wanyama who played like he didn’t care.

Hang on a minute…. in my little scenario there, Pellegrino is still the
manager. He’s come in with his best achievement being taking Alaves to mid
table in the Spanish league and getting to a Cup Final. Alaves are the Spanish
equivalent of Bournemouth – a traditionally small club who have done remarkably
well to get in the top division. He achieved his Alaves success by playing very
dour defensive football. Saints are already an established mid-table side with
an entertainment problem so we didn’t need what Pellegrino had provided so far
in his managerial career. Les Reed will have known this and therefore will have
been expected Pellegrino to improve on that and grow as a manager like the
relatively unheralded players we brought in.   Is Pellegrino a Sadio Mané or is he a
Juanmi? 

At the moment, it’s hard not to see a season ahead which is exactly like the
last one only without a cup final and finishing lower than 8th. With no
tangible improvement, Pellegrino will undoubtedly be sleepwalking into being
replaced at the end of the season. It’s not his fault that patience with him
will be in much shorter supply after the season under Claude Puel.  It’s up to Pellegrino to make sure that he’s
not on the way out in the summer and the only way he’s going to do that is
playing some braver, more entertaining football and taking a few risks, especially
in home games and against teams we should be beating.