Everyone has people in their circle of friends that support other clubs, and even though they might live in the city, they don’t know much about Saints and what’s been going on. This one particular friend of mine is a Liverpool fan, so after dissecting Liverpool’s crisis of losing three games after spending £300 million in the summer, he asked me to sum up Saints’ season so far. I thought to myself that I don’t need to give a blow-by-blow account and that I just need to summarize what’s been going on. In the end, a single word popped into my head, and that word was “underwhelming“. It’s like the ultimate answer for any Saints-related question – how have the results been? Underwhelming. How’s the new manager been? Underwhelming. How’s the style of football? Underwhelming. How have the new signings performed? Underwhelming… you get the drift.

Though he didn’t ask all of those questions, the fact that I can answer the same thing to all of them kind of says it all. I guess one question is why? And another question is, is it going to get any better?

If you look at our last four seasons, including this one, Season 1 was the Premier League relegation, Season 2 was the Championship promotion, Season 3 was another Premier League relegation, and this season in the Championship is Season 4. Though we, of course, got promoted the last time we were in the Championship, in Season 2, can you honestly say that things are better now and that we should achieve the same end result?

If you compare Premier League squads and teams to Championship squads and teams, then it’s like comparing apples to oranges, and a pointless exercise – the only way you can gauge things in this case is to compare Season 1 to Season 3 and Season 2 to Season 4.

Season 1 was the first time we got relegated from the Premier League, even though we finished bottom, I feel that relegation was eminently avoidable but we made disastrous managerial decisions amongst other things and it all went South.

Season 2 saw that squad that got relegated, inherited by Russell Martin and we lost a few, signed a few and that squad eventually got promoted via the playoffs of course.

Season 3 in the Premier League and Russell Martin, then Ivan Juric, then Simon Rusk, and no matter who was in charge, we were awful and were one point off being officially equal to the worst Premier League team of all time. The team that got relegated the first time around in Season 1 was considerably better than the team that got relegated in Season 3. In the same way, the team we had in Season 2, in the Championship two years ago, is considerably better than the one we’ve got now. All of Che Adams, Stuart Armstrong, Jan Bednarek, and Kyle Walker-Peters would all walk into the current team, so expecting us to blitz through this division with a worse team than we had last time around is not really feasible.

Will Still’s job is, of course, to achieve that equalling of Season 2, and he has to do it from a worse starting position than Russell Martin had. Still inherited a squad that got 4 fewer wins, 5 more defeats, scored 10 fewer goals, and conceded 13 more. How we cringed at the end of Season 1 when our top scorer was a midfielder (JWP) with 9 goals, but Season 3 saw the top scorer (Tall Paul) hitting the net a whole 4 times. Oh yes, and we got 12 points in the Premier League in Season 3, whereas Martin’s inheritance from Season 1, got 25 points.

Still has become the manager this season, with a reputation forged in Belgium and France, and there is no doubt he has had an unusual journey to get here. Most managers have, of course, been a player of some description and whilst you don’t have to have been a horse to be a jockey, it is undoubtedly unusual. Regardless of his background, he will ultimately be judged by performances and, in particular, results on the pitch, and that’s where we get to the word ‘underwhelming’ again. Still arrived with a reputation for playing fast-paced, front-foot attacking football with lots of crosses going into the box. He also arrived with a reputation for pragmatism and being quite happy to switch things around if what we were doing wasn’t working. We have seen all of this sporadically but not nearly enough.

In the first game against Wrexham, we saw him throwing forwards onto the pitch when we were 1-0 down with five minutes to go, and we saw our central defenders given license to be in the penalty area and open play, and it worked and we won that game. It papered over the fact that the opening 90 minutes had been largely poor.

On paper, the next game away to Ipswich was one to be feared, and we managed to look the better side before absolutely throwing one into our own net with some horrific defending when under no pressure. We equalized and should’ve pushed on, but then nothing. At the end of the day, though, a point was a decent result.

Top of the league Stoke was the game where we were supposed to assert our authority on the division, but we gave away poor goals again before slipping to a rather depressing defeat, and with that, the balloon of optimism somewhat burst.

New players began to arrive with the visit to Vicarage Road in Watford, with Finn Azaz, the goal and assist machine from Middlesbrough, having signed. Bizarrely, we found ourselves with no midfielders for this game, and Still deployed Robinson and Wee Man in the midfield along with Charles, and we played some decent stuff but gave away poor goals. It was a shake-up by the manager and partially successful.

The dull draw at home to Portsmouth, and what was the first game after the closure of the transfer window, was not a great day as we appeared to be scared to press a very average team. With the expectation of playing that lot from down the road at home, it was a major opportunity missed to get fans onside, and what we had instead was a performance that left everybody scratching their head regarding how poor we were in attacking areas. The only good thing about the day was that we didn’t lose, but we wanted a proper performance and we got not much at all.

Still picked what was largely thought to be his best side for the trip to Hull, and it was an unmitigated disaster as the players selected totally betrayed the manager’s confidence in them with pathetic goalkeeping and defending in our own penalty area and a complete lack of anything in the opposition penalty area. It’s hard to blame the manager when the players don’t do the basics.

Top of the league, Boro came to St Mary’s and there was a huge cull of those deemed responsible for the Hull fiasco, and big-name players like THB and Captain Jack got bombed out, and those who had played well in the Carabao Cup at Liverpool were rewarded with a start, and it brought a win. Alex McCarthy proved that the old-fashioned goalkeeper requirement of being able to save shots was the way to go. Brave decisions by the manager.

A win against Sheffield United brought the long-overdue starting of Ross Stewart, and his two goals showed that he was the answer to the centre forward problem and more reward for Still as the two goals were preceded by two brave substitutions at half-time with £20 million of new players replaced, with Azaz and Fellows coming off. Whatever the reason for making the subs, the end result justifies it. This was Will Still’s best day as Saints manager.

Against Derby we finally saw the brand of attacking football we were expecting with crosses going into the box, good movement from the forwards and the opposition goalkeeper being forced into action on numerous occasions. One injury to a chronically injury prone player later and we went back to underwhelming, and dropped two points to a side we should’ve put away easily. Armed with his Midas Touch from the last game, Will made a substitution that killed our attacking threat (bringing on Fellows and moving Arma to the middle), tried to correct it with a second sub that killed our creativity (bringing Downs on for Scienza) and made it worse again, before trying to replair the damage of the second substitution (by bringing Azaz on).

I feel that Will Still has struggled a bit with having too many players of similar ability and it seems to almost give him too many options. He clearly wants to play 4-2-3-1 but it hasn’t worked when he’s tried it so we’ve gone back to 3-4-3 which has looked good sporadically. You want changes to be small tweaks to whatever wasn’t quite working but throughout this season but our tweaks have usually been full scale baby-out-with-the-bathwater full scale about turns, in response to the originally chosen options being utterly terrible. I do feel that having rotated and chopped and changed, it is time to nail down a regular system and starting XI, starting with a settled defence.

I do feel that Will is getting close to working out which players he can trust and which combinations do and don’t work. The reason for thinking that is that certain players have come to the fore , like McCarthy, Wood, Jander and Scienza, all of whom would not have been in his first XI when the transfer window closed but here we are. Combinations that would have been first choice have been tried and jettisoned. Charles and Downes in central midfield was too stodgy, so that’s been changed. THB and Stephens too similar and not dominant enough in defence, so that’s also been changed

With our underwhelming start, there have been rumblings amongst the more impatient in the fan base to put it all on the door of the manager and demand a change – after 9 games, I’m all for change if something categorically is not working and it’s never going to work, but we are a long, long way from that situation yet – after 9 games, not to mention the fact that Sport Republic won’t want to sack Johannes Spors first manager, after a couple of months. The way I kind of feel about it at the moment is that things have not been that bad. Don’t get me wrong, they’ve not been great, but I’m not here screaming at every decision Will Still makes, and I’m not finding myself disagreeing with everything that he says in post-match interviews and press conferences. I find with him that he is usually watching the same game as me, and we have had managers in the not-too-distant past who have told us that everything was great when we were clearly not playing well, leaving me feeling that my intelligence was being insulted. Still is not like that.

Identifying what is wrong is one thing and fixing it is another and that’s where he will stand or fall. He knows that his success or otherwise depends on results and there is none of this Ted Lasso style “success is not just about the wins and losses“ bullshit, which is a mantra that Russell Martin strayed very very close to on occasions when we were getting regularly smashed to bits.

What Still needs now and what the players on the pitch need now is for the fans to get behind the team. Yes, they have to give us something to get behind and that hopefully starts against Swansea on Saturday.