Winter of Discontent: Southampton Face Tough Run to New Year

Southampton will find easy points hard to come by as we approach the halfway point of the season. With the table bunching up, every game counts.

Thirteen points. Eleven games played; three wins, convincing ones, albeit over lesser sides. Four draws; tough ones, disappointing ones (Watford home opener; Sunderland) but also good ones (Manchester City; Leicester). And, of course, four losses. Losses that saw the side outplayed, one that saw it robbed and another, most recently, where the Saints played themselves out of the match.

In Europe, of course, it is another story, where Southampton have a decent chance of getting into the meat of the competition. But it is the Premier League that draws the crowds every weekend, where clubs live and die, and in this competition all is perhaps not well. Eleven matches in, little more than a quarter of the way through the season, Claude Puel’s Southampton are underperforming his predecessor’s team by 4 points. More critically, the side sit a mere three points—one win—from the relegation zone.

And of course, Southampton’s next match is against Liverpool, league leaders, coming off a 6-1 thumping of a Watford side that has played, in all honesty, about on-par with the Saints this year.

It is on the whole more likely than not that Match Week 12 will come and go and leave the Saints with a hole to march out of, deep down the table. The week after, the second half of Merseyside comes to town as Ronald Koeman’s new employers Everton look to keep their season going. With three days rest from a trip down to Prague in a must-win versus Sparta Praha, one must concede that any visions of thumping the old boss in his first return to St. Mary’s, satisfying as they might be, are likely fantasy.

For League action, November will be an especially unkind month. For December, prospects are dismal but perhaps slightly better.

Opening the month with Crystal Palace away is a match that could truly go either way, such is the inconsistency that is an Alan Pardew side. The Saints have gotten the better of Palace the past two outings, but this is a side that can be strong in attack when it wants to be and may be inspired to give its Holmesdale Fanatics something to cheer about in the frigid South London air. Middlesbrough, Stoke and Bournemouth follow; all sides beneath Southampton in the table at present, all sides the team should on paper be able to defeat handily, but three matches in seven days, two of them away.

A match versus Spurs and one against West Brom round out the month; the former, without sounding unduly pessimistic, may be safely written off barring a Christmas miracle. West Brom may be good for a win or, more likely, a draw, such as Tony Pulis’ defensive wiles are.

So where does that leave the Saints? By my calculation and predictions, somewhere between 20 and 28 points. Going off last year’s metrics, that would put Southampton somewhere between 16th and 11th in the League table. Going off the 2014/15 numbers, a more “typical” season, they’re good for 14th to 8th.

Is it time to panic? Perhaps not yet. But barring a great run in the new year, the Saints march on may see its first domestic setback in seven years.