Southampton: Saints Marching’s weekly poll – edition 5

Each week Saints Marching runs a poll on it’s official Twitter account, gauging the views of the Southampton fanbase with a topical question.

This Sunday the Saints play host to an Arsenal side who will be hungry to bounce back after humiliation at the hands of Jose Mourinho’s Manchester United last time out.

Southampton meanwhile drew 1-1 with Bournemouth in a game that saw them revert to their natural 4-2-3-1 formation, having previously deployed a 5-3-2 in the loss to Manchester City.

With all due respect to the Cherries, Arsenal offer a lot more going forward than Eddie Howe’s side and pose an entirely different threat. Setting up in a 3-4-2-1 with Alexis Sanchez and Mesut Ozil behind Alexandre Lacazette, Arsenal can be devastating on the offensive foot.

But rather than what tactical set-up Mauricio Pellegrino will use, it’s perhaps more interesting to see how the Argentine will rotate. A handful of players were dropped for the City game whilst another few were rested against Bournemouth. In particular, the centre-midfielders were rotated heavily.

Despite coming on a substitute, Mario Lemina was dropped from the starting XI after an impressive midweek performance against some of the best midfield talent in the league. This was naturally seen as an enforced move by Pellegrino, especially with the Gabonese international only recently returning from injury.

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However, in the win against Everton, Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg received plaudits for his impressive performance on his first start of the season. Despite this, he’s not been regularly selected since.

The duo are yet to feature in a two-man partnership and if the Saints do deploy their standard 4-2-3-1 then it seems like the supporters would want to see the duo play together.

Lemina naturally stole the majority of the votes with exactly two thirds of all of them – the young Dane took a the majority of what was left with 20 percent.

Surprising, club captain Steven Davis was given the nod by precious little, despite being a consistent performer for the Saints this campaign.

Nonetheless, with all four players fit, Mauricio Pellegrino has the pleasant kind of selection headache on his hands, as the Saints aim to win their first game against a member of the ‘big six’ since the tail end of the 2015/16 season.