Southampton: Kitzbichler sees positives in Saints draw with West Ham

Southampton Assistant Manager Richard Kitzbichler saw the positives in Saints’ goalless draw with West Ham on Tuesday evening.

Kitzbichler was standing in on the touchline at St Mary’s with Saints manager Ralph Hasenhuttl forced to stay at home after a positive Covid-19 test in his household.

Despite Saints failing to score in their last three league fixtures, the man in charge on the night saw something to build on as he and the coaching staff work on ways to get their players back creating.

Speaking to Amazon Prime Video after full-time, Kitzbichler said:

"“The final action is missing at the moment – the final punch around the box to really get this final shot or to get this scoring chance. But anyway, we did not concede which is good.“That is always a good sign that when you can’t win you draw. That’s good, we keep taking points.”"

The good thing that has come from this minor blip in Saints’ season is that – like Kitzbichler said – they are still remaining strong defensively despite struggles at the other end of the pitch.

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They have dropped some valuable points over this Christmas period but also secured two points from two tricky games that they may have previously lost by a narrow margin against Fulham and West Ham.

All teams seem to have a spell in a season where they lose sight of what brought them success and Saints will have to work on getting back to what pushed them into the top four early on in 2020/21.

Ninth place in the Premier League table at this stage of the campaign usually leaves a lot of work to do to claim a European place come May. However, this season Saints sit there and are – at time of writing – two points off the top four and six off of 1st.

As the table settles as 2020/21 goes on, Saints just need to make sure that they are hanging on to the coattails of the teams above them right now.

Any team can have a crisis and drop away from the top so Ralph Hasenhuttl and his team can still be the team that takes advantage if this happens.