Ninety minutes of Championship football, and Tonda Eckert already has two selection problems he did not have on Saturday. Southampton lost 2-1 at Watford, both goals arriving off their own mistakes..
Stoke City visit St Mary's on Saturday. The interesting bit is not who gets dropped. It is who gets to start.
Nathan Wood has just been handed his opening
Jack Stephens went into the opener as captain and came out of it as the story nobody at the club wanted. His sliced clearance was the invitation Iker Bravo needed for Watford's first. Before the half was out the skipper was still dawdling as the second went in.
Stephens is 32 now. Saints Marching, picking through the individual underperformers, had him well off the pace of a game played at that tempo.
So who benefits? Nathan Wood, who sat and watched the whole shambles from the bench.
Two years at Southampton and Wood is still waiting on a proper run of games. Taylor Harwood-Bellis has now asked to leave for Benfica, so the centre-back conversation got a good deal more urgent on Monday morning. Saints Marching has argued the club need a new defender either way.
If Wood cannot make his case against Stoke, days after the man ahead of him handed Watford a goal, when exactly is the invitation coming?
Tom Fellows should be next in on the right
Then there is Lewis Dobbin, and this one hurts more because of the price tag.
Nine million pounds, three goals in pre-season, and a Championship debut that produced almost nothing. Fifty-seven minutes, one shot, none of them on target, one successful dribble from six attempts. Omar Haktab Traore had a comfortable afternoon against a winger who should have been a nuisance.
Nobody should write Dobbin off over one game. Preston North End got ten Championship goals out of him last season, though it took him a couple of matches to get going there too. Sharpness, that is all.
Tom Fellows is the man this helps most. The former West Brom winger stayed in his tracksuit for the whole afternoon, which was an odd call given how little arrived down Southampton's flanks. Kuryu Matsuki managed four goals from the right flank last season without being an automatic pick either.
The obvious solution is to shuffle Leo Scienza back out to the left wing, bring Finn Azaz back into the centre and reinstate Fellows out on the right. A strong argument for Sam Edozie to start could also be made.
There is another argument for shuffling the pack as well. Stoke lost 2-1 at home to Swansea City on Saturday, Adam Idah punishing them late on, so this is a wobbling side arriving at St Mary's rather than a settled one. Eckert has a licence to be bold.
Both of these calls are reversible. Stephens and Dobbin could each be back in the XI within a fortnight. What they cannot do is assume that they will walk into Saturday's team, because Southampton are on minus four points and there is no room for sentiment.
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