“The ambition is to get this fantastic football club back to The Premier League” said Nigel Adkins with a glittering smile dashed across his face, among comments such as, “sometimes when things aren’t going quite our way, the supporters get behind the players, they weren’t negative, they were positive about it.”
That’s what you get at Southampton; positivity. Nigel Adkins breathes it, the players inhale it and the football expresses it. Just one clip of the man will show you he isn’t your bog-standard cliché riddled manager that states the obvious, lists the things that didn’t go their way and then bemoans the opposition. That’s just the man.
Then there is the football team; even when they were climbing back from the bottom rungs of League One the much-seasoned pro, Steve Claridge who has yet again come out of retirement, this time at the age of 45 for Gosport, sat with Manish Bhashin and told viewers how Adkins was “building something special.”
It’s taken an eighteen game winning streak at home to get them noticed though, a winning streak, not just an unbeaten run. Long has life for the Southampton fan consisted of waiting forty-five minutes to an hour into the Football League highlights afforded to us by the BBC to see all of thirty seconds. However, it might have just favoured The Saints in the long run – “The Silent Assassins.”
They crept up into The Football League Championship in 2nd place as runners up to Gus Poyet’s Brighton; they won the league with 4 games left at 93 points but only claimed two more points in their remaining four games including losing 2-1 to Southampton, meaning the gap between the top two was only three points when the season came to an end.
Southampton were placed among early bookies’ favourites for promotion, but Brighton, strengthened aesthetically with their new 22,000-seater Falmer Stadium and on the pitch with big-name signing Vicente on a free transfer from Valencia were still making much of the early noise.
It was a case of patience for Southampton if seeking credit and appraisal was high on the agenda as early season form, starting with a 3-1 opening day victory over Leeds United followed up by three more straight victories, counted for nothing in the eyes of the media. Although Leeds only just missed out on play-offs last season and Ipswich were touted as this season’s dark horses, it was deemed that Leicester would be the real test for Southampton. The big spenders beat the South-coast side 3-2 and for a while at least, Southampton were still being brushed aside with the “good start but early doors” brush.
Really good article, enjoyed reading that.