Southampton are quite simply dreadful and have done themselves no favours at all

There was a time, early in the season, when you wondered whether Southampton might actually be capable of becoming a half-decent team capable of putting up a fight if they were willing to be a bit more pragmatic about how to play Premier League football.

Leeds, Leicester and Burnley had all gone down in the past two seasons in part because they left it too late to realise that trying to out-football the opposition was more likely to cause problems for themselves than for the opposition.

Russell Martin dug his heels in, and things have not improved at all. They let a 2-1 lead against Liverpool slip through sheer self-destruction on the ball, and were soundly pummelled 5-1 by Chelsea the previous time they hosted a Premier League game at St Mary’s.

This, against Tottenham, was the worst of the lot: an utter humiliation from literally the very first minute. No team should concede an amount of goals in 45 minutes that matches their points tally in mid-December.

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Tottenham taking the three points was not a surprise nor a particular indictment in itself, but the pitiful way that Southampton went about their business is not made any better for acknowledging that if Spurs are anything under Ange Postecoglou, they are an excellent attacking side.

You can’t put it down to recklessness on the ball when you concede without having even touched the ball. You can’t make any excuses or suggest any tweaks when you subsequently stand aside to let the opposition breeze by and score three more times before the clock has even hit 25 minutes.

Southampton are quite simply a dreadful side in a division that has no room for them. By half time, it was five-nil to the visitors; it does Southampton and Martin no real favours that it didn’t get worse from there after Spurs took their foot entirely off the pedal to conserve energy for inevitably tougher tasks ahead. Even they weren’t at any risk of letting it slip from there.

The massive gap between the Premier League and the Championship is a real problem, but at least fellow strugglers Ipswich have put up a fight and look to be growing into the challenge. Both they and fellow newly-promoted side Leicester have more than double Southampton’s points tally. Man cannot live on Tyler Dibling alone.

At their current rate of return, Southampton would need to play until around October next year to get out of the relegation zone, and that’s assuming that all of the rest of the table was frozen as it stands. Call us cynical but we think they might be in trouble.

The stupidest part is that the warning signs were there for Southampton even on their way to promotion last season. A wretched Huddersfield side on course for relegation and under caretaker management visited St Mary’s in February and unexpectedly went at Southampton with attacking vigour.

Huddersfield’s efforts were in vain as they lost 5-3, but they had taught better sides in the division the way to beat Martin’s: don’t be afraid of them, just go for it. Southampton lost seven of their remaining 16 fixtures, and got through the play-offs largely by virtue of their opponents showing them altogether too much respect.

You would have thought that Southampton might have learned from that and looked to shore things up with their bountiful summer recruitment, knowing that top-flight opposition would be more willing than their Championship rivals to go on the attack.

Instead, they have played on with much of the same defence and midfield that got them promoted with too many loans made permanent, with the starting line-up supplemented minimally by the likes of 20-year-old Mateus Fernandes and 36-year-old Adam Lallana. With their recruitment, with their approach, and by sticking with Martin, Southampton have done themselves absolutely no favours any step of the way

Southampton find themselves in such a seemingly irretrievable position that their most sensible course of action now is to start preparing to win promotion from the Championship again next season, and if you were any other club recruiting for that job, you may well turn to Martin himself. What a stupid, impossible corner for a club to have painted themselves into.

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