It will go from one extreme to another in March as Saints go from a period of fixture congestion to one of over a fortnight between games.

From Boxing Day's game against Tottenham Hotspur till the win at Sunderland, Saints had to squeeze in 8 league games plus 5 in the cups in a period of 47 days, that was less than 4 days between each game.

Now it has swung in completely the other direction as after Sunderland on February 11th up to and including the visit of Bournemouth on April 1st, Saints will have played only 3 Premier League fixtures in that time, a total of 48 days.

The trip to Watford on Saturday will be our first outing in the Premier League in 3 weeks and then there will be another 2 week break before we take on Spurs and then another fortnights gap before Bournemouth are the visitors.

The real issue apart from we missed a Premier League fixture against Arsenal to play at Wembley and then our game against Manchester United is postponed due to their participation in the FA Cup is that because of their commitments we cannot reschedule them at all.

There is a chance that Arsenal could go out of Europe next Tuesday, however that would still not leave much time to fit in our rearranged game as the only spare date in the fixture calendar would possibly be the following week and it is now a bit late to reschedule that game, the week after that has to be left spare for a possible FA Cup Replay.

There is then an International break in the week beginning 25th March and ironically the following week sees a round of midweek League fixtures already in the calendar.

So that means that there is unlikely to be an announcement in the short term about when these fixtures will be rearranged .

Saints already have a busy April with 6 games scheduled in just 29 days and even squeezing a date in there will be difficult with United and less likely Arsenal in with a chance of being still in Europa then.

So the probability is that Arsenal will be slotted in some time in April, with the earliest date being around Wednesday the 12th but the following two weeks could be Europa League games for United, so that game might not be played till at the earliest 27th April or the final week of the season.

One think Claude Puel won't need to do in March is rest his players, they will all get plenty of that, so we will find out if he will play his strongest team when he does not have a fixture pile up.

On a brighter note for Saints it does mean that they could have some of the long term injured back for the final weeks of the season, Virgil Van Dijk hopefully by the end of the month and Charlie Austin has stated he will be fit for the Bournemouth fixture.

Photo: Action Images

SaintBrock added 15:22 - Mar 1 By now you will have read that the PL will not start thinking about re-arraging our two fixtures until the last week of March which as you say is the next international break so both these games will be in the April /May period when fixture congestion becomes inevitable once again. More late night mid-weekers ahead.
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Bettwsresident added 07:23 - Mar 2 Well we will have have the mid winter break all the managers crave...but only by playing a stupid number in the first half and then doing it all again in the last 6 weeks. Another weird note to an abnormal season.
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