Saints had been lucky all season with Fraser Forster suffering no injuries, but now he looks likely to miss most of the rest of the season f not all of it, Kelvin Davis needs to step up to the plate.
I cannot lie and say that I have really rated Kelvin Davis as a goalkeeper, even in the Championship I felt that his game still lacked a little something to truly make him a decent keeper.
However I do respect him as a man and for what he has done for this football club and I certainly was very pleased to see him do such a good job yesterday including a couple of decent saves.
But is he going to be good enough for what could be a run of 8 important games between now and the end of the season ?
We will soon find out as there is no clause in the loan deal with Bournemouth to enable us to recall Artur Boric and this was one area of the squad I think we did not deal with either last summer or in January, it is not all Saints fault Ronald Koeman is on record as saying he wanted Boruc to stay and battle it out for a place, but the Polish keeper had decided that it was obvious that Forster was going to be the number one and he didn't want to play second fiddle and therefore he went to the Cherries with that clause inserted that he could not be recalled, good for Bournemouth not good for Saints.
We gambled in January that Fraser would see out the season injury free but we now appear to have lost the gamble and the choice now is to play Kelvin, or perhaps throw in Paulo Gazzaniga or even Cody Cropper, although I feel that it is Davis we will stick with unless e blunders and we are forced to throw in Gazzaniga or Cropper as a last resort.
But the good news is that Saints have a far better defence than anytime in the last three decades and Kelvin will benefit from a lot more cover in front of him than he ever has had in his 9 years at the club, hopefully as was the case on Saturday the back four will protect him and leave him only needing to do what he does well and that is shot stop, that was the case on Saturday against Burnley and he stood up well to a difficult situation.
The reality is in the last 8 games we need 4 probably 5 wins to be sure of Europe, we are good enough to do that with or without Fraser Forster and with Kelvin in goal, it obviously isn't the best news to see our England keeper out of the team but the truth is our great defensive record is based on the protection the defence gives the goalkeeper rather than the keeper making save after save week in week out.
Hopefully the news on Fraser won't be as bad as feared and it is good that we haven't a game for another fortnight, but I'm sure that in the final run in to the season that if it is Klein that has to play in these games he will do a great job as he did yesterday.