Saints fans were taking to social media to berate not just one but over half the team for the capitulation in the final half hour against Manchester United, but it is time to praise the side for it's great run over the past two months and move forward again.
I was taken aback by the fingers being pointed at individual player after the defeat to Manchester United, not just for individual errors but for just about anything that could have been imagined.
One site claimed that Kyle Walker Peters gave the ball away 23 times so it is time that he is dropped for Yan Valery, I myself did think that Walker Peters wasn't at his best, but he rarely gives the ball away in his own half , as full back he plays a lot of balls along the line, both as passes and clearance these are percentage balls not passes as such.
Che Adams was berated for having made less passes than Alex McCarthy, he only completed 19 out of 24 passes was the rant, at 79% that was worse than Alex McCarthy ! Yes but forwards have to try and make the killer pass, whilst goalkeepers often pass short simple balls to defenders under little pressure.
Again Adams like KWP did not have the best of games, but he has been superb in most of the other games.
These are only two examples of those being berated, not because of any real individual error, but just because they had a dislike of a particular player.
I have been accused of this on many occasions, but when I slate an individual I always do so by explaining a good reason why, Jannik Vestergaard has been the brunt of my keyboard in the past and it would be easy to take him to task over the second United goal when he got caught napping and playing Cavani onside, but the Dane has been superb over the last couple of months and this has been an isolated error.
The problem on Sunday was not individual errors per se, the whole team looked jaded, we seemed to want that extra touch on the ball and too often we were slow to react and thus caught out.
There was barely a player who could come off that pitch and say they had a good game, if I am brutally honest the only three players who could hold their heads up and say that are James Ward Prowse, Oriol Romeu and Theo Walcott, all three never stopped battling.
But aside from them we were poor.
But that does not mean we are a poor side, it means we just had a bad day at the office, Liverpool got beaten badly at Aston Villa and shipped 7, but they like us yesterday just had one of those days.
I think the issue is with injuries in key areas we have not been able to change things around when needed and this came home to roost when we played United who are a good side on paper.
Yesterday our two wide players were not having good games, Stuart Armstrong seems to have lost a little something since his bout of Covid 19 and Djenepo just didn't suit a game that needed him to be back and supporting Ryan Bertrand.
But Ralph had no real option to replace either other than to drop Theo Walcott back, but the loanee was offering so much up front it would take something away there.
This was a game where it needed men not boys to come in hence Nathan Tella or Dan N'Lundulu being untried options were perhaps not the best for the job, their time will come.
It is testament to the team spirit that we have these days that we could take a 2-0 lead, it is just sad that we couldn't keep it, but United in contrast were having one of their good days, we could have crumbled after conceding the second but we hung on in there only to lose it so late on.
So we now need to dust ourselves and go again in a weeks time, hopefully we will have players back from injury that will offer us options to change again, a week on the training ground and then we have the perfect couple of opportunities to get the season back on track.
I offered a word of caution a week ago, saying that we will lose games, when we do it doesn't signal the end of the world, just a bad game, we have to take things in runs of three's to give a more balanced view.
The three games in November were tough games Wolves was a good point, United with a game in hand could currently move into the top 5 if they won it, even Newcastle who are 14th are only 3 points behind us in 5th.
There is a tough fight ahead in the middle ground, 4 points from the last 3 games is a little below the 5 we should target, but against these 3 sides is a good haul.
For those ranting on social media this morning look at the League table, appreciate what we have done so far this season, accept that we are still not the finished article and we can't win every game. Also accept that we cannot go from the shambles we were a year ago into title challengers overnight if at all, but we are making good progress.
If you can do that then you will see the good steady job that Ralph Hasenhuttl is doing and the squad he is building, it is not perfect yet, we do not have the money to do it overnight and we are still burdened with paying a big chunk of wages to several players out on loan, as we free that up then we will be able to do a lot lot more.
It was a bad day at the office not a terminal blow !