There were man who were tipping Saints to be in the relegation dogfight as the Mcmenemy era was now well and truly over.
The previous term had ended on a bit of a low, although Saints had sat in either 13th, 14th or 15th place from November till the seasons end, only 1 win in the last 11 games had seen them finish only 5 points off the last relegation spot, for this coming season it was intended to reduce the top flight to 20 clubs over the next two years, three clubs would go down as normal, with only two coming up, but to add incentive the fourth bottom club from the first division would go into a play off situation with the 3rd to 5th place second division clubs for the right to play in what would be the following year a 21 club top flight, with the same situation being repeated for a second year to attain that 20 club number.
Saints were of course worried about this, they appeared to now be on a downward spiral with Chris Nicholl needing to impose himself on a dressing room of so called stars, out of the door though were several long standing stalwarts, who whilst not so called stars, had played vital parts in the clubs success, Steve Moran, Mark Whitlock, David Puckett all departed.
But there was excitement in the transfers in section, the club paif out there record fee to bring striker Colin Clarke who had just returned from a succesful World Cup in Mexico with Northern Ireland, from neighbours Bournemouth.
So the atmosphere was one of wariness and hope around the Dell for the visit of QPR on the opening day, 14,711 turned out to see what the season might hold, Colin Clarke was the one debutant in the side, but he initially made a quiet start on the scoring front whilst his teamates ran rampant, on ten minutes Nick Holmes opened the scoring getting on the end of a Danny Wallace cross, five minutes later it was Wallace himself who doubled the lead as Clarke made his first meaningful contribution in a Saints shirt to fire home a peach of a cross from the debutant to silence the mass of QPR fans behind the Archers Road goal.
On 35 minutes though it was the start of the Clarke goal scoring show as he rose at the far post to nod home Saints third and leave the visitors in disarray, after the break he ran rampant himself, just before hour he drove a left foot shot home to make it four and ten minutes later completed his hat trick prodding a Wallace cross past the despondent David Seaman in the Rangers goal.
A couple of minutes later QPR scored a consolation and the final twenty minutes surprisingly yielded no more goals and Saints trotted off to the applause of the home crowd ringing in their ears, 5-1 against a side who had finished above them the previous year and were considered no slouches was a satisfying start to the season, not to mention the emergence of a new goalscoring hero,the first man to hit a hat trick on his debut for the club.
Ultimately the season would go pretty much the same way as the previous one, but little did Saints fans know the upheavals that would be taking place over the next 12 months, as we shall find out in the next of our gripping Opening Day Of The Season series.