Every week seem to bring not just one tough challenge but two, but that is the price of success as Saints to compete up there with the big boys.
Saints are finding out what it is like to be one of the big boys, there rarely seems to be a week apart from the International breaks where we are not playing a midweek game either in the Europa League or the League cup.
That is the price of success and it is something they have been aiming at for the past few seasons, there are those who bemoan the player transfers over the last couple of years, but the reality of that has been that we have been able to use the fee for each player to replace him with two.
The fact is that if we had kept that squad of 2013/14 together and not raked in big money we would not be in the position tat we are now, back then once you were past the starting XI, there was not much after that.
Of course Saints did not want the player departures en masse of 2014, but in hindsight that being forced upon them was a good thing, we had to put faith in our system and it paid dividends.
But over the last two years the squad has evolved to one that is big enough to handle the schedule that we now have, even last years squad would have struggled, but make no bones, the 2013/14 squad would have done well, but it would have achieved what it did that year and no more, it did not have the depth to be able to play 40 games a season, let alone the 50-60 that we may well face this term.
If we had stayed static in the summer of 2014 we may well have been 8th again, but I do not think we would have played in Europe nor had the cup runs that we had, nor would we have been on the cusp of European Champions League qualification, ironically something we missed out on due to a failure to rotate the squad enough in late November and December last year.
We now have a squad that is 75% experienced full internationals and 15% proven non internationals and then some promising youngsters.
It is this that means that we are now in a position to be able to play games in quick succession and get results even when the squad is stretched to breaking point through injury as it was i the win against Sunderland.
There are those that would prefer to see us not in Europe and out of the cups so that the Premier League can be concentrated on, but that is the mindset of perennial relegation strugglers and we are not in that category.
Off the field we have evolved as well, from Pochettino who likes a small compact group of players to pick from week in week out, to Ronald Koeman who was a great manager, used his squad but did not like playing youngsters and now to Claude Puel.
Puel was chosen carefully by Saints, despite doubts by some supporters who seemed to prefer anyone who was a household name, the reality for Saints was Puel had experience in France of doing exactly what Saints wanted to introduce here, that is a squad based system aimed at not only developing the experienced players but utilising the youngsters.
That has worked so far, indeed since we started our Europa League campaign we have been beaten only once, ironically in a game we dominated at Inter Milan, that makes it only one defeat in ten games in that period, so we have shown that the so called curse of playing in the Europa League hasn't affected us so far.
Now we face another tough test on Sunday against Chelsea, it is a game that will perhaps define the season for both teams, if Saints win they will again be on the cusp of the top six and for the Blues a win will suggest they are ready to challenge for the title, whilst defeat would see them lose ground.
For Saints though we are seeing the fruits of careful planning behind the scenes, it is long term planning that means we will be looking to keep movng forward although there will be setbacks along the way.
That is why the supporters need patience, even on Wednesday night twitter was full of Saints fans whinging that Boufal was rubbish and we had wasted our money, even though this was his first full game after coming back from a long injury and he had only two cameo sub appearances to his name, yet again it was proved that it is all about a little patience and not panicking at the slightest hiccup.
This season could be the best so far, the only issue at the moment is our injury list, once we have a full squad all fit we can surprise a few people this season.