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All We Are Saying Is Give Us A Goal !

Saints go into the game against West Ham United determined not to make it 7 consecutive Premier League home games without scoring a goal.

Personally I don't consider that Saints have gone 6 straight home games ithout scoring as something that should be burdened on Mauricio Pellegrino, last season the supporters were placing the blame on the team not scoring firmly at the door of Claude Puel and demanding that he be sacked, that having taken place it is no use continually harping on about what happened last season, that is in the past and should be forgotten.

All that matter is now and the fact was that although Saints failed to score against Swansea, the performance was totally different to the final 5 home games under Puel last season, there was a freshness and vibrancy in Saturday's performance that was largely missing four months ago.

Mauricio Pellegrino needs to be judged on what he does this season and this was his first game in charge.

The game against Swansea was pretty much par for the course for a Saints opening day game, we haven't won a Premier League opening day game at home ever, indeed our last top flight home win on the opening day came in 1988, in fact since then we have only won 1 first day game in Southampton once, that was against Leeds in the Championship in 2011 and add to that 2 away, Coventry in 1999 and West Brom in 2013 that makes only 3 opening day wins in 29 attempts.

So a slow start for Saints has become almost traditional whatever division we are in.

But having said all this it was clear on Saturday that the lack of goals was playing on the players minds in the Swansea game, we created a plethora of chances yet we snatched at too many of them, we were almost too desperate to score and the longer the game went on you could see it was weighing heavily.

It is now at the stage where we need a goal from anywhere, it doesn't matter how it goes in, it just needs to go in, usually we say these things about strikers, they all have droughts and sometimes something just goes for them and suddenly they are scoring for fun again, our problem at the moment is it is not one individual striker it is the whole team.

It can be likened to trying to get tomato ketchup from a sauce bottle, you keep banging on the bottom of the bottle and nothing comes out, but if you keep banging then eventually something comes out and that is usually followed by a deluge, we just have to keep banging away and it wil come.

The good news is that we have the players in the squad who can all score goals and they score them from different positions, Manolo Gabbiadini is a fox in the box, he can get into positions and stab the ball home, Charlie Austin is a more physical player but has the same eye for a goal, Dusan Tadic is good for a few during the season and Sofiane Boufal can pull out the spectacular from time to time, add to them Nathan Redmond and Shane Long and we do not have a shortage of players who can score goals, we just have a problem we need to solve.

Once we score that first goal I'm sure that more will come, this problem is not a throwback to last season, we are set up in a totally different way under Pellegrino, we are set up to attack and in the final days of Puel that was not the case, we were set up to sit back and protect a weak central defence, the Frenchman had to stop the goals against us column spiralling and did so, but that came at the expense of keeping men behind the ball and not going forward, its different under Pellegrino.

So all we are saying is give us a goal ! but we need to be behind the team and encourage them to score, almost suck the ball into the net, what we don't need to do is increase the pressure on them by getting on their backs !

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