Saints travel to Reading to try and preserve their lead at the top.
Saints travel to Reading and for once its hard to predict the starting line up.
First question on everyone's lips will be if Adam lallana will be fit to play, early indications are that he will be, but given the performance put in by the midfield on Tuesday and especially by Richard Chaplow in Lallana's usual left sided position it could be that Nigel Adkins opts not to start Lallana rather than risk him.
Another big decision in the centre of the park is whether to restore Jack Cork, on Tuesday Cork was strangely on the bench, strange because having been one of our best players in previous matches you could only assume that he had a knock of some sort.
Otherwise it will probably be more of the same with the big decision, whom to leave off the bench if Lallana does return.
For their part three of Reading's back four have connections to Saints, Alex pearce spent a succesful loan spell here in 2008/09, Joseph Mills of course only left St Mary's a couple of months ago and Kaspar Gorkss will surely be fired up after his alledged snub by Saints at the last minute after terms had been agreed.
One "ExSaint" on Readings books who wont be featuring is Michail Antonio, last season he came off the bench 20 times in the league but only made 2 starts scoring 1 goal in the process and he has been loaned out to Colchester where he seems to be doing quite well playing 12 times and scoring 3 goals.
Nicholas Bignall who had a short spell with us last season is another surplus to requirements and is currently on loan at Exeter City.
This is a chance to take a big step for Saints, it has often been mentioned on message boards that Saints were only on the top because thir rivals were slipping up and whilst there is an element of truth in this, the fact is that we are five points clear and we have a great chance to start pressing this advantage home whilst the rest of the promotion hopefuls are in disaray.
Our away form has been poor this season, the first two games yielded maximum points and since then the following four have only seen a return of 2, given that we need to be looking at two points a game we have been held up by our home form, a win tommorrow would get us virtually back on track, but to be blunt a draw would leave us having only got 3points from the last 5 away games and frankly thats not good enough for a team looking for promotion.
We should havethe confidence now to go and take thegame to Reading and win, as is well known I was always quite a fan of Joseph Mills, but the fact is last season he was effectively considered our third choice left back and that got worse with Ben Reeves seemingly leapfrogging him and the arrival of Danny Fox at St Mary's the week before he left for the Madejski. This being the case then we should be looking to crush Reading.
Its time Saints put in another big shift on the road and Reading would be just the place to do it and line ourselves up nicely for the visit of Middlesbrough.