Saints take on Everton with both sides looking to emulate their best ever Premier league finishes in a season.
For Saints its a case of getting back to winning ways and making sure that we dont let Newcastle or even Stoke City overhaul us in the final run in, a win at home to Everton would just about guarantee that, although a draw would see us limping towards the finish line, for Everton only a win will do, anything less than that and they face a mountain to climb to pip Arsenal to that Champions League spot, therefore the Toffee's will arrive at St Mary's with a do or die attitude.
This is all going to get predictable from now on, if we are going to win games then we have to do something different than we have in the past couple of games, yes we have lost Jay Rodriguez to injury, but really one player should not pose such a problem to our style of play and if it does and it clearly does as our last two games have shown with 70% possession in both but barely a decent chance, then we should be able to adapt.
We have a good basic shape so this should allow Mauricio Pochettino to throw in someone like Harrison Reed or Omar Rowe and give us that bit of attacking flair we have lacked since Jay Rod's injury, yes we could mix and match as we did against both Cardiff and Villa and we may get a result, but that is far from certain against an Everton side who have only lost six times in the League all season, their goals scored of only 21 on the road offers us hope in that this is lower than every other team in the top eight, however in reverse their goals conceded 18 is only bettered by Chelsea.
In short just the sort of team we struggle to break down, they keep it tight at the back and break quickly as they proved in the game at Goodison, we again did our usual trick of having the bulk of possession but we failed to capitalise on that whilst they scored with a trademark strike getting the ball to Lukaku who lost his marker.
So if we want to finish this season on a high we have to do something different, from that point of view we do have Gaston Ramirez back so we do have a bit of flair probably from the bench though.
This game is as tough as it gets all season, so far we have failed to beat many of the top half, our only two wins being against Liverpool and Newcastle, it is now a good time to make it three.