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Now The Sust Has Settled We March On With Confidence !

There are some who are a little underwhelmed by the appointment of Claude Puel, but that is more to do with a natural tendency to prefer a familiar name rather than the unknown.

I swear that there are some people who would be happier with Harry Redknapp being appointed as Saints boss rather than Claude Puel purely because instinct tells them that Redknapp has managed in the Premier League.

To want the familiar is natural, no one likes the unknown, however the fact is that Saints have appointed Puel not because of his name, but because of his track record in doing the job that is required of him at St Mary's.

In football there is too much of team's appointing the same old faces time and time again, you only have to look at the names that figured strongly in the betting after Koeman left, most of them where the names that time and time again crop up whenever a vacancy occurs for a manager, for most of them the only real qualification they had to manage Saints was that they were by trade football managers.

But Saints have looked far beyond merely making an appointment based on the headlines on a potential candidates CV, they are not looking at whether a candidate has a high profile like Harry Redknapp or Roy Hodgson, they are looking to see how he has managed and the situations he has succeeded in and indeed those where he has failed.

Managing Southampton Football Club is different than any other position in England, no other team has our set up, foundations or strategy, most club's are merely appointing a manager, seeing him sell off the previous managers signings at a loss, giving him millions to spend to revamp the squad and then when he fails repeating the process again.

And fail it does, the only real question when a new manager is appointed is how long it takes before the club becomes disillusioned with the job he is doing and moves him on and has to start from square one again, this is the same whether you are Chelsea, Manchester City or you are Everton Aston Villa or Sunderland.

But at Saints we are different, the manager is the icing on the top of the cake, of course he is an important part of the cake, but he is not the ingredient that holds it all together, other clubs see their cake collapse into crumps and they have to completely re bike when their manager leaves, not Saints we still have the strong foundations, we merely have to re ice the top.

So Saints fans should be delighted that we have appointed Claude Puel, he fits the bill so he has the best chance of continuing our success of all the candidates.

We are adopting a new approach in England, but continental clubs are ahead of us in this respect and Puel is used to working in the way we require, it is not about personalities or trying to convince your supporters that by appointing a manager who has managed a big club that you are ambitious, it is about showing your ambition by strong logical decisions, not just by big names.

Of course this does not guarantee success, nothing does ! but it does give us a better chance of doing so.

So Saints fans should look at all the reasoning behind the appointment of Puel, rather then just whether they had heard of him, after all we had never heard of Mauricio Pochettino as a manager, two years ago we had heard of Koeman as a player but few could tell you anything about his career as a manager, from that point of view he was unknown.

The future is bright for Saints, we will suffer setbacks, we will not always be able to better our League position year on year, we cannot take the big boys on at their own game, but we will be able to take on them on, on our own terms and that is more than we have been able to do in the last three decades.

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