Ryan Bertrand has admitted that Mauricio Pellegrino had a clear the air meeting in which he told the squad that it was going to be a back to basics approach.
Ryan Bertrand has spoken of how the team’s meetings during the week were alll about pulling together as a unit and creating a change of attitude.
He revealed that manager Mauricio Pellegrino focused on pulling the squad together in the run up to the Everton game.
"It was easy to fix. We just needed a refresher and start really putting the work in. Small adjustments paid dividends.”
"We got back to basics. It was nothing drastic and the manager really got hold of us and got us into shape and we gave him that performance”
"We put that all to bed during the week. We got together as a group and analysed what we needed to do and do more and we came together and put a good performance on for everyone.”
"It wasn’t a serious one, there is no danger but we’ve done well the last few years and we’ve got big expectations now, so we weren’t happy with a lot of things."
"Everyone thought we should have more and deserve more, so we needed to get back to that.”
"There’s that expectation there now. We’ve had so many solid seasons since I’ve got to the club. We’ve experienced fantastic seasons, consistently finishing comfortably within the top ten. I’m not just talking top ten, but right up there.”
It is good to hear that Pellegrino has been pro active over the past week, the perfromance at Liverpool was unacceptable and the first one in a long time where you felt that the squad had lost it's spirit, I said myself it would be hard to get that back, but it appears that mauricio Pellegrino has taken a big step forward and certainly the team that ran out against Everton had something in it that was lacking the previous week at Anfield.
The big question now is whether the manager has learned from is undoubted mistakes, the first thing has been gelling the squad together mentally as well as physically, now Pellegrino needs to win back the Saints supporters by showing them that performances like this will become the norm rather than the poor showings of recent weeks.