The third of our end of season player reviews sees us start on the defenders, we take a look at Cedric Soares season for Southampton Football Club.
A decent third season for Cedric Soares at St Mary's, generally solid although perhaps he was stronger going forward than he was defensively, but we all know that the one area that truly we slipped up in this season was our defending.
I like Cedric as a player he is well suited to our system and he started 32 of the 38 Premier League games this term, defensively he tended to win more than he lost apart from perhaps in the air and that is understandable given his height.
But going forward he added to the attack, he got down the line and got in 137 crosses during the season gaining him 3 assists and a further 6 big chances created that were not converted, that would have surely been more had Saints played most of the season with someone to aim at when he crossed.
This was the folly of our game for the first part of the season, we relied on Cedric and Ryan Bertrand to get up the line and cross the ball and then we gave them Manolo Gabbiadini to aim at, Gabbiadini has many strengths but his ability to get on the end of crosses and outjump defenders much bigger than him isn't one of them, that meant that Cedric was nowhere near as effective as he should have been.
But overall he was a solid reliable performer for the club and I would be disappointed to see him go as i think it would be hard to find a right back of a similar quality, Cedric in a well organised defence and indeed side will be a real asset, sadly like most of our squad he spent much of the term in a tactical formation that wasn't working.
I don't think we have seen the best of Cedric yet, if we keep him next season could see him show us his undoubted quality.
Our defence had a few problems last year, but Cedric was not the root cause of the problem and in that respect he is part of the solution not the problem.