Ralph Hasenhuttl has revealed that he has good and bad injury news with regard to his squad ahead of the vital game against Cardiff City.
Saints will be without Danny Ings on Saturday as the striker once again pulled up in a game and the hamstring injury will require another 2-3 weeks to recover
Hasenhuttl said: "Danny had made a big step after 20 minutes to the ball and then sprinted and he then had a problem with his hamstring."
"This has cost him another two-three weeks to come back, so that’s not good.
"We miss him because he is a good player for us and a good striker.
"We need to have him here, but at the moment, we have to know it will take two-three weeks."
Despite Ings’ absence, Hasenhuttl isn’t worried that Saints will struggle to score although this might not be a view shared by the fans.
With Manolo Gabbiadini gone, Michael Obafemi not fully fit and Charlie Austin lacking game time, plus Shane Long being more a creator of goals than a taker you can see the cause for concern, but the Austrian is upbeat.
"I don’t think that we show we have problems to score."
"We did it in nearly every game and Redmond is having fantastic performances at the moment where he nearly scores every game.
"We have a few other players who can also score, Prowsey for example."
"I don’t think our biggest problem isn’t being able to score, we should be focused on having more clean sheets in the future."
"We showed in the last games we can always score and, sometimes, it must be enough in a game to score once and not always two or three times to take a win.”
Saints have only kept one clean sheet since the Austrian has been in charge which came in the goalless draw with Chelsea at the beginning of January and this season has like last been a tale of Saints conceding sloppy goals and giving away leads .
There has been a problem in the back four for over two years now and it is the same players committing the same errors, whilst Saints now appear to be stronger defensively than a year ago with the emergence of Jan Bednarek and the improving Jannik Vestergaard, they still lack a quality experienced head in the back line
But Hasenhuttl is in confident mood and confirmed that the defence will be boosted on Saturday by the return of Ryan Bertrand and Maya Yoshida.
"Ryan is back and has nearly trained in every session,”
"Maya Yoshida is back after the Asian Cup, so we have a few more options in the back-five which helps us to have better training sessions."
"The guys have had a really concentrated week and they’ve shown a mixture of having fun and working hard, you can feel it’s a good passion in every session."
It will be interesting what the Austrian does, whether he sticks with a central trio of reverts to a back four and whether Yoshida and Bertrand step straight back in, but one thing is for sure he has to do something different, the late sloppy goal conceded at Burnley was far from the first of this nature this season and unless something changes won't be the last.
I think that we have enough to get us up to safety, after all we stayed up last season with what could be said to be a worse squad than this, but the issue cannot be ignored.
However Ralph finished with good news.
"But the good thing to know is that Pierre is back after his concussion, which is important for us because you saw against Burnley we missed him and his experience in this position and it’s good he’s back.”
"I enjoy working very much working with this team at the moment and, on Saturday, we want to show we are better than when we played the first time against Cardiff.”