We resume today's look back at the past 33 years ago and a thing that is rare these days, a comprehensive home win.
Luton Town were the visitors to the Dell back in 1987 and they were having a better season than Saints who were now seeing the old guard of Lawrie McMenemy depart and Chris Nicholl not quite yet having his youngsters knock on the first team door and having to try and build his own squad.
This would be the last season of Peter Shilton, David Armstrong,Mark Wright and George Lawrence who would all play their last game for the club on the final day, earlier in the season we had seen Mark Dennis leave as well as Joe Jordan and Nick Holmes all play their last games although on the plus side both Tim Flowers and Mathew Le Tissier had made their debuts.
Saints last two home games had seen us beat Leicester 4-0 and Aston Villa 5-0 and both clubs would be relegated, but Luton was a far tougher task, but it didn't turn out to be that way, Andy Townsend seems to have airbrushed Saints from his memory when he talks about his past, but he definitely played for us and he scored after only 3 minutes of this game, George Lawrence scored 10 minutes later and then again on 75 minutes for an emphatic win on a cold Tuesday evening watched by only 12,117, very few of them being Luton fans.
In 1990 Saints were going well in March and were in the top 7, in contrast Manchester United were struggling against relegation and their manager Alex Ferguson was the brunt of the fans ire, some say that Mark Robins goal for United to keep them in the FA Cup back in January saved Fergy's job and kick started their revival and subsequent , but could equally be said that this win for the Red Devils went a long way to their ultimate survival, Alex Ferguson owes a lot to Saints, we got him the job in the first place and we could equally have lost it for him if we had beaten them in this game.
But we didn't , the biggest home crowd of the season hoped to see a hammer nailed in his coffin, but Just after the hour the visitors went ahead through Gibson and then in the 88th minute up popped Robins to seal the victory, United would stay up by 5 points, if they had lost this one they would have been very close to going down come the final table.
Fast forward to 2012 and we hosted Doncaster Rovers in the Championship as we pushed towards promotion, in the game up in Yorkshire earlier in the season Billy Sharp would score the only goal of the game to send us to defeat, but now he was playing not in Red & White Hoops but stripes and he would score both goals in our two nil win to keep our promotion push going, although it would sadly go off the rails slightly after this win in front of a virtual full house at St Mary's.
This would be the last game we played on this date as usually the last week in March is an International break.
So who has memories of the games in this part two, share them in the comments section below to truly bring the games alive.