A quick guide to the big fixtures in Saints season including the dates of the World Cup break and when the big boys will be in town.

There is an old adage that in a football season you have to play everyone and it all evens itself out in the course of a season, sometimes that rings true, but it could also be said that a club's fortunes in a season can fluctuate depending pot luck whether their opponents are in good or bad form or are hit by injuries and suspensions etc.

Going into this season the rest of the Premier League would hope to get Saints either at the beginning or the end of the season, for the past two years we have started badly, played well in the middle and then tailed off alarmingly in the final third or so of the season.

This being the case Spurs fans will be elated to have us visit them on the opening day of the season, we have rarely won in the top flight at this stage and more often than not we get beaten as we did last season at Everton and the season before at Crystal Palace or for that matter the season before that at Burnley, that is three straight opening day defeats, all of them being on the road.

So the fact that we play Spurs, Chelsea & Manchester United in the opening fixtures should not be seen as an issue, these are games that we don't traditionally pick up many points from, yes the table may not look good early doors, but with our bad start issues we don't want to be losing to the promoted sides etc early on.

After the opening salvo, the first game of real interest will be the trip to Bournemouth on 18th October which is scheduled for a Tuesday evening at present, indeed the return game at St Mary's is also in the calendar for midweek this time on Wednesday 26th April.

Our trip to Anfield to take on Liverpool is in the final round of games before the World Cup Break, we go up there on the weekend of 12th November and then this will be our last fixture until Boxing Day 26th December when Brighton will be the visitors to St Mary's.

A few days later we are scheduled to be at Fulham on New Years Eve, usually a good day out, but most who go will be hitting the road back straight after the game for the festivities.

We don't appear to have a game on New Years Day, but we do have one on the 2nd January when Nottingham Forest will visit St Mary;s, it's clear that this three game run will be a crucial period for us, which will go a long way to pointing which way our season will go.

The trip down to Brighton is scheduled for 20th May and the following week we host Liverpool, will that be a good fixture for the final game of the season or a problem?

That we will find out in a little over 11 months time.

Photo: Action Images

YosemiteSaint added 06:22 - Jun 17 <Sigh>, unless we effect some big changes this summer the 2022-2023 EPL fixture list suggests we'll be spending at least the first three months of the season in the bottom five if not the bottom three.
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