Anyone who has been to the first three Championship games of the season, will tell you one thing, they are enjoying going to watch Saints again, there is a feel good factor around the place and that is reflecting in ticket sales.

For the opening home game of the season, we saw 30,113 fill St Mary's, the only empty seats in the house were in the corporate areas and in the away section and even a block usually allocated to the visiting supporters was almost filled by home fans.

Likewise 3,000 fans to Sheffield Wednesday for a televised game on a Friday evening was impressive and we would have taken a similar amount to Plymouth, perhaps even more, if they had given us more tickets.

To put the crowd against Norwich in perspective, when we were relegated in 2005 the opening day of the season saw the attendance against Wolverhampton Wanderers number just 24, 061.

Indeed last season our average attendance in the Premier League was 30,440, indeed covid years aside, since our return to the Premier League in 2012 the average has been pretty constant between, 30,139 to 30,936.

In our 5 seasons in the Championship at St Mary's saw the average after relegation in 2005 flutter around the 23,000 mark and still only 26, 420 in our promotion season of 2011/12.

That year was a slow burner, despite the perceived euphoria of the early years after Markus Liebherr arrived, in our League 1 promotion year the average was 22,161.

Even when we returned to the Championship in 2011, even though we should have had the feel good factor of promotion, the opening day saw us play Leeds in front of only 25,860 and that included 3,000 Leeds fans, roughly 6,000 more Saints fans saw us play Norwich a fortnight ago than watches us play Leeds that day.

I don't know why, but there has just been a groundswell of support for the club, the feeling is that people are fed up with the Premier League and it's haves and mainly have nots these days.

So the attendance against Queens Park Rangers with still 4 days to go before the game, looks set to top, the QPR game especially as the West London club, making perhaps one of the shortest and easiest trips of the season have already sold out of their 3,000 tickets.

If we take a look at Saints online ticketing system, it shows that the Northam End has already sold out and in many blocks there are only a few tickets left, in total though there are still 1,300 tickets left in the general seating areas, that in itself is around 300 down on Monday's night's total so they are selling fast.

There are still a couple of hundred tickets left in the cheapest category of £20 for adults in the Itchen/Chapel corner and they are likely to be the first to go, most though are £30 for adults.

Given last season's highest crowd of around 31,600, I would suspect that we are getting there or thereabouts of 30,000 tickets in total, so the Norwich attendance is already exceeded, but Norwich brough over 1,000 less fans to the game than QPR will, so there is still the scope for the last tickets to be snapped up as they were in the run up to the visit of the Canaries.

So if you are intending going to the game then the advice is get a move on.

More information can be found on the Southampton FC Ticket site using this link.

Photo: Action Images via Reuters