If ever Saints fans needed re assuring that last seasons summer transfer dealings worked out for the best then Ryan Bertrand being chosen by his peer's is just that.
Ryan Bertrand has been selected in the PFA team of the year, an honour decided by the voting of his fellow professionals, this is a great accolade in the fact that although Bertrand is the only Saints player in the team, with six coming from Chelsea the fact that we have a player represented is a reflection of how we have come on this season as a club with all of the players coming from the top 7 in the Premier league with only Manchester City in that group not being represented.
It is also recognition of just how well Saints performed in the transfer window last summer and hopefully will give Saints supporters confidence that if we lose players in the summer we will repeat the success of last year.
Bertrand was of course the replacement for Luke Shaw with Saints receiving somewhere in the region of £30 million for Shaw and having to pay Chelsea only around a third of that for Bertrand, the end result was that we have got the better player at this time, yes Shaw may mature in the next few years but at present i would rather have Bertrand than our former left back.
This is the type of deal we will need to keep doing over the years, the reality is that we are unable to compete with the other six clubs ahead of us in terms of wages, but what we can do is cultivate players through the academy and supplement that by bringing in players like Bertrand, Clyne even Lovren as replacements when we sell players, nurturing them and inevitably selling them at a big profit and then repeating the process again.
Yes there is no guarantee that we will succeed with every player, but then again there is no guarantee that paying out big money for marque signings will bring success as we found out with Ramirez and Osvaldo and Liverpool found out themselves last summer.
So congratulations Ryan Bertrand it is a well deserved honour and perhaps it will make a few Saints fans think beyond the obvious candidates when the voting opens for the Saints player of the year.