Hallelujah! Praise Almighty Rasmus! It's finally done. Sadly the season isn't over in terms of games, but the festering boil has been lanced and Southampton have staggered through the trap-door into the Championship.
And isn't that just a great thing?
No, really. In a world suffering from a case of critical short-termism, it's actually the best possible scenario for a club that's been shattered into tiny pieces.
Now a lot will be written, and already has, by those far better resourced and informed than I am, about what the hell has gone wrong at Southampton this season (and if you're looking for the best of these, I highly recommend Jacob Tanswell's excellent dissection in The Athletic). So let's leave that to the experts. Why don't we talk about how this could actually be the start of something good?
Twit.
Let me take you back to 2012 and the beginning of the Premier League good times. A brave club, with a clear identity not just in playing style, but under our mad dictator, one with a defined long-term vision and an almost obsessive determination to see that vision come to pass. It may, in the case of the sacking of Nigel Adkins, have felt brutal at points, but we all knew where we wanted to go, and we were getting there. We had a strategy. Nicola Cortese was not everyone's shot of grappa, and he upset people on the way, but then he was never going to do a TED talk or appoint the world's most irritating human as manager. Brighton chairman Tony Bloom looked at the model of Southampton back then and publicly proclaimed, "this is good". He copied it, and look at how brilliantly the Seagulls are doing now as a result. They're everything we were, and everything we should still be given a sensible strategy and some good (or even vaguely competent) decisions.
Under Poch and Koeman we had some glorious years. Playing at the San Siro, beating Inter Milan at St. Mary's. Mané, Van Dijk, Schneidelin, Fonte, Pelle, Rickie Lambert. It was truly an exciting, wonderful time to be a fan.
Remember this?
And then it became awful.
Let's face it, bar a couple of moments where it looked like Ralph might be able to reanimate a corpse or two (or at least Danny Ings' knees) the last few years have been as painful as watching Elyounoussi try and sprint. And they've got progressively worse. They've been Joe Aribo bad. For a fleeting moment we were cruelly given hope that we had an owner that would spend money which might allow us to compete again, but everyone was unprepared for quite how determined Rasmus was to "break it", and quite how monumental the flaxen-haired berk's ego is.
Absolute Twit.
Perhaps then the end of this horror show provides us with opportunity. Sure, it's going to be a real shame to have had a talent like Romeo Lavia in a Saints shirt for only one season. Of course, it'll be sad to see a club stalwart like JWP bid us farewell. It's going to be very interesting to see if he can, under a different coach and system, become more progressive and the midfielder that everyone outside of those that watch him on a weekly basis seem to think he is. One note I had from the Fulham game was the glorious pass Lavia pinged over to Theo (who was, naturally, offside) which made me stop and think when was the last time this season Prowsie even attempted a pass like that? Surely that's a key part of a supposed midfield orchestrators role? I love JWP, and I love his passion for the club, but if we all recycled as much as he does there'd be no climate crisis.
Prowseball
We need a big old clear out, and a reduction to a manageable squad size. We need that squad to be a team. A collective. A group of young and experienced players that want to play for the club, that want to bring the club straight back up. Who want to be there. And to do that, we need a tough manager that's not afraid to make difficult calls. A manager that the players respect, can relate to, and believe in. Preferably one that the fans can love too. Essentially, what we need is a regen-2013 Pochettino.
An actual football manager
So all hail the Championship. Bring it on. Let's look forward to possibly winning a few games again (as opposed to a season with more managers than home wins), let's celebrate the fact that for at least one season we might be able to celebrate goals without an interminable wait as someone with a failed O-Level in physics draws a line incorrectly on a computer. It's going to be interesting, even if it is fraught with the possibility of danger. One thing it surely will be, is better than this season? Surely? Good luck, Mr. Wilcox. You've got a job on your hands.
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