Speaking ahead of this afternoon visit of Tottenham Hotspur, Ronald Koeman has spoken of how in this season's Premier League the margin between success and failure is smaller than ever.

“I think to win the title, to win the Premier League, you don't need that number of points what normally you need, and maybe that's the same in the bottom of the league, relegation is more teams because we are so close to each other in the table.

“Two weeks ago we had a 1-1 with Aston Villa. It's always 'if', but with two points more, we could have gone fifth in the table and everybody would have been laughing. Everybody's worried, and that's in two weeks, and that's the Premier League.

“In two weeks you can be there, in which position you like to be, but if you don't win and you get three in a row that you lose, then it's a different world.”

It seems a lifetime for Saints fans at present, but the reality is that Saints poor form is only four Premier League games and Koeman is now urging his side to re focus and concentrate on getting back to wining ways after a narrow defeat at Crystal Palace.

“Of course it was a disappointing result, and more disappointing results in the last few weeks, and that gives always a little bit more pressure to everybody,”

“We play a lot in the next three games we have until the end of the year.

“We play a lot of our ambition, we play for a position on the table what we like, and it isn’t the position that we are now at this moment.

“Of course, we speak, we have good training sessions, but everybody needs to realise that we play for a lot this Saturday and we have to improve.

“Maybe some lack of confidence, but still we can play good football, still we create chances. “The productivity is not good enough.”

“Sometimes it’s difficult, because it’s impossible to explain everything what happened in football.

“I think we are struggling in scoring goals, I think our opponents see us in mistakes defensively, and it’s close.

“If you watch all the results every weekend, it’s always 1-0, 1-1, 2-1, and every detail is important.

“The whole team performance, every individual performance of the players, is a little bit low than what we expect, and what we can show, and I hope I explain now why.”

Football is a simple game and for Saints the way back to winning ways is simple, score more goals and cut out the errors at the other end, if Saints can do that then they should move back up the table. Simple Eh !

Photo: Action Images

aceofthebase added 09:46 - Dec 19 Time to get the head out of the sand and knuckle down. We are not in fight for Europe or a top ten finish. The fight is to get enough points to avoid relegation. No more ifs and buts. Come on Saints you can do it.
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SaintNick added 09:57 - Dec 19 I dont agree that the fight is to avoid relegation, we are on 21 points, generally 38 is enough in any given season, in real terms we need to win 4 out of our remaining 22 games with a few draws. We are 7 points off the bottom 3 but only 5 points off of Spurs in 5th , so we are closer to a place in Europe than relegation, even after only getting 1 point from the last 4 league games. There is nothing wrong with Saints that a couple of wins wont put right, the sooner we get them the better

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aceofthebase added 19:33 - Dec 19 And the band played on as the Titanic sunk beneath the waves. Other bad results are hiding the fact that we do mot have quality players and that we are lucky to have a few early points. It seems unlikely that other teams are going to generously let us win. Dream on Nick but this season is going to be afight against relegation.
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SanMarco added 20:45 - Dec 19 Well it wasn't that fine a line this afternoon. They were comfortably better than us. I don't think we will be in a relegation fight but we will do well to stay in lower-middle of the table. Any claims that we are making progress or have a stronger squad are beginning to look threadbare to say the least..
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