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Whether you believe Saints’ season has been reasonable or poor seems to hang on one key question. Do you think of football as a results based business or part of the entertainment industry?
If you think of it as the former, then chances are that, on balance, you will be reasonably satisfied as you reflect on the campaign as it draws to a close.
If you favour the entertainment argument, and subscribe to the view you would rather see your side lower down the table but battling out 3-2 or 4-3 results for and against each week, you probably won’t have enjoyed it much.
The so-called ‘entertainment factor’ is the major gripe you hear from Saints supporters when they talk over the last year.
Let’s be brutally honest for a moment, it hasn’t always been great. That Saints have scored so few goals at home has been a frustration, only compounded by the fact that the better performances have also come on the road, where most people don’t see them play.
There has not been that same sense of excitement, of possible achievement, that the club have felt over recent years.
However, it was always going to happen at some stage.
Saints have been riding the crest of the wave for years – running straight through League One and the Championship, staying up in the top flight, finishing eighth, seventh and sixth.
That was simply not going to carry on forever.
Many feared the result would be a drastic crash at some stage, a relegation struggle even.
It has been a long way from that. But it hasn’t been as thrilling as fans have gotten used to.
Taking the Premier League campaign in isolation for a moment, the best Saints could have managed this season is eighth.
There have been wobbles amongst members of the established top seven over the past couple of years, but those have been steadied now.
They all have stable management and have spent a lot of money on their squads to ensure the old order was restored. They will splash out again this summer to make it even harder for anybody else to break through.
Therefore, you have everybody else competing for eighth downwards.
That Saints have always looked as though as they would finish in that eighth-tenth type of bracket shows they have been steady and consistent when it comes to being the ‘best of the rest.’ Not exactly sexy or glamorous is it, the ‘best of the rest?’ However, it is the cold, hard reality of modern day football, and if you cannot handle that you had better go and find another sport to watch as you are going to find this very frustrating.
When you contemplate the rest of Saints’ season you firstly have to doff your cap to the achievement of reaching the EFL Cup final. That was no mean feat given the quality of opposition they faced.
They beat a reasonable Arsenal side at the Emirates and defeated the best Liverpool could throw at them over two legs in the semis.
In truth, the fact they didn’t beat Manchester United in the final with the way the game panned out was a disappointment, because they could have bagged that trophy.
Still, it was about as much as most would have asked for at the start of the season.
The FA Cup sadly went by the wayside with a thumping at the hands of Arsenal, which was a shame, but given the timing of the fixture understandable as Saints prioritised trying to get to Wembley in the League Cup.
Then we have the Europa League, which was, without question, the biggest frustration, perhaps even annoyance, of the season.
Saints should have got through that group. It was very ordinary indeed.
The only team of any note, Inter Milan, basically said they weren’t bothering before it even started, and left out most of their best players from the squad they could pick from for their six games.
Saints defeated Sparta Prague 3-0 at home in the first round of fixtures. Sparta went on to win the group with 12 points, while Saints finished third with Hapoel Be’er Sheva, a plucky side but without any attacking quality at all, bettering them.
It was where the obsession with rotation went just a little too far. It was one, arguably two, rotations to a weakened side too many, even given that Claude Puel was trying to manage a crazy amount of games without a massively deep squad.
Given how rarely Saints get into European competition, it was such a shame that the excitement could not have extended to the knockout stages, as it should have done.
On top of all this we have had the usual griping about whether the star players sold last summer, and, in Jose Fonte’s case, in January, were adequately replaced, as well the team having to cope with two of their star men being injured for half the season.
There has also been questions asked of the manager.
And talk for a long period of a potential £200m takeover of the club, which remains hanging in the balance.
Young players have been developed, new stars have emerged, and what was always likely to be a transitional phase for the club after all these years of success and given the departure of Ronald Koeman after the last campaign, has moved forward.
So when you ultimately come to the question of whether it has been good enough, and with so many factors at play, there are two schools of thought.
If you go with your heart then maybe not. It just hasn’t got the pulse racing often enough in the way we like sport to do.
If you go with your head then it probably has. In the cold light of day, Puel and his players are employed to get results, and could they really have done all that much better?
The fan base feels divided on this themselves, and it’s why when the Saints board consider everything this summer, they have some serious questions to answer about the way forward for the club.
And for all the talk of Puel’s future, the decisions they need to make extend far beyond just that.
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