Southampton travel to Tyneside this Sunday to take on Newcastle, in a game that would see Southampton make up further ground on their relegation rivals having beaten Watford before dismissing Norwich by a 2-1 scoreline on Wednesday evening.
Newcastle, despite their decent form of late, are still very much in a relegation battle with Steve Bruce at the helm, so this is a game that has huge significance for Ralph Hasenhuttl and the Saints in their battle against the drop.
We have already outlined a couple of Magpies players who could pose the south coast side some problems on Sunday, and seeing as Southampton have conceded the most goals in the Premier League, Hasenhuttl must get his line-up right in order to prevent more defensive issues.
Here’s the XI that we think the former RB Leipzig manager should deploy at St James’ Park this weekend…
As you can see, there aren’t too many changes from the lineup that beat Watford last week – in fact, there’s only one.
We think that Hasenhuttl must bring Sofiane Boufal into the side in place of Nathan Redmond, following the Moroccan’s impact from the bench against the Hornets after replacing the former Birmingham forward.
Boufal inspired a five-minute turnaround with five successful dribbles and one key pass in just 34 minutes on the field, putting Redmond to shame after he managed just one dribble and no key passes.
We outlined how Allan Saint-Maximin might cause Southampton’s weak full-backs some problems due to his mesmeric dribbling ability – only Lionel Messi, Wilfried Zaha and Eden Hazard average more dribbles than the Frenchman.
While that is very much the case, Hasenhuttl doesn’t really have any other options who are good enough to dislodge Ryan Bertrand and Cedric, so the Austrian will simply have to hope his problem areas are not an issue this Sunday – a report from The Mirror (print version, November 12, page 53) states that a new right-back is a priority in January.
In other Southampton news, these 11 words from Hasenhuttl may have pinpointed why one Saints player doesn’t start many games…