THERE are 75 players in the first-team squads of Southampton, Leicester City and Ipswich Town — and how many of them will be playing Premier League football next season?
My guess is two — Ipswich striker Liam Delap and Southampton kid Tyler Dibling. Two out of 75.
What a damning indictment that is of the recruitment at the three clubs who were promoted last summer and are all going straight back down to the Championship.
When I was promoted with Watford a decade ago, we made a point of telling each other, ‘Ten wins and we will stay up’. Well, these three clubs have managed only ten wins between them!
This is the second successive season in which the three promoted clubs will all suffer instant relegation but don’t tell me the gulf between the top two divisions has suddenly got a lot wider.
Three years ago, Fulham, Bournemouth and Nottingham Forest went up together and all three are in the top half of the table, eyeing Europe, with Forest even vying for a Champions League spot.
Nothing much has changed financially in two years, so bridging the gap between the Championship and Premier League can be done.
What you need is a club united in its vision, with pragmatic management and with players who have experience, character and desire.
Don’t get me wrong, it is a huge gap. As a player, you notice an astonishing difference in the physical and mental demands when you’re promoted into the top flight.
I’d had three consecutive seasons of scoring 20-plus goals in the Championship before we went up in 2015.
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In the Premier League, I had never felt more motivated and I was playing some of the best football of my life but I didn’t score in my first nine games.
On Match of the Day, they were saying, ‘Well, he scored a lot of goals in the Championship but can he do it in the Premier League?’ and that got me riled — although I’m getting my own back a bit on that show these days!
But I’d got four or five assists, the team had picked up two wins and four draws and I was performing well in a different role with more defensive duties — but there I was being doubted to the whole nation.
And that’s another thing you really notice in the Premier League — the incredible media attention.
Watford versus Crystal Palace in the Championship barely registers on the radar.
That same fixture in the Premier League has a massive worldwide event.
As a player, you notice an astonishing difference in the physical and mental demands when you’re promoted into the top flight.
Troy Deeney
Anyway, my tenth match in the Premier League was Stoke away — and when I scored, it was a pretty aggressive goal ‘celebration’.
It was such a release of frustration that I belted the s**t out of the corner flag.
But that was a difference between the Championship and the top flight — you’d often only have two shots per match.
Sometimes you wouldn’t have any because you’d be getting humped by Manchester City.
The amount of effort you have to put in to get one win — to score one goal — in the Premier League is extreme.
Those levels of determination are what Southampton, Leicester and Ipswich have been lacking — as well as a proper vision from the clubs as a whole.
Transfer-market strategy has to be ruthless.
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Matej Vydra scored 16 goals in Watford’s promotion season, he was hugely popular and I loved playing with him, but the club bombed him out, selling him to Reading without him playing a single top-flight game.
That felt cruel but it’s an example of what’s needed.
We also signed a host of players who had been captains at their previous clubs, which gave us the necessary character.
I also look at Fulham under Marco Silva and Brentford, who were promoted under Thomas Frank a year earlier, and remember how they adapted so intelligently to the Premier League.
Both played champagne football in the second tier but changed markedly when they went up.
Brentford became much more direct, while Fulham released their tiny ball-playing defensive midfielder Jean Michael Seri and signed an absolute beast in Joao Palhinha.
Contrast that with Southampton, whose manager Russell Martin stuck with his purist footballing philosophy and was sacked after 13 defeats in 16 games — many of them good hidings.
But it’s not as if the Saints improved under Ivan Juric — they got even worse and registered the fastest-ever relegation.
Unless they can earn two more points in their final six games, they will go down as the worst team in the history of the competition.
And it’s not as if Leicester are much better — they haven’t scored a single goal during eight successive home defeats and are likely to be relegated by Liverpool tomorrow.
There are no short cuts to staying in the Prem – everything has to be done the right way. But at Southampton, Leicester and Ipswich, pretty much everything has been done wrong.
What were they doing in sacking Steve Cooper after just 13 games, when they weren’t even in the drop zone?
They wanted a more attractive style of football, apparently — well what’s so attractive about losing eight straight home games without scoring, while conceding 21?
The appointment of Ruud Van Nistelrooy always felt doomed to failure.
Leicester are a mess.
Many would cut Ipswich a bit more slack after back-to-back promotions under Kieran McKenna but I’m not really inclined to as their recruitment has been poor.
Despite Delap looking a real player, Ipswich have too often been too nice to play against.
I don’t see enough desire and belief.
In January, they spent £20million on Jaden Philogene from Aston Villa — who has never looked worth that kind of money.
And last summer, there was Kalvin Phillips — a ‘name’ signing but a player who seems to have lost his fire.
In short, there are no short cuts to staying in the Premier League — everything has to be done the right way.
But at Southampton, Leicester and Ipswich, pretty much everything has been done wrong.
