Goals from Ivan Toney and Yoanne Wissa saw the St Mary’s side remain rooted to the bottom of the Premier League despite a positive start to Selles’s managerial career. Saints had kept a clean sheet and earned a point at Manchester United’s Old Trafford on the weekend – a third shut-out in four matches – but problems in front of goal persist. The Bees, managed by Thomas Frank, also hammered Saints 3-0 just last month during the closing stages of Nathan Jones’s tenure. This result leaves Saints with only 11 matches to save their Premier League status, needing to make up two points on those in safety.
Ruben Selles said: “We came here to our stadium with the belief we could make a good performance and get the three points. We didn’t manage the key moments of the game. We had a clear plan on how to do it and we showed this with principles in the last third, but we lost a little bit of those principles and the consequence of that was we didn’t have situations in the box. We have been working on scoring goals and we are not a team that will score a massive amount, but we can still get much better in the last third. We are working on it but it shows we are still fragile in that, we lost a bit of our structure and we need to work on keeping our structure and principles. In the second (Brentford) goal, we lost the structure and it was a long ball and second action. This can happen when you’re chasing the game, so we need to be better.”
Selles, however, reiterated his belief that Saints can beat the drop and avoid playing Championship football for the first time in over a decade next season.
Ruben Selles said: “We are absolutely confident but we need to stop making mistakes in set-plays, be solid there and then we will find the goals to stay in the Premier League, no doubt about it. It is not only for us, but it is also for everybody in the Premier League that one mistake can lead to one goal, two mistakes are two goals and more mistakes are more goals. We just need to keep doing the things that keep us moving away from relegation, and we will have games like this where we lose our structure. We need to keep it more often and stay competitive more often when it is not in our favour, that is where we need to learn.”
