Ralph Hasenhuttl and his squad will be stepping up training and will be looking to play games at St Mary's ahead of the trip to Norwich City next week.

Saints will be looking to acclimatise the squad to matches in empty stadiums by playing games at St Mary's .

Whether that will involve playing other clubs as some teams have already done has not been announced, but certainly the squad will play training games between themselves as part of the build up.

Ralph Hasenhuttl has spoken to the Daily Eco of the work done so far and the plans.

Asked by the Daily Echo if training at St Mary’s was part of his plans, the Austrian responded:
“For sure everybody wants to do this, but we will have to wait a little bit because the groundsmen are working hard on the pitch as this is the only time of the year they can do it.

“We will need a good pitch for the season that’s coming immediately after this one, but we will do it.

“We need to get used to it because it’s a different atmosphere. We must be there.”

The Austrian is very much a tracksuit manager and is enjoying the return to contact training.

“It’s so enjoyable It really is fantastic to see the players working on the pitch, going into duels and fighting for every ball.

“We all love football if it’s intense, quick and if you see a few good goals in the session.

“Seeing Ingsy scoring, seeing Longy scoring and seeing both Che and Michael scoring is really enjoyable.

“It’s interesting for me to watch because I really missed it. It’s still not the same because we are here in this bubble of 40 people. It’s still very calm here.

“It was important that we went this way and that we stick to the guidelines which are very clear and strict.

“We have an observer here to make sure we are doing it right and the staff are also doing a fantastic job.

“It’s more work to keep everything clean and the social distancing isn’t easy for the players to handle but, so far, we have done it well.”

Now of course Saints will step things up, the real test when the teams return is to see how each squad has adapted to what is an unknown scenario, usually pre season is planned well in advance, but this is different, it will be hard to gauge levels of fitness going into the first game, there has not been much time to get the squad working and there is no margin of error or the chance to fine tune things before the big kick off.

The hope for Saints is that in Ralph Hasenhuttl they have a manager who thinks outside the box, has always been open to new ideas and adapting and this could be a big factor in getting off to a good start, Saints rarely do this in a normal season, so hopefully they can do it now after a long break, indeed longer than the normal close season.

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