Saints travel up to Essex to take on Colchester in a televised 5.30pm kick off and for once in this competition, it could be that a very strong side will be fielded by Tonda Eckert to complete his pre Championship preparation.

The German manager has shown in his time here that he is very methodical in his preparation and that seems to have been the case this pre season, where most of the emphasis has been on the work on the training ground and not playing friendly matches.

That could well mean that Tonda will finally reveal his hand as to what he considers his best side as his team take on League Two Colchester United.

However what is his best side now, might not be the case in a few weeks time when the transfer window ends, rumours of a new signing being imminent are rife and when a few of the squad are trimmed, the last week of the window could be very interesting.

In the meantime this game will be interesting, as there are several positions that are up for grabs and several players will be looking to stake their claim to play a part in Eckert's squad next season.

These are both seasoned professionals such as Mads Roerslev as well as youngsters such as Nick Oyekunle.

The pre season friendlies were always mix and match, so we never could be quite sure who was were in the pecking order.

But now we come to the first competitive game of the season, only a few months ago after beating Middlesbrough we were assuming that our next game would be against Hull City in front of 80,000 people at Wembley, as we now know it is actually going to be Colchester United at the JobServe Community Stadium in front of a crowd probably struggling to push over 5,000.

Saints have sold their full allocation of 1,500 which is strangely less than some clubs in League matches are given, they had the infrastructure in place to extend that number, but for some reason declined to do so.

Reports on Colchester websites are saying that for the Carabao Cup the attendance at the Jobserve Stadium, a ground that can hold over 10,000 would usually be 2-3,000, but with 1,500 away fans and the high profile of Saints in the media this summer that they could get as much as 6,000 turning up.

Binocular sales have gone through the roof in Colchester.

To put that in context, their biggest crowd last season was 6,932 and their average 5,177, that makes them 80th out of the 92 League clubs.

So this is going to be a big day, but why they couldn't have given us another 500-1,000 tickets I don't know.

So this is a game Saints should win and hopefully Tonda Eckert wants to win and that is the most important thing, we are back in the limelight after Spygate and we need to stand up and prove that we are a great side with or without the Spygate issues.

All Photos Via Reuters