ORIOL Romeu has urged Saints to continue building a relationship with the fans after some tough times in 2017/18.

After long spells of disquiet from the faithful this season, a sense of togetherness was finally reached as Saints secured survival on the final day of the Premier League campaign.

Through most of the season there was a clear disconnect between supporters and the players and management, especially while Mauricio Pellegrino was at the helm.

However, Mark Hughes was partly able to foster goodwill from the fanbase and they themselves got behind the team as they fought for survival, putting any disillusionment temporarily behind them.

Romeu admits the connection between the stands and pitch is key to success and knows that to get next season off on the right foot, Saints must continue to get the fans behind them.

“That connection between the crowd, players and managers, all in their own way, but doing their job has been key to us and we have to keep this up,” he said.

“We need to start next season with the same feeling again. We need to show the fans that we’re there and to show the manager we’re here to compete.

“Everyone of us has to push the right way. That’s the way we want to start next season.”

The 26-year-old revealed he had a difficult campaign and didn’t reach the heights he wanted, as he failed to replicate the superb form he showed under Claude Puel in 2016/17.

The former Chelsea and Barcelona man wants Saints to now take stock, relax but get ready to build something far stronger next term and Romeu himself is eager to do that as an individual.

“The first thing is to relax. We’ve had so much tension, so many difficult moments. It hasn’t been easy but the first thing to do is to keep our minds off for a while and then comeback to build something stronger,” he said. “Building something and that these negative things don’t happen again.

“We are a solid group and we won’t allow some difficult results to affect our game.”

On his own displays, Romeu said: “It has been tough, I’ve had so many ups and downs personally, so I’d like to improve that. I’d like to be more consistent.

“The last games I’ve felt much better and I’ve enjoyed more and I could feel the team was doing better, so I appreciated that.

“That’s the thing I want to do for next season. I probably haven’t felt as good as I did last season but that’s part of football.

“Some seasons are better some seasons are worse but we need to go again on what we haven’t done right.”

Romeu wants Saints to learn from the tough experiences they went through this season, having battled against the drop after four successive years of top eight finishes.

“There are many things to be learnt, there are many things to improve on, because we’ve made so many mistakes and that’s why we finished like this.

“We had to find so much in the last games. This cannot happen again, we don’t want to experience this again because we’ve seen how tough it is and how difficult it is to come back from those positions.”

“I’m glad it’s over the way it is because we were thinking weeks ago that it was going to be very tough, but we know it’s positive and we knew we could achieve it."