Daily Echo:

New season, new manager, same problem.

Hopefully Mauricio Pellegrino will find a solution to Saints’ goalscoring woes. Certainly that is a large part of why he has been entrusted with the manager’s job at St Mary’s.

But if he was in any doubt as to just what he has to work on, he knows now.

Claude Puel was castigated for the style of football his team produced, which was widely blamed for the lack of goals.

Pellegrino has only had days to work with largely the same squad in virtually its entirety, but the opening day goalless draw against Swansea was a familiar tale.

Saints squandered early chances, the opposition decided to drop deep and defend for lives, Saints then struggled to pick them apart and couldn’t score the goal their efforts fully deserved.

Ultimately, these are the same players as Puel had. Time will tell whether it was the manager or the blend of the squad that has been assembled that is the issue.

Certainly we can say that Pellegrino’s first team selection yielded just one change from Claude Puel’s final game in charge – and that was simply swapping in Manolo Gabbiadini for Charlie Austin up front. They played in the same 4-2-3-1 formation too.

With players reporting back late in the summer after international duty, the disruption caused by the ongoing Virgil van Dijk saga and incoming transfers still to arrive, this is hardly the end product for Pellegrino. This is merely the start of a long journey.

But anybody who thought that simply changing the man at the top of the team would produce some kind of instant answer was always likely to be disappointed, even if in the fullness of time that hopefully does prove to be the case.

In fairness, Pellegrino’s Saints were more positive, and they played some good football against Swansea, but this was two points dropped on the opening day of the season.

Even Swansea’s manager Paul Clement thought it was funny to joke about his team’s defensive display, and was honest enough to admit that he was mighty relieved to get away with a point.

Swansea are missing their own star player, Gylfi Sigurdsson, through a transfer saga as well as their goalscorer, Fernando Llorente, and are stuck in terms of signings until Everton complete their deal.

They will then strengthen and get much better, but this was a case of Clement fielding the best he had and hoping for a result.

There was good movement from Saints, especially early on. Ryan Bertrand was very positive as the full backs overlapped, they got the ball in between the lines before Swansea retreated really deep, and there were a fair few chances, but none were taken.

That Pellegrino’s substitutions had the hallmark of Puel – like for like – perhaps suggested the limitations are not being imposed by an individual manager.

Saints came out flying and almost took the lead after two minutes as Manolo Gabbiadini flicked a near post corner against the top of the bar after a fine darting run.

Ryan Bertrand laid on a great chance for Dusan Tadic, which he put wide from close range, while James Ward-Prowse saw his shot from Nathan Redmond’s cut back blocked.

Swansea had their sole chance of the game midway through the first half as Tammy Abraham headed wide.

They really offered little else going forward, though we also have to give credit to Saints for that. Their performance was defensively strong and they didn’t let up throughout.

With Swansea dropping to the edge of their own area and getting ten men behind the ball, the scene was set for a deja vu second half.

Like so many matches last season, the opposition knew that was their best hope, rode their luck, and got away with it.

A few balls didn’t bounce kindly for Saints, a few final balls didn’t quite deliver, and Lukasz Fabianski produced a decent save from Tadic while Maya Yoshida headed over when he should have netted with a header at the far post.

Yoshida and Austin both hit the side netting late on just to cap it all off.

There were still plenty of positives to take from the game from Saints, and it would be wrong to focus too much on the cumulative lack of goals over the back end of last season and the start of this.

Pellegrino deserves the chance for this to be a slate wiped clean and not to be judged on what has happened before.

However, that is admittedly difficult for anybody who sat through the frustration of the final weeks of the last campaign.

It also underlines that perhaps just simply blaming Puel for it all was not entirely fair, though whether this is now symptomatic of a collective loss of confidence that started under him is a fair debate.

Pellegrino will have surely learned more about his squad in the first 90 minutes of the season than he probably has all summer.

With a second successive home game to come thanks to the fixture switch with West Ham, there is an opportunity to get it right and make progress.

He will be as desperate as the fans to see some goals when the Hammers come to town at the weekend.