Southampton executive director Les Reed refusing to panic after a few defeats

He oversees the hiring and firing of managers, the club’s recruitment policy and the direction of the football side of things from the top to the bottom.

The Daily Echo’s chief sports writer Adam Leitch met him in his Staplewood office for a half term report on this season.

Here is the second of a two part series of what he had to say, focussing on football…

Les Reed on the disappointment of the Europa League exit but excitement for the EFL Cup semi-final… What I would like the fans to understand is that we all feel the same way (about the Europa League exit). We have been there with them on those journeys and we haven’t turned away from that.

We have to examine what got us there, how do we improve on that and make it better? And what can we refocus on?

We are in the semi-final with Liverpool. That’s a fantastic opportunity and we have to assume that by giving it everything we’ve got, we have got a chance of a Wembley appearance.

Yes we targeted Europe and we did well in terms of getting further in Europe than we did last year and we would like to qualify again for next year.

That means we have to have a fantastic end to the league season and have other teams drop away a little bit. But we have to consider that if somebody drops away and we don’t give it our best shot we will be kicking ourselves.

At the same time we have got an opportunity through the cup, and therefore for us we need to turn that around for us into an exciting period again.

Let’s go and play Liverpool and give ourselves a real good chance of getting a Wembley appearance when we go up to Anfield and from that boost let’s take that into our league form and carry on and have a good finish to the season.

Nobody is giving up on anything here. We are setting ourselves targets, saying ‘this is what we’ve achieved and this is what we haven’t achieved, how do we put that right and how do we refocus?’ January has been a tough month and not only have we got FA Cup, League Cup and league games to play, but it is the January transfer window and there is a whole lot of stuff that can be very distracting.

It’s keeping focussed on what are our targets, what are our goals, how can we achieve them, what have we learned in the first half of the season and put everything into a really strong finish, which we’d all love to be an appearance at Wembley.

We will give it our best shot to do that.

Les Reed on Claude Puel’s rotation policy and the manager sticking to his guns…

Yes and I support him in that.

If you look at that kind of fixture congestion it’s very interesting. I listen to pundits on the radio and TV who played years ago who said ‘but I wanted to play every game,’ but every week wasn’t three games a week.

The other thing is that our players run around 13km per game now. If you think of an athlete training for a competitive 10k run they do about ten a year and they train for months leading up to the competitive run. Our boys have been doing in excess of that three times a week.

I remember when I was coaching ten years ago measuring players who we thought were fantastic athletes at the time and were running 8k or 9k per game.

All of our team are regularly running 12km or 13km per game.

Also remember they are not 10k races which are paced. These are high intensity sprints and the number of high intensity sprints has gone up. The run like Bofual’s at Everton, chasing back and then running through the entire Everton team to set up a chance, those have increased.

As a coach now you really have to look at that data and say ‘yes, probably some of these players could play two or three games on the trot, but then the fourth game they’ve gone.’ It’s trying to keep all 24 players up to a match level of competitiveness with a fixture calendar like the one we’ve got.

Claude is a coach who is out there on the field all the time, and wants more of it, to not be tempted to think one more session will be alright.

You’ve got to take into account the three games a week, the 13k they are running, is in addition to their training. What tends to happen in this kind of period is play, recover, prepare, play, recover, prepare.

What we really hope is if we can get through January we have the chance of coaching, improve, prepare, play and recover and move on.

I think we have to take a long term view.

An interesting conversation I had the other night was the team we played against Spurs at home is two-and-a-half-years of Mauricio’s work.

Claude has done six months.

When Mauricio first went to Spurs there were lots of questions about the pressing, the running, the volume of training, will it work?

Players moved out of the club, young players were given a chance – Harry Kane was on loan at Leicester.

We are at the beginning of that kind of cycle.

It’s really important that we think long term so that we are still competing at sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth in the league for the long term and we are not going up and down like some of the other clubs around us.

We want to get consistency and we have had six years of that so we think we know what we are doing so I say trust us on that basis.

We have gone through this kind of thing before, we have done it the Southampton way and have come out the end ok.

We think we have got that philosophy right and so why would we want to change it because we are under a bit of pressure at the moment?

Yes, we are disappointed we have lost three Premier League games in a row. We have to put an end to it and then we have to move on.

But the fans should be reassured that we are not just taking this for granted. There is a lot of work going on behind the scenes to make it happen.

Les Reed on criticisms over a lack of entertainment at St Mary’s this season…

In relation to fine tuning the performances then we could with some time to get that going.

It comes to roost when you have lost a few games. The system, the rotation, the style is under question.

Earlier in the season we were playing some exhilarating stuff and winning games and fans were stopping me in the street and saying they really loved the football.

A lot depends on how you feel when you exit the stadium on any given day.

Another thing we are suffering from a little bit is because early in the season it became clear that we were going to play through the back and midfield and play some quality middle third stuff that teams have dropped off us and been deep.

We lost to West Bromwich Albion, and that is a major disappointment because with the amount of possession and the amount of ball we had at their end of the pitch you would expect to score some goals.

Yet we came up against an absolute brick wall, and what was ironic was when their fans were singing ‘we’ve got the ball’ as if it were an incredible exception.

We have to cope with that.

One of the reasons we brought in players like Boufal and Redmond is because we need the Bouafls, the Redmonds and Tadic’s to bring their skill to the table to unlock that so we are in a position to get early leads in games which means the other team have to do something about it.

One of the problems that comes along with so much domination of the game is I think we have conceded goals through lack of concentration because we have been that dominant with the ball we have switched off for critical times.

I think the story of the season has been we start well, we dominate possession, we get three or four chances and don’t take the chances, they get one and score and that gives them the opportunity to go ‘bang, you’re not going to come through us.’ Teams haven’t had to work hard enough to get their goals, and this is something Claude recognises that we really have to put right.

Seocndly, we need more players to chip in with goals from midfield and the players who have outstanding ability to create more chances and keep that going.

It’s difficult, but what it leads to sometimes is what can be perceived as a boring game because we have a lot of the ball but we don’t create enough goalmouth incident.

I think we could play exactly the same way but if we created more goalmouth incident the fans would be excited about that.

The alternative is to be a different team altogether, to start smashing the ball and creating chaos and hoping to get a goal from a set play. That’s not what we start teaching our kids at eight years of age to do.

Our philosophy is to play the ball on the floor, play possession football.

What we need at the moment is one or two to have a bit of luck, to raise a bit of confidence but also do what they are really good at and beat a couple of players.

Sofiane showed that with his first goal for the club. We need more of that. We need Dusan to be doing that. We need Nathan to be doing that as well as Jay and Shane as strikers.

We need Prowsey to be whipping in a few free kicks that lead to a goal, we need Jordy and Hojbjerg to be coming onto things on the edge of the box and smashing it into the back of the net.

When your confidence is low you resist that because you don’t want to miss, but then the chance fizzles away.

I am voicing what Claude knows and what Claude is saying.

We need to work on that and build up the confidence so we get the goals we deserve because of the amount of possession and the amount of ball that we have.

It’s not the time to completely change the philosophy.

It’s the time to sort the problems out, focus on the solutions and get better.

Les Reed on accusations the club lack ambition due to selling top players…

I understand that but the fact is that none of those players have gone to anything but Champions League clubs, and that is the nature of the domination of the top five or six.

We will always separate ourselves from clubs, and I hear this is the boardroom every time ‘we are aiming for 40 points.’ That’s not for us.

We know the size of our club, but we won’t accept that we know our place. We still want to rattle the cage.

There are plenty of teams around us that just want to get to 40 points, just want to survive in the Premier League and their owners are kind of happy.

We want to do more than that, and by the nature of that we give our fans a taste of what might be behind the door, we knock on the door and it doesn’t open and they are disappointed.

To a certain extent we are the victims of our own success, and we have shown our fans what can be achieved by a club like us in the top league in the world and then comes expectations, I guess, to do that all the time.

Even a little blip causes a lot of worry, and yet we have had those blips every year and still finished eighth, seventh, sixth, forgetting the back-to-back promotions and the qualification for Europe.

I understand the nature of support and the dynamics of it are changing. Generations are changing.

We have got people who still romantically remember The Dell, and I guess if you said to some of them ‘do you want go back to the The Dell?’ They’d say ‘yes please.’ West Ham will have the problem with their stadium.

Then you have others who are brought up on gambling websites, mobile phones, Twitter, they watch a game in a different way. They are continually communicating with people elsewhere during the game. Back in my day it was a transistor radio in your ear listening to the results.

There are a whole load of other distractions for fans and we as a club have to modernise with that, understand what our fans want and try and give them that in addition to them being happy and entertained when they come to St Mary’s.

There is a changing dynamic there and that changed has been over the period we have gone from administration to sixth in the Premier League.

Our punishment for that has been the level of expectation there has been now.

The fans should be encouraged that we feel that as well as a board, as 300 odd staff in the club, we have those expectations a well.

What we have to think every day is ‘how can we make that happen?’ I will be the last person to say after all this success we’ve had midtable is fine. I wouldn’t be satisfied. I would be unhappy. I would be disappointed. So would Claude, the players and the rest of the staff.

We have all grown up now with that expectation that every year we can get better.

It’s our slogan to do that, but we could take huge leaps six years ago, but now they are marginal gains. I hate that phrase because it is applied to everything but they really are.

We have not changed. We are still looking for those marginal gains.

How can we with less resources compete with the guys immediately above us and around us? Our targets are always up.

Some people would look over their shoulder and be thinking about how far from the drop they are, we are always thinking ‘who can we catch?’ This week we wanted to catch Everton and it didn’t work out so going into the new year we have to do that and move on.