Mauricio Pellegrino will make a final decision on his team for the opening Premier League game against Swansea when he has seen which players are ‘mentally prepared’ for the start of the season.

Saints signed off their pre-season campaign with a 2-0 victory over Sevilla at St Mary’s with Pellegrino fielding what looked the side he will select for the visit of Swansea on Saturday.

However, he insisted that he has not yet finalised his starting line-up for the big opener, and will be assessing his squad during training this week.

He said: “No, because I have got an idea but I take the decision at the end with my intuition when I see which of them are more prepared mentally to compete.

“We are ready and looking forward to do our best.

“The players are fit, all of them, and this is the good news.

“This is the process and we have to keep going and to improve every single week because some of them came back two weeks ago and need more minutes to improve the dynamic on the pitch.

“They are realising the demands of the manager and we have to keep going.”

He added: “We were doing some experiments with some players.

“The other day Ward-Prowse inside, Shane Long outside, and other players out of position, but I have to see different options for the future.

“You never know because football is changing all the time and we have players who can play and that is good news for us.”

The victory over Sevilla came courtesy of goals from Jack Stephens and Manolo Gabbiadini and was a welcome victory after the 4-0 defeat to Augsburg just a few days earlier.

“It was a difficult game because we play against a really good team, a Champions League team who the last few years were on the top of Europe, not just the top of Spain,” said Pellegrino of the Sevilla test.

“We realise how we had to confront these type of games.

“We were running too much from my point of view and we have to improve our capacity to have the ball under pressure.

“It is a process and I think we are in a good way because the spirit of the team is good.

“I think more or less we improve our dynamic and we were strong in the middle, something that happened last Wednesday on the pitch, and we had to keep going.”