THERE is a very good reason why goalscorers command top dollar, both in terms of fees and wages.

And it’s been there for all to see at St Mary’s this season.

Saints do have some very hard working frontmen.

You cannot question the effort and commitment of Saints’ forward players.

These guys offer a lot and the squad would be worse off without their presence.

However, at this stage in their careers, they are not natural goalscorers. Maybe it is something they can develop, maybe it’s not.

But for now Saints have a lot of what you might call second strikers.

These are guys who would normally play off of a main man.

The main man usually doesn’t do much running but bags the goals.

The second striker does their share of leg work, creates openings for others and then weighs in with a few goals here and there as well.

Though Saints don’t play a 4-4-2 system, that still applies because of the player in the hole playing off of a frontman, as the wide players should do to a slightly lesser extent.

As everybody knows, Saints do have natural goalscorers on the books, namely Stern John and Grzegorz Rasiak.

These are main men. They don’t offer a huge amount to the team but what they do bring, indeed have brought in the past, is goals.

For that reason they earn top dollar, and for that reason they are out on loan.

It is a sad reality, though, that they are the only thing this side is really lacking at the moment.

Against Sheffield Wednesday it was another all too predictable St Mary’s tale.

Saints come out of the traps firing on all cylinders.

In the first half they played some great football and should have been home and dry come half-time with the chances they created.

As it was they went in at the break just 1-0 up.

In the second half the pressure of trying to get a much-needed home win started to tell. As is human nature, the team started to drop deep to try and defend what they had, inviting more and more pressure on themselves.

In the end that pressure told as Wednesday equalised and a game that should have been a comfortable three points for Saints again ended with just one.

Though much of the focus is on the statistic that shows just one home league win at St Mary’s this season in 11 attempts, the far more telling one is that in those 11 games Saints have only scored eight goals.

That is the major problem for Jan Poortvliet.

What the answer is is hard to say but for things to vastly improve Saints have to find a way of accommodating a goalscorer in their ranks and wage structure.

Saints took the lead against Wednesday on 14 minutes with a lovely back-to-front move that culminated in Andrew Surman feeding the ball to Bradley Wright-Phillips.

He cut in from the left, once in the area shifted the ball onto his right foot and curled a shot into the bottom corner.

It was a great platform and Saints looked like they would build on it.

As confidence was high, Lee Grant was forced into saves from Surman and Wright-Phillips before McGoldrick put a header from six yards out over the bar.

The best Wednesday had mustered in the first half was an off target header from Leon Clarke and a weak shot from the Wednesday frontman.

As the game wore on and Saints nerves became frayed, they started giving the ball away and dropping deeper and deeper.

The one thing you could say is that Poortvliet has got Saints well drilled throughout the team now and they were still keeping their shape and, though they were all over them, Wednesday weren’t creating numerous chances.

After sub Matt Paterson had put one effort into the side netting and decided to go alone rather than square the ball only to see his shot blocked on another, came a big Wednesday chance.

With five minutes remaining the ball came through to Marcus Tudgay, but inside the area and with time and space to pick his spot he lashed well wide.

But any sighs of relief were shortlived as just two minutes later the ball was laid back into Tudgay’s path and from 20 yards he sidefooted a shot into Kelvin Davis’ bottom left hand corner.

It could have got even worse had Davis not produced a good save from Bartosz Sluzarski in injury time.

The only thing separating Saints from a massive forward push is one thing that money can buy.