SAINTS have given all of us a happy Christmas and New Year.

Three wins out of four over the holiday period has put us back in what I call the Premier League’s ‘middle eight’.

If they carry on as they are I’m sure they will soon be securely placed above the bottom six.

The bottom six is often made up of the three most recently promoted clubs and clubs with smaller grounds like Burnley and Bournemouth.

There are always surprises and in the last few years Leicester City have provided the biggest by jumping into the top six,

Burnley in particular have over recent years become a well-established middle-eight club while Bournemouth have also been there for the last three seasons.

But they are now looking over their shoulders, while Saints are looking upwards again after three wins out of four.

For Saints, the big tests of course are coming up in the next four weeks, away to Leicester and Liverpool.

We all know what Leicester did to us when we played them down here, while Liverpool haven’t lost a Premier League game at Anfield since April 2017. If we can get results at both these clubs it would, to put it bluntly, make an ‘L’ of a difference.

One of the features of modern football is frequent managerial changes and, typically, there were a number of departures before Christmas.

Surprise, surprise, there has been an immediate upturn in form from Watford and West Ham since Nigel Pearson and David Moyes came in.

These two are traditional type managers who will have sorted the dressing room out before they even get on the pitch.

Someone should be able to ask these players ‘how come you can suddenly work harder on and off the ball and score more goals but you couldn’t do it for the last man?’

Tottenham made a similar start under Mr Mourinho, who made every back page on his arrival. Mourinho turned things around initially, starting with three successive wins, but without taking anything away from Saints, Tottenham did not look like the same team he had in his first few games.

It will be interesting to see if he can get them playing as they did when he first arrived.

Meanwhile, our board is being rewarded for standing by Ralph.

After a good start during the second half of last season things didn’t go too well at the start of this campaign, particularly against Leicester at the end of October. But he’s now repaying them. Let’s hope he and the team can keep the smiles on our faces throughout 2020.

Happy New Year to everyone and many congratulations to one of my ex-players, Sir Francis Benali, on his MBE for his wonderful achievements in raising £1m for Cancer Research UK. I knew he was going to get something because Royston Smith and I put his name forward.

But if I had my way he would have been knighted and we would now be calling him Sir Francis!

Franny’s efforts are sure to benefit many people and hopefully some can be directed to his home county as I know Hampshire Cancer Research is desperate for funds at the moment.