Ivan Juric watches on as solid Southampton claim point at Fulham

Juric’s may not be a CV immediately to delight Southampton fans, game though the Torino side he led for three years was. A 12-game stint at Roma this season perhaps hints at the major reason he has been appointed: that there was no compensation to be paid. Southampton had held talks with their former assistant coach Danny Röhl but springing him from his contract at Sheffield Wednesday would have been costly.

It’s not entirely clear what Juric gains from the situation. A fan of heavy metal, he has graduated from his teenage love of Metallica and Megadeth to Obituary and Carcass; in the context of Southampton’s season, the gags are too obvious to be worth making. The official line is that he does not take over team affairs until Monday, but it was notable that the 3-4-2-1 shape – just about the only formation Southampton had not tried so far this season – is what he preferred at both Torino and Roma.

Juric may speak of being optimistic and wanting to make the team press harder and be more aggressive, but he’s in serious danger of what might be termed the Jan Siewert Trap. Even if he can improve performances, it would require something miraculous for them to avoid relegation which, almost inevitably, means lost confidence and diminished faith in him. Siewert, having been brought in to oversee Huddersfield’s relegation in January 2019, was sacked three games into the following season. Plenty of teams have believed there was wisdom in letting a new manager get a close-up view of the squad as they went down, the better to lead their promotion bid the following season, only to find that rebirth strangled by negativity.

But there were promising signs on Sunday. At the very least, Southampton were not the pushovers they had become. Once Aaron Ramsdale, wearing a modified glove to protect his fractured finger, had tipped an early Alex Iwobi chip over the bar, it was a first half of very little incident. Harry Wilson and Iwobi both had a couple of speculative long-range efforts and there was a spectacular flash of lightning behind the Riverside stand but, that aside, the main interest was seeing just how long Ramsdale could take over a goalkick without incurring the wrath of the referee Tim Robinson. But then his namesake once spent a tour of Pakistan batting with Bill Athey, so perhaps patience goes with the title.

Fulham began the weekend eighth in the table having lost only four times in the league all season and yet, well as they are playing, there is an odd sense that it would haven’t taken much for their league position to be even better. In the past three weeks they have led against Tottenham, Arsenal and Liverpool and not won any of them, while they also led against Manchester City and Aston Villa before losing. In a different way, this too felt like an opportunity missed.