Oriol Romeu is back in the Southampton colours, having re-signed for the club until the end of the season.
The midfielder is now wearing number 28 for the Saints – if I were prone to football betting, I would have said that’s what he wore for Chelsea too but in fact this is the first time in his career to carry those digits.
The reason for the choice is that the two numbers he wore in his first stint at St Mary’s, 6 and 14, are occupied and so he opted to double the latter.
Romeu moved downwards in the summer of 2020 and it was part of a very satisfying general tidy-up – the kind that were half-common in the 1990s during the infancy of squad numbers but which have all but died out now as players become attached to higher identifiers.
The Saints’ starting team for their last game of the extended 2019-20 – a 3-1 win over Sheffield United to secure 11th place – featured six players with squad numbers greater than 11, including Romeu, and five of those were re-assigned during the truncated close season that followed.
Come the opening day of the 2020-21 season in September, Southampton made the trip to Crystal Palace and the starting lineup was almost identical to that which had been chosen for the Sheffield United game.
The really sore thumb was Jan Bednarek, who had worn 35 for Lech Poznan and stuck with it on moving to the south coast of England – however, at half-time he was replaced by Jannik Vestergaard, meaning that Ralph Hasenhüttl’s side started the second half like this.
Unfortunately, the fact that the missing number 7 was the property of Shane Long, a striker, meant that a full 1-11 was not a prospect.
Incidentally, Hasenhüttl’s own playing career doesn’t indicate a huge desire to have always wanted a 1-11 number so the motivations for such wholesale changes are not immediately apparent.
Rather than wondering too much about why it happened, we’ll just be happy that it did.
This was the squad in full:
