AS a football pundit with a media-friendly knockout punch, I guess I'm about as popular as greenfly at the Chelsea Flower Show.

No surprise then when TalkSport brought their breakfast show to the Friends Provident St Mary's Stadium recently that they asked if I would go on the programme at 6.20am. I mean, who listens to incisive, football chat at that unearthly hour when all sensible folk are tucked up under their duvets counting the zzzzs?

We talked about Saints' new stadium, the parking problems, prospects for the season ahead - and Rupert Lowe.

The question was a pretty acid one - is it right that someone with no footballing background should be in charge of a Premiership club?

After all, here's a well-spoken man who attended an exclusive preparatory school in Oxfordshire, and then went to Radley public school where rugby, and not football, is played. Apparently hockey is Rupert's game, and he didn't see his first professional football game until six months before he took charge of Southampton Football Club.

Rupert is a businessman, not a dyed-in-the-wool football fan, and yet that doesn't make him a bad chairman.

In fact, Rupert's objective eye and business brain have been an asset to Southampton Football Club.

You can't fault the guy because, as I sung his praises to the learned listeners of TalkSport radio, he delivered on his number one promise. He promised a new stadium, and it was delivered - on time.

As football clubs up and down the land are left reeling in the red of deepening debt, he has kept the club financially fit. A £96,000 pre-tax loss by Southampton Leisure, the club's holding company, was a vast improvement when they were budgeting for a deficit in the region of £2.3million.

And in the maelstrom of balancing the books, as well as suffering the twin distractions of Dave Jones' court case plus Glenn Hoddle's swift flight to the capital, Rupert has ensured Saints are a Premiership club.

The boy's done good, but the acid test now will be how he reacts to pressures on the field.

These are not desperate times for the club - no league wins in three - but they are concerning ones.

Will he invest in new players, particularly strikers? Does he have the ambition to take Saints up to the next level and, importantly, how will he react come Christmas time if the team are still in the bottom three?