REVENGE will be in the air when Wanderers' board their specially-chartered jet to Southampton tomorrow morning.

The memory of Marian Pahars' late winner at the Reebok in September still wrankles, not just because it was a smash and grab raid or that it brought the first blot on their Premiership copybook but because of what it started.

Wanderers - the nation's Surprise Guys - went into the game walking tall. But they were dramatically cut down to size that Saturday afternoon and, although they felt they didn't deserve that or many of the other defeats they have suffered since, hindsight shows it to have been a landmark result which has had the most serious of repercussions.

"I was hugely disappointed at the time," Sam Allardyce said, reflecting on the most painful of experiences.

"It took the edge off our play for a while. And it was the first blow, the first real setback we had because we didn't deserve to lose the game. But that's the Premiership and I said then that's what would happen if we weren't careful and many, many times this season it has happened to us. Too often! So I had to do something."

The consequences of that 1-0 defeat - a dreadful home run and a sequence of 12 Premiership games without a win before they beat West Ham at the Reebok last time out - eventually prompted Allardyce to undertake a major overhaul of his squad with the investment, belatedly but better late than never, in the likes of Fredi Bobic, Stig Tofting, Youri Djorkaeff and most recently Mario Espartero.

"The confidence the squad gained at the start of the season by achieving those absolutely fantastic results then diminished," the manager explains. "Hence the new players. Because after I'd rotated the players and given them the chances they wanted and we still didn't achieve the results we wanted - even though performances were very good - I finally went out and did something about it

"I would have preferred it to have been a lot earlier than this but, for lots and lots of reasons, it couldn't be."

It remains to be seen whether the new-look Wanderers can deliver but Allardyce believes he has drafted in the quality - Bobic and Djorkaeff - and the strength - Tofting and Espartero - to give them a better than even chance of coming out tops in the survival scrap.

Of Espartero, the 24-year-old Frenchman who previously had trials with Blackburn and Rangers, Allardyce enthuses: "He's a tackler! His use of the ball is good and his work rate level is good ... but he tackles.

"It's no use being a good footballing side if you can't win the ball back and, if you have ball winners in midfield you can win the ball higher up the pitch.

"I'm hoping with players like 'Super' Mario and Stig Tofting we will protect the back line and break up the opposition attacks in midfield so that we can get going as an attacking force."

In theory he knows he has the correct recipe and the right ingredients (although he would dearly love to have the "readies" to add Real Madrid centre-back Ramos Ivan Campo to his list of transfer coups.

The only question is whether, with just 12 games left, he has time to serve up a winning dish.