What could have been a disastrous weekend was merely a drama rather than a crisis after Aston Villa losing last night completed a miserable weekend for all the other teams around us QPR excepted.
Most Saints supporters would have breathed a sigh of relief last night when they heard the result from Villa Park, Man City's narrow win over Aston Villa completed a miserable weekend for the bottom 8 clubs with only QPR of course winning and Sunderland getting a point at home to Fulham, this maintained the status quo and meant that no one really gained or lost from the weekends results.
For Saints it could have been much much worse if Villa and Wigan had won in that we could have found ourselves only out of the bottom three on goal difference and even now we are looking over our shoulders and with a tough run of games coming up in the next month, to be blunt we will be doing well if we are still out of the bottom three in four weeks time after our trip to Reading, it will be perhaps the result of that game that determines whether we face a nervy end to the season or if we can pull away.
The table shows how it could be oh so different though, if we had beaten QPR it would have done us the world of good, six points clear of relegation would have been a big ask for any of the other sides to catch up at this stage of the season, I know it is "If only" but if we had also held on at Wigan then it would be almost game over, we would have then found ourselves 9 points clear of the bottom three.
This just shows us how tight the bottom of this division really is and how we can ill afford to keep on conceding these sloppy goals, no one is outclassing us or outplaying us including Man Utd at Old Trafford, but the fact of the matter is that only five points from the last six games is not good enough given how we dominated all six games for long periods, 11 goals conceded and in fairness probably virtually all of them could have been prevented with better defending and not losing concentration at vital times.
Perhaps the loss on Saturday will focus us for what is a difficult trip to Norwich City, I certainly hope so as defeat there will put us in trouble.