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Saints At Leicester City The Verdict

Not the three points we really needed, but it was a battling display, although it ran out of steam in the final quarter of the game.

To not win the game was a big set back in our quest to avoid relegation, but it is still not terminal and on the plus side there was enough fight out there in the side to suggest that we could yet pull out a miracle in the final four games of the season.

No one could say that Saints did not get stuck in and if we had showed these commitment levels in the most part of this season then we might not be in this predicament.

For 70 minutes we matched Leicester in a game where there were few real chances at either end our best ones falling to Shane Long who in the first half seemed to get tangled up when put through in a good position and then in the second when his effort was well saved.

Solid defending saw the home side have a lot of second half possession in our half and them not only run at us with pace, but put balls in the box and in the main we coped well.

The big disappointment though was the lack of a grandstand finish, you thought that having dug in and took a grip of the game that the final 20 minutes would see us try to get all three points.

But that was not the case, for me and many around me it was baffling why James Ward Prowse was taken off, he seemed to be winning a lot of the ball in the midfield and using it well, when he went off on the hour mark we seemed to lose something both defending and going forward.

Austin coming on with 17 to go was predictable, but like for like with Shane Long was not really changing things although Long had again run himself into the ground.

We waited in anticipation for the third substitution, I am not as big a critic of Tadic as some, but he was clearly spent, he was the obvious choice to be replaced in the final ten minutes and we would go for it, sadly we didn't and Nathan Redmond coming on for Hojbjerg was nothing more than running down the clock with a couple of minutes to go.

I have to say I was disappointed with Mark Hughes in that we seemed content to hold on to a point instead of having a good go in the final minutes and throw caution to the wind, indeed it wasn't even really gambling Redmond for Tadic was the clear substitution with ten minutes to go, fresh legs were needed and there wasn't a change made early enough.

But we have to take the plus points from this and that was a clean sheet and a battling display, in essence nothing has changed, we still need to win three games, one of them has to be Swansea, something has to break the circle surrounding us, perhaps in this season it will be something as simple as pure desperation in the run in.

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