Saints found the solution to their lack of goals yesterday against Everton, "Who needs Rodriguez wh have got your back four"
It was a superb performance from a Saints side who matched Everton for work rate and effort, with Jack Cork and Steven Davis leading the way ably assisted by Victor Wanyama.
But it has to be said that there was still the old failings present, up front we failed to create much that troubled Howard in the Everton goal the two own goals aside and at the back we seemed to press the self destruct button sometimes, Dejan Lovren being the main culprit and on another day he could have seen two penalties awarded against him and a yellow card for each.
Ironically I felt we played a lot better against Cardiff but lost, the difference against Everton was that we had a bit of luck.
But overall we did what we do well in that our midfield harassed when not in possession and moved it quickly when we had the ball, those who said that Cork and Wanyama could not play in the same team were given the answer and that was an emphatic yes they can, in fact I would profer the opinion that the trio of Wanyama, Davis and Cork were as good as we have seen all season as a midfield unit.
All that our performance lacked was a goal scoring threat, Gallagher had a good game in that he put himself about a bit, but he isnt making the runs off the ball that he needs to, that is a lack of experience and of course games will give him that, but for the moment he isn't quite up to the standard and that was shown in the few times we actually troubled Howard in the Everton goal.
But a win is a win and that puts us on the cusp of cementing 8th place, we now need to start planning for next season on the pitch, it was good to see Harrison Reed used albeit for 4 minutes at the end, but again what was the point of bringing on Guly for 4 minutes of injury time, that told us nothing, why did we not use Matt Targett who was also on the bench, that would have been far more beneficial in the long run.
Saints remaining games look to have little on them now, both for us and Man Utd and Swansea, we have an opportunity to give a few youngsters a chance, lets take it.
Overall though Saints fans left St Mary's feeling happy, we had witnessed another good performance and the own goals glossed over our failure of one of our own players to score, but we know what our problems have been over the past few months, but we have ridden them through and now we can start to make sure that we solve them for next season.