Ward-Prowse: We've laid a foundation down

Saints moved out of the bottom three as Oriol Romeu’s 23rd minute effort was added to by Ward-Prowse shortly before half-time.

And the midfielder believes there is now a platform to build from in order to keep pushing away from danger, particularly as lessons were learned from recent weeks.

“It’s a big relief. We know we need to beat the teams around us to pick up important points. You could feel the positivity, which I think stemmed from us in the changing room.

“You could feel the determination to put things right after a difficult two games and we wanted to put what happened here last time at Cardiff to bed.

“It was important [to start well] but I think it was more important the way we managed the game in the second-half. We spoke about it after the Cardiff game when we got back into it that maybe we should have settled for a point in the situation we’re in.

“To manage the game and look comfortable like we did shows we’ve learned and developed under the manager with the training we’ve been doing.

“We’ve put a good foundation down tonight on game management, being aggressive, winning the ball and scoring some good goals. We’ve got to take that into the weekend.

“We go to Manchester United which is a great place and we’ve caused a few upsets there in the past before so we want to build that foundation to get a bit of momentum going into the last period of the season.”