A very disappointing day at the office for Saints who really should have taken something back to St Mary's from this game and now again face playing catch up.
This was a game that Saints lost rather than Stoke City won, from the early stages of the game Saints took control and capped that off with a goal from Morgan Schneiderlin on 22 minutes to go into the break in front after a half where they had dominated and stood strong against a Stoke side who were their usual selves full of battle and niggly fouls.
But the referee allowed them to get away with it, the fouls given total was even on 17 yet Saints had four booking with the home side not receiving a single yellow card, I am not blaming that to our defeat, however it shows what Saints were up against and how well they did to keep their passing game going.
But things changed straight after the break, a chip from Nzonzi looked fairly innocuous, Kelvin Davis seemed to thing it was going over and although he covered it seemed content to let it go over, but he misjudged and the ball hit the bar and rebounded down with Diof reacting fastest to prod the ball home and the direction of the game had changed.
However the game was stll very much for Saints to win, although Stoke now had their tails up the truth was that Saints were comfortable and perhaps that was the issue we were comfortable but lacked that certain sense of urgency, that was perhaps best illustrated by the fact that we didn't bring on Shane Long and Eljero Elia till the 86th minute after Stoke had taken the lead, Ronald Koeman doesn't make many wrong decisions, but I did feel that we should have been looking to win the game earlier that that by bringing on certainly Shane Long rather than waiting till it was a desperate finish to try and save a point.
The reality is that any fleeting hopes of Champion League football are virtually gone and it is now going to be all about qualifying for the Europa league and that destiny will become clearer after the Spurs game on Saturday.
Overall in this game Saints did not play badly, we just lacked a spark .