Martin hails Saints' courage and togetherness
Russell Martin was left “knackered” after watching his Southampton side trade blows with Norwich in a match that lasted 107 minutes and contained 46 shots, 11 yellow cards and eight goals.
Saints led once, albeit for only two minutes, but trailed three times, including up to the 97th minute, when Adam Armstrong buried his second penalty of the day to rescue a point.
That led Martin to commend the courage of his team, who kept pushing, together with a hugely supportive crowd of over 30,000 inside St Mary’s, and ultimately got their rewards – the second time Saints have scored late to earn a result in their two league games so far.
“I feel knackered,” Martin said. “I’m really pleased with so much of it and really annoyed and frustrated at a few bits of it as well, obviously conceding four goals and too many moments for Norwich in transition.
“Two really good teams – they’re a team that will be up there, I think. Their real strength is in transition, and we gave them too many moments, but the lads were relentless.
“We had so many opportunities, we had 31 shots, the crowd were brilliant, so I enjoyed so much of it – the feel, the atmosphere. We didn’t deserve to lose. To have lost that game would’ve been really disappointing, really frustrating.
“The players had an opportunity to show togetherness, character, resilience, and they did. They came back from behind twice and eradicated the nerves of the first 15 minutes.
“I think there’s still a few people feeling what went on last season, and how today was going to go, so there was a bit of nerves there, but they came through that brilliantly, and showed big courage in the way we want to play.
“I’m really pleased that we got the point. We’re two games in, we’ve got four points, it’s a solid start, but also in the two performances there has been so much to be so pleased with, and now loads to work on, but we knew that was going to be the case.
“There’s a balance to be found between the amount of ball we had and how dangerous we looked, but also limiting their opportunities – we have to do better than that. The players know that as well, because Gavin didn’t deserve to concede four goals today.
“I said ‘strap in’, I didn’t mean that much! Hopefully everyone will see we want to be quick with the ball, we want to move forward, we want to be aggressive, we want to be the dominant team, and we need to keep building to be that.
“We should’ve scored more today. The pleasing thing is we created a lot more today than we did last week, but we also gave up a lot more, so there’s definitely a balance to be had.”
