SAINTS Left-back Graeme Le Saux believes Saints needed to show a little more composure with their final ball.

He felt it was a decent display at Stamford Bridge, but accepts that the difficulty in stringing passes together ultimately proved costly.

"We played quite well," he said. "But we are not quite making the final pass, we need to take more responsibility on the ball - that will get us going and give us more opportunity to create chances.

"When you are playing full-back and you are an attacking full-back like Paul Telfer and myself, you need extra passes to get forward.

"There is a process of getting into attacking positions, but there were times when we started to get there and it broke down.

"But obviously Chelsea deserve credit as well. Sometimes we had more time on the ball than we realised and if we had taken advantage of that we could have caused them more problems.

"We gave it our best shot and everyone gave 100 per cent, but it still stopped us putting their goal under pressure towards the end of the game."

Le Saux did feel, though, that Saturday's performance in the 2-1 defeat at former club Chelsea was an improvement on the loss to Bolton.

"The performance justified us sitting down and feeling a bit better about ourselves," he said.

"We have got to start getting more clean-sheets.

"We were very professional last season with the number of clean sheets we got and we have got to get back to that."

Including last season, Saints have now gone 12 Premiership matches without a clean sheet - though they have scored in ten of those matches (Chelsea away in May and Aston Villa earlier this month the games in which they have fired a blank). That contrasts sharply with the start to last season, when Paul Jones kept four successive clean sheets after letting in two goals in the opening 10 minutes of the season at Leicester.

"It's getting all the sections together," Le Saux added.

"We've got 16 days now until the next game to let this week become history andfocus on Charlton.

"It's important that we go into that game on song and make sure we do better. It gives everyone a chance to take stock.

"The spirit between the players is very good, we've remained focussed and we need to bring that collective mentality on the pitch.

"All in all, we did well, but the most frustrating is to concede two goals from set-pieces, because we would expect to defend those better.

"In the open game we handled their quality well. Every man took responsibility for his role in the team and that is a good sign."

Le Saux has played all four of Saints' matches this season after injury restricted him during the later half of the 2003/4 campaign.

The 35-year-old was again full of running down the left and said he was particularly pleased to have come through three matches in the space of just a week.

He added: "Coming back from injury, you get into the game mentality. Sometimes you can start off a little bit negative when you come back.

"But to play three matches in a week, I'm delighted."