RICHARD Chaplow celebrated his first goal in nearly a year at St Mary’s yesterday, as he helped Saints to a 4-1 win over Peterborough.

The on-loan Preston midfielder rounded off a flowing team move with a thumping finish from Dean Hammond’s delivery to make it 3-0 early in the second-half.

It was Chaplow’s first goal since arriving at St Mary’s for a second spell, and ended a scoring drought that goes back to December 2009.

The 25-year-old was last on the mark when he netted in Preston’s 2-0 Championship home win over Plymouth on December 12.

So he was relieved to have finally put an end to his long dry-spell in front of goal.

“I think it’s been coming for a while now,” he said.

“I’ve had a few chances since I came here and it’s something that I’m trying to add to my game if I can.

“But I think throughout the team today we’ve passed the ball well and we encouraged each other when passes went astray, and that third goal epitomised the team’s performance.”

Chaplow said the players were delighted with the way they imposed themselves on The Posh yesterday.

“We had a high tempo at the start of the game which was something that we’ve been looking to do for a while now and I thought that we were unfortunate to go in at just 1-0,” he said.

“We wanted to emulate the first half by using the same first ten minutes of tempo (to start the second half).

“We thought they would probably be in for a bit of a telling off so they’d be coming at us, so we wanted to start brightly again, similarly to Carlisle where we got an early goal.

“We did it again, and from there on we were on the front foot and in the ascendancy.”