RICKIE Lambert was taken off during last night’s 2-1 win over Hull as a precaution to try and protect a hip injury.

The Saints front man, pictured below, who has barely missed a game since joining the club from Bristol Rovers, was withdrawn during the second half for Lee Barnard, who continues his own recovery from ankle surgery.

After the game Nigel Adkins confirmed the change was a result of an injury to Saints’ top scorer and will now hope the few days before the weekend fixture at Doncaster will prove enough time for Lambert to ready himself to play again.

Adkins said: “He’s feeling his hip a little bit.

“What I’m trying to do is if someone has niggles in little situations we don’t want to put them at risk of losing them for longer periods of time so we try and manage that properly.”

It was partly for that reason that Adkins left out Danny Fox last night, preferring Dan Harding at left back.

Fox was given a tough time by Albert Adomah at Bristol City and, after the work he put in at Ashton Gate, Adkins opted to make a switch.

“Danny had one or two things that I looked at,”

said Adkins. “I changed it round before when we played Saturday, Tuesday and the energy we wan t from the full backs to go up and down. We looked at the stats from Saturday and the work rate Frazer Richardson and Danny Fox put in and the yardage they got was phenomenal.

“He had a scenario with a pelvis as well so these things add up to weigh the scales. It’s not one thing.

“I’ve got a hungry, enthusiastic Dan Harding who was Football League left back of the year last year, great competition for places and I have no qualms about playing the players.

“I just have to make sure they don’t hide things from me.”

The victory over Hull saw another strong performance at right back from Frazer Richardson and Adkins added: “He’s got a phenomenal engine to run up and down.“We always talk about getting width and using our full backs to give us width because we can keep good possession of the ball infield – and the full backs, we ask to give them the width.

“In the modern game the full backs are not classed as defensive players so much but give you that overload out wide and you look at how many times we’ve crossed balls in. We’ve got four exceptional full backs here and, with Ryan Dickson, that’s five and he’s very unfortunate not to be involved because of the competition for places we’ve got.”