Mauricio Pochettino insists Saints will stick by their principles – despite back-to-back defeats to teams in and around the Premier League relegation scrap.

The Saints boss was the toast of the town as his insistence on a high pressing game led to a great victory over Manchester City at St Mary’s.

But losses have followed at Newcastle and at home to QPR to lead to questions over whether it has already been worked out.

Saints travel to Norwich tomorrow for a game that could massively boost their survival chances if they were to win it.

Pochettino is adamant he will be sticking by his plans.

“That’s our mentality,” he said. “We’re disappointed that we didn’t get any points against Newcastle and QPR, even though we played better than them.

“We have to carry on the way that we’ve been playing because we’ve been playing very well.

“Looking back on QPR, the two chances they were able to get they scored two goals. That’s just not on and it’s something that we need to address. We’ve all accepted that those kind of mistakes cannot happen at all.

“My line of thinking is to keep going with our own philosophy of playing football and being a lot more effective in terms of scoring goals, and nullifying other teams and their goal scoring opportunities.”

The importance of the Norwich game is underlined by the fixture list which shows the next two are tough home games against Liverpool and Chelsea.

“We can’t really get ahead of ourselves, we need to take every game as it comes,” said Pochettino. “The game against Manchester City seemed quite tough and difficult but we did manage it quite well. Instead games that should have been easier, such as QPR, we had problems in them.

“What’s most important is that the team finds its regularity in terms of the mental aspect because in a tactical manner the team is playing in a regular way in these last six games.

“So we just need to find a regular way of playing in a collective and individual manner which perhaps was lacking against QPR.”

Pochettino confirmed the Daily Echo’s story that Adam Lallana is set to recover from the head injury that forced him off against QPR to be in contention to face Norwich.

Left-back Danny Fox is less likely to recover in time. Pochettino also said there were a couple of other injury doubts but refused to say who they are.