FRASER Forster has been forgiven by his team-mates for his costly error in the miserable 3-0 defeat at Crystal Palace, with Oriol Romeu Jose Fonte stating that he doesn’t deserve any criticism.

The Saints goalkeeper allowed Christian Benteke to score after he badly miscued a clearance from a back-pass from Jose Fonte at Selhurst Park.

Forster apologised for the mistake that saw Palace open the scoring, before James Tomkins added a second two minutes later and Benteke complete his brace late on.

But Romeu and Fonte believe that Forster deserves to be saved from being slated, considering his performances in the past have helped Saints significantly.

Romeu said: “It’s not easy to take, but he’s clever. He’s done a lot for us and, of course, he had credit on making a mistake one day. He saved us so many times and we cannot say anything to him.

“Sometimes we are relying on him playing out from the back and he needs to play a lot of balls under pressure.

“Just one simple mistake comes into that and that’s what happened today.

“Unluckily it happened to him.”

He added: “As time goes on we’ll learn to play under this pressure.

“Fraser has proved that he can still play perfectly. He’s an amazing goalkeeper and I’m sure it won’t affect him.”

Fonte stated that Saints will move on from it and it should be marked down as just one of those things.

“Obviously he’s a great goalkeeper and I’m not going to even talk about it because it happens to anyone,” he said.

“We move on from that. We are a team. We support each-other and I’m sure he’ll give us so many points, so it’s tough to take it, but it happens in football.”

The captain was disappointed after Saints conceded “three cheap goals” to struggling Palace, who had lost six in a row before welcoming Claude Puel's men.

“When you come to a place like this, to a team that’s struggling, first of all you have to match the intensity and match the way they play,” he said.

“We conceded three cheap goals. The first one was what it was, the second one from a corner – it’s not possible. When you give two goals away to a team that hold on it’s difficult after that.

“Obviously we were in control, but we didn’t create much. It was just a bad day in my opinion and we have to do better than this.”