Chris Perry is hoping to hold down a place in the starting eleven after helping Saints to a clean sheet against Wycombe.

The veteran defender was praised by his manager for the professionalism he has shown in the build up to the game having been out of the picture recently, and the former Spurs man showed plenty of experience to help the hosts through to a shut out at St. Mary's on Tuesday night.

"It's great to be back playing," he said. "Every single person wants to play and I was obviously a little bit frustrated that I wasn't playing but I just got my head down and tried to do what I could when I could really.

"I got my chance on Saturday which I hopefully took and I've had another game here where I thought I played quite well. I was much happier with my performance but I can only get better through playing an amount of games.

"There's not a lot you can do about it if the manager doesn't want to put you in then he doesn't want to put you in, you've just got to keep doing what you're doing and keep yourself fit because the last thing you want to do is go in with a bad attitude because you'll never get back in that way. It's all about professional standards really which is something perhaps you don't have when you're younger, you sulk a bit. When you're older you become a bit more philosophical and you can deal with it better.

"It was important to get a clean sheet here," he continued. "Obviously experience goes a long way, we know what to do in certain situations within games and maybe that helped us to close this game out at 1-0.

"It was a bit frustrating not to get a second goal, but we managed to keep our discipline and they didn't really have a chance to score so that was a good thing. We felt that Northampton had a couple of chances on Saturday and we let in a sloppy penalty and another goal so we were disappointed with that. Keeping a clean sheet was the main aim and not to give anything away which we've done.

"We weren't at our best, but I felt that we were always in control of the game and when you look at the number of chances that we created but didn't take, it was frustrating not to get a second and a third to be more comfortable.

"We defended well as a unit and it was nice to get a clean sheet because we've been looking to get one for a while now."

The victory took Saints out of the relegation zone and Perry is already looking to the next targets for the season.

"It's a weight off everyone's shoulders. Now we can look up, no-one's looking down at all and we're not thinking about ever going back in there, so it's all up from here and a win at Walsall on Saturday can bring us some way closer to mid-table.

"Once you get to mid-table over the Christmas period you can look to push on to the play-offs. I know it's a long way off at the moment but the main thing was that we had a couple of games before where we could have got out of the bottom four and we didn't, so it was important to finally do that.

"When you start with minus ten points it is hard because we've collected 29 points now which would be just outside the play-offs so it's frustrating when you look at the table and you're still in the bottom four.

"Getting out of it means we can now push on and obviously our goal is to get as many points now and see where it leaves us at the end of the season, but I don't think that play-offs are an unrealistic target. Teams have come from a lot further back than we have in the past and we've given ourselves a good chance, but we need to consolidate that at Walsall on Saturday."