Nathan Jones reveals half-time message to inspire Southampton’s victory against Everton

Nathan Jones explained that he and his coaching staff took several minutes to deliberate the half-time tweaks required to engineer Southampton’s turnaround against Everton.

Jones picked up his first win as Saints boss with a 2-1 victory at Goodison Park.

Everton had the better of things in the first half and opened the scoring in the 39th minute through Amadou Onana’s towering header. But Southampton were back level just 50 seconds into the second half when James Ward-Prowse netted. Then Ward-Prowse deepened the Toffees’ relegation woes further through Ward-Prowse’s superb 78th-minute free-kick.

The defeat moved basement side Southampton level on 15 points with Frank Lampard’s under-fire side.

And Jones detailed his message to his team in the dressing room at the interval.

He said: “It was a bit of disappointment (to go into half-time behind) because we probably didn’t deserve it.

“They didn’t really have any chances, we’ve gone to sleep and haven’t defended it properly. That’s avoidable and we’ll look at that and want to improve on things like that.We were very calculated at half-time.

“There was a hairdryer or a rant or rave. We knew we had to get the tactical decisions. We deliberated for seven, eight, nine minutes and then went bang, this is how we’re going to go.

“Back to the game-plan, be really aggressive made one little switch by putting Sali (Mohammed Salisu) at left-back and switching Kyle Walker-Peters. Then we said: ‘Let’s go after the game’ and we did. To score so quickly settled us down and then we did go after it.”