Dejan Lovren believes Saints' performance against Manchester City shows how strong the club's squad is.

Mauricio Pochettino's side were lacking a number of key players through injury on Saturday, yet ended up dominating much of the match.

There were excellent performances from the likes of Jack Cork and Calum Chambers, while Paulo Gazzaniga could be proud of his performance in goal.

“You have a lot of players who can replace the injured players and everybody believes in them – everybody,” said Lovren. “It’s important. A lot of players, they were improving – Chambers, Cork, Steven Davis, Paulo. It was really at the top level and I hope we will stay like this."

After three defeats on the spin, albeit with the first two coming at Arsenal and Chelsea, Lovren stressed how vital it was that Saints snapped that run.

“It’s really important,” he said. “I think the most important thing now was keeping our game and keeping our style.

“We didn’t panic and I think that’s the important thing, to keep our style, to have the confidence.

“Ok, it was a little bit difficult after three games we didn’t win, but we were showing the character and I think we have a good squad, a positive squad.

“Everybody is in the head prepared for everything, so we need just to believe and to play our game."

Being able to impose their own style of play was not necessarily a simple task, against a City starting line-up that cost £200m to assemble.

Yet, after an ominous first ten minutes, Saints began to control large parts of the game.

“We cannot change just for Man City,” said Lovren. “With the last three games I was happy with our performance. I cannot tell we wasn’t good.

“Man City are in form, they were scoring a lot of goals before this game – in each game three or four goals – so that means they had a lot of respect for us.”