Southamp­ton loan ace Joe Roth­well has now giv­en his ver­dict on the won­der goal he scored against Hud­der­s­field Town.

Southamp­ton dipped into the loan mar­ket to sign Joe Roth­well from Bournemouth in the Jan­u­ary trans­fer win­dow.

The 29-year-old arrived at St Mary’s in pur­suit of reg­u­lar first-team foot­ball after play­ing just 379 min­utes across 11 Pre­mier League appear­ances for the Cher­ries.

Roth­well has added an abun­dance of qual­i­ty to Southampton’s mid­field, par­tic­u­lar­ly from the bench, as the impe­ri­ous Stu­art Arm­strong con­tin­ues his fine form.

In a sea­son that hinges on huge moments, espe­cial­ly in the race for pro­mo­tion, the for­mer Black­burn Rovers man has deliv­ered the goods when it has mat­tered most.

Southamp­ton came dan­ger­ous­ly close to drop­ping points at home to strug­glers Hud­der­s­field Town. Rus­sell Martin’s men were 2–0 down at half-time and need­ed a moment of bril­liance to spark a come­back.

That came from the right boot of Roth­well, who struck a stu­pen­dous vol­ley into the top left cor­ner to get the Saints back into the game just after the break.

It was a goal that deserved to be cel­e­brat­ed, regard­less of the cur­rent score, but Roth­well instead ran straight back to the halfway line as Southamp­ton were 2–1 down at that point.

Joe Rothwell shares what Southampton teammates did after Huddersfield wonder goal

Roth­well hasn’t scored many goals across his career, net­ting just three times dur­ing his final two sea­sons at Ewood Park, so it was no sur­prise to see him rank that out­ra­geous vol­ley as the best he’s ever scored.

He told Sky Sports: “I’ve not scored that many so yeah, it was quite easy for that one to be the best. I knew as soon as it left my boot that it had a chance and as soon as I’d seen it going towards the cor­ner and I didn’t even watch it go in, I just turned round and ran back.”

Run­ning straight back to the halfway line was per­haps the cor­rect deci­sion from Roth­well giv­en his side were 2–1 down and it proved to be the cor­rect one as he scored the equalis­er a minute lat­er.

How­ev­er, the mid­field­er has now revealed that his team­mates were dis­ap­point­ed that he didn’t cel­e­brate such an incred­i­ble goal.

“Obvi­ous­ly, we were get­ting beat at the time so the lads gave me a bit of stick about not cel­e­brat­ing the goal,” Roth­well said.

Regard­less of whether his team­mates were annoyed or not, that won­der vol­ley against the Ter­ri­ers could make all the dif­fer­ence come the end of the sea­son.

Southamp­ton need to real­is­ti­cal­ly win their two games in hand to stand any chance of achiev­ing auto­mat­ic pro­mo­tion as they are cur­rent­ly nine points behind sec­ond-place Leices­ter City.

If they do keep up with the relent­less pace being set at the top of the Cham­pi­onship and break into the top two, they may look back at Rothwell’s goal as the turn­ing point in their cam­paign.

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