Saddlers still facing survival dogfight

Lee Beevers today admitted Walsall were left feeling damned after they blew their Chesterfield chance.

The defender conceded the Saddlers suffered a major body blow after drawing 1-1 on Saturday – to stay rooted in the League One drop zone.

Jack Lester's last minute leveller at the b2net Stadium robbed Walsall of a vital win at the basement boys and Beevers revealed the team are shattered.

"It's devastating," said the 28-year-old, after just two wins in 21 games.

"It feels like we lost. The players are all down. It is not a nice feeling and it's happened in previous weeks as well, where we've conceded late on or we've gone 1-0 up and haven't been able to see it out. We need to turn those draws into wins.

"Wins are what we really need now. We have stopped the rot a bit with the losses but we are on a run. That's the fifth draw we've had.

"We've got a platform now and hopefully we can go on now and keep the momentum going and keep building."

Alex Nicholls' fifth goal of the season fired them ahead but Lester's late show ensured the Saddlers remained a point behind fifth-bottom Scunthorpe.

And Nicholls insisted Walsall cannot afford to keep blowing the leads – after losing 15 points from winning positions this season.

He said: "I will look back on the goal as a positive for myself from a personal point of view but we've got to start winning games.

"We can't dominate like we did in the first half and then let it slip. We didn't play badly.

"But the way we invited pressure on to ourselves and dropped deeper and deeper was not good enough.

"Sometimes in the game at a pause in the second half we needed to rally round, talk to each other and get ourselves higher up the pitch. It didn't seem to happen and the inevitable happened.

"The season we are having, that's the way it's going for us at the moment. But we need to start turning draws into wins. That's the be all and end all."

"We just aren't killing teams off. We need to start doing that and making sure when we do take the lead we keep it."