St Kilda coach Ross Lyon praised his team's desire to win and courage under fire on Sunday night saying it learned from last week's shock loss to lowly West Coast as it struggled to get over another bottom-four team in Port Adelaide at Telstra Dome.

The Saints' eight-point win over the Power on Sunday was one of their most important of the season as it put Lyon's team back in the eight - at the expense of Brisbane - but the seventh-placed Saints will have to beat eighth-placed Collingwood at the MCG next Saturday night to stay there.

The Saints did it the hard way on Sunday and if not for the courage of captain Nick Riewoldt and former captain Luke Ball in particular may have suffered its second straight loss and all but cost itself a place in the September action.

Riewoldt took a magnificent mark backing into a pack with just under seven minutes left in the final term to give the Saints a two-goal cushion and then as Port surged again, Ball bravely threw himself into a pack in another marking contest and hurt himself in colliding with his much bigger team-mate Justin Koschitzke but his actions enabled Jason Gram to seal the win as he gathered the crumbs and ran into an open goal.

They were the sort of individual acts of courage that coaches just love and Lyon was no exception on Sunday night.

"The great Hawthorn era of the 1980s - I was coached by David Parkin and had some contact with Alan Jeans and Alan Joyce and they used to talk about how there is a moment in a game where someone has to go (and commit an act of courage under pressure) and today our players did that," he said.

"Luke Ball (who was carried off with a leg injury and concussion after his collision with Koschitzke in the dying minutes) is up and about but he is sore and it was a massive collision between him and Koschitzke."

"But he (Ball) is a real leader and he stood up and I think Nick (Riewoldt) has really grown into the captaincy and under adversity he has got a great capacity to stand up not only game day but also during the week in driving the playing group and the club."

While Lyon said he was 'relieved' to get the four points and admitted that most people would have felt the Saints would have dealt with Port much more easily, he said his team also could easily have suffered another shock loss as it did last week against West Coast.

"I think we learned from last week against West Coast that there are no easy games," he said.

"I can understand everyone crystal balling and talking about finals but you can't play them if you are not in them and internally we were disappointed after our effort last week and we wanted to make sure our contests and tackling was strong this week."

"And I thought that was realty strong because we had 70-odd tackles and we won the contested ball, which we haven't been great at all year."