A devastating injury toll that continued to mount throughout the match saw the Kangaroos play one man down for about five minutes in the final term and left Laidley in awe of the gutsy performance.
"We lost two players before half time and then ran around in the last quarter with 17 players on the ground with two blokes who probably shouldn't have been out there. It's a monumental effort," Laidley said.
"Benny Warren went down and Sam Power got whacked. We had Matty [Campbell] there and we needed to make sure that he got his game time, but we didn't want him to re-injure [his hamstring] so we kept him off the ground. Then Sam Wright hurt himself and Daniel Pratt and Adam Simpson probably shouldn't have been out there.
"It was just super."
Daniel Wells was the other player to finish the game "lame" according to Laidley, but Warren is the only definite non-starter next week after suffering a suspected fractured cheekbone in a head clash.
Simpson, who is fighting to play his 300th game against Adelaide next week, and Pratt both sustained calf injuries, while Wright fell awkwardly on his knee late in the last quarter.
Power sat out the game concussed after an off the ball incident involving St Kilda's Steven King late in the first half.
An upset was on the cards before the injuries piled up, with the Roos leading the unbeaten Saints by 29 points in the first term. Given the imbalance in playing personnel later in the match, Laidley said that he had told his players to "just forget the second half".
Laidley stopped short of throwing his weight behind suggestions that emergency substitute players should be allowed on the bench.
"There are lots of issues and we probably need to sit down go through it all first before we really start jumping up and down," he said.
"This is probably one out of the box. I'm not too sure how often this happens."
Injuries aside, Laidley said there were plenty of positives to come from the match.
"You see from the way that we played in the first quarter and 20 minutes that, regardless of some of the results, we're going in the right direction," he said.
"We set ourselves for the contested footy, we set ourselves to tackle them and I said that if we won that and we had a little bit of luck we'd be right in the ball game. But we didn't get any good luck; we had bad luck."
The work of defenders Josh Gibson and Scott Thompson, who played on Nick Riewoldt and Justin Koschitzke respectively, also caught the coach's eye early despite the Saints pair finishing with nine goals between them.
"I thought both their games were good," he said.
"I think Koschitzke kicked three in the last quarter … I don't think we'll count them. Can we rub them out?
"Scott was shattered after the game and I said, 'Mate, hold your head high'. We've just got to get rid of that last quarter because of the physical state that we were in and just draw the positives out of it."
Jack Ziebell was a late withdrawal from the match with the gastro virus that swept through the club's staff during the week, but he was the only player affected by the bug.
