Released by Southampton as a ten-year old, a “devastated’ Danny Ings spent the next five years playing for his father’s team, Itchen Tyro, until Bournemouth offered him a trial and he duly progressed through their Centre of Excellence while attending college in Hamble.

He spent the first few months of the 2010-11 season playing Conference South football for Dorchester before an injury crisis at Dean Court curtailed the loan and he debuted for Bournemouth in a League One fixture away to MK Dons in the December. Eighteen months later he was subject to a £1m transfer to Burnley, following his old manager, Eddie Howe who had made the move to Turf Moor eight months earlier. Initially he had to compete with two future Southampton forwards, Charlie Austin and Jay Rodriguez but once both men had departed, Danny became Burnley’s main striker for the 2013-14 season which culminated in him winning the Championship Player of the Year at the Football League awards, his 22 goals helping the Clarets to gain promotion to the Premier League.

In 2015 Liverpool signed him for a £8m fee (later getting another £3.6m following his sale to Saints), but in the October – in his first training session with new manager Jurgen Klopp – he suffered an anterior cruciate ligament injury to his left knee that sidelined him for the rest of the season. There was more bad luck the following season with another injury on his right knee, which kept him out of the first team for 11 months. With game time scarce Ings agitated to leave and rejoined his home-town club, very late on the last day of the summer transfer window, for a fee around £18m.

In his first season at St Mary’s he took time to settle during which time manager Mark Hughes made way for Ralph Hasenhuttl, but during 2019-20 he became only the third Saints player to pass the 20 goal mark in the Premier League, form which lead to a recall to the England set-up nearly five years after winning his first cap in 2015. A brace of goals in a League Cup-tie at Fratton Park firmly cemented his place in the fans’ affections, but there were clouds ahead. During the 2020-21 season he contributed a valuable 12 goals, but he missed a third of the season owing to a series of niggling injuries and catching Covid-19. There was also another problem looming on the horizon.

He had originally signed a four-year contract which expired in 2022. Southampton offered him an extension which would have seen him become the club’s highest-paid player in their history, but after months of speculation and very suddenly, the club announced he had been sold to Aston Villa for £30m, just as St Mary’s hosted its first pre-season friendly of the new campaign. The news stunned the fans in the stadium and had caught the journalists in the press box napping. Despite Saints having to give Liverpool a further £2m the fee was a good one for a man just turned 29 and about to enter the final year of his contract, but the fact remained that despite his fragile fitness record, Danny Ings’s priceless ability to consistently find the net – better than a goal every two starts – would be almost impossible to replace at short notice.