Southampton vs Tottenham: Danny Ings plays the role of Saints’ silent assassin to kill off Spurs

Five things we learned: Cracks in Jose Mourinho’s Tottenham side revealed themselves as Jack Stephens produced a sublime performance at the back for Southampton

Danny Ings en route to scoring Southampton's winning goal (Reuters)

There is a pause that accompanies all great strikers, a kind of quiet certainty which fills the air just before they shoot, when you know exactly how this will play out. It’s something you sense when Harry Kane hits penalty, or Cristiano Ronaldo meets a header, and more curiously it now seems to follow Southampton striker Danny Ings whenever he’s through on goal.

He knows, too. You can tell from the urgency in the build-up, as he points to exactly where he wants the high through-ball to land. You can see it in the way he flicks it over Toby Alderweireld’s shoulder with the swagger of peak Paul Gascoigne flooring Colin Hendry. And then there’s the finish, shifting his balance before guiding it past a stationary Paulo Gazzaniga.

What stood out was just how assured Ings appeared. At no point did he stop to think, to look up at the goalkeeper or consider what he might do next. If you were to ask him what he was thinking he probably wouldn’t be able to tell you, because this was all instinctive, lost in the moment, mind a blur of concentration.

It was symptomatic of what is already the best season of the 27-year-old’s career. He has 12 goals in the Premier League, 14 in all competitions, scoring at a rate of almost one a game with an average 105 minutes per strike. He has scored all sorts: headers, tap-ins, right foot, left foot, and the fact that he has only one assist tells you all you need to know about his Ings’ priorities. He will run and press and work for the team, but ultimately he is a penalty box striker, someone who runs the channels and darts in front of his marker, who preys on defensive mistakes, who manages to be a constant nuisance and a looming threat while hardly touching the ball.

Perhaps we should have seen all this coming. At Southampton it is the perfect storm of a natural goalscorer finally finding fitness and confidence, back at the club where he began his football journey, where the fans adore him. As Ings put it this week: “I’m here and enjoying my football again. I feel absolutely loved by the fans and my team, so all of that helps altogether.” He fits Ralph Hasenhuttl’s demanding style, where pressing isn’t so much strategy as identity.

Some people need the right environment to flourish. You see it in good managers at the wrong club, in players who can’t quite settle, and particularly in strikers. All that bravado can be undone in an instant, by a manager’s comment or a glaring miss or simply by weight of expectation. At Southampton there is expectation on Ings of a different kind, the sort that makes him feel important, and the power of that feeling should never be overlooked.

Yet it is the surprising nature of Ings’ campaign which he has weaponised. This is his strength, the power to lurk on the fringes before exploding to life, to leave a defender of the calibre of Alderweireld in a twist wondering what exactly just happened. A few seconds ago he was on a carefree jog towards the halfway line; now he’s on his knees in the six-yard box and Spurs are 1-0 down. And as they scrambled to react, Ings already knew what was going to happen.

Spurs’ travel sickness

It is a full year since Tottenham kept a clean sheet away from home in the Premier League. That is an extraordinary and worrying statistic for a team who had consistently been one of the hardest to break through over the previous three or four years.

This is now Jose Mourinho’s biggest challenge, and it will come to define whether he steers Spurs into the top four. There is an array of attacking talent at his disposal, arguably more so than at any time in his managerial career since leaving Real Madrid, but it is defensive unit full of uncertain futures, lacking midfield protection and still missing the presence of a reliable right-back. Mourinho will need to relocate all his old charm if he is to persuade Daniel Levy to address these problems in January.

New Jose or same old Mou?

Mourinho was rather humiliatingly shown a yellow card by Mike Dean late in the game. He had skulked over to the Saints bench to have a word in an opposing coach’s ear, and his indiscretion was reported to the referee by the fourth official on the sideline.

It was a minor moment in the match but it did point towards an answer to a broader question around Mourinho, and whether or not he has left behind the angry man who fell out with everyone in his path at Manchester United. Some who should know better have analysed that Mourinho is a new man, or at least a return to the old more charming man we once knew, but perhaps that is simply because he has been winning. Here he wasn’t, in a game he needed to be, and that snarling character was back, even if he did later offer an apology.

History tells us it is a character likely to reappear plenty more this season.

Kane unable

Harry Kane hobbled off late in the second half after appearing to tweak his hamstring, having just turned the ball into the net only for it to be ruled out for offside. We don’t know yet how long he will be missing, but it did not have the look of only a minor knock. Taking on runaway leaders Liverpool on 11 January would have been hard enough with their talisman. It might just have got a little more difficult.

Stephens shines

Just quietly, Jack Stephens is having an impressive run in the Southampton side. Oddly enough it began when he was subbed on at half-time during Saints’ 9-0 thrashing by Leicester City, yet from there he has become a key cog in a quickly improving side. He scored against Aston Villa, kept a clean sheet at Chelsea and did the same here, and it is was his sweeping first-time ball which picked out Ings for the goal. Southampton look far more assured with Stephens in their defensive unit.