There weren't many concentrating on anything else than Danny Ings last night, but in the background there was the little matter of Saints playing Levante in the third of the official pre season friendlies.

When the news broke that Danny Ings had left Saints around 30 minutes before kick off at St Mary's last night it seemed that most Southampton supporters had taken to social media and were not concerned about what happened in this game against mid table Spanish side Levante.

Ralph Hasenhuttl opted to split the squad a little and have a small bench with only Shane Long and three others on it.

The emphasis was on giving those on the pitch 90 minutes.

The game although not a pulsating affair was a good contest with both sides working hard to keep chances down to a minimum, in the centre of midfield Ibrahima Diallo and Oriol Romeu worked hard and looked good.

Fraser Forster looked alert and confident in the Saints goal and commanded his box and made a decent save as well

Up front Che Adams and Nathan Tella were quick and caused problems, but it was a defender who won the game with a great overlapping goal, Kyle Walker Peters made a great run into the corner of the Levante box and fired home from around 18 yards with a low shot into the far corner, a worthy goal to win any game.

So overall this was a decent win and bodes well for next season, it showed that we have three players from last season who were bit part players in Salisu, Tella and Diallo who could well become key players next season.

It also showed that our new left back Romain Perraud had a bit of steel in his play, he could dish it out when needed.

So on a night of doom and gloom on social media, at St Mary's it was down to business and we showed that we might have lost Ings, but we still have a decent squad, last season fell away because of the injury crisis, hopefully that was a freak occurrence and won't be repeated in the coming year.

No doubt this season will be tough, but slowly but surely Ralph Hasenhuttl has got a squad together that is very much his own and that has to be a good thing.

Photo: Action Images

dirk_doone added 08:45 - Aug 5 I wondered why the Levante team had such high shirt numbers - only one player had a number between 1 and 11 (#6 Duarte). But, then I saw they have a home game against Alaves tomorrow, where I guess they need their first team.
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JoeEgg added 09:14 - Aug 5 I didn't see the game so shouldn't comment but as Dirk says this was probably their reserve team so maybe we should have done better. What I sadly fear - despite the claim that Ralph is putting together a good squad - is that there will be game after game where we fail to score. True the likes of Tella and Adams need time but I am convinced that we will struggle to win matches at the top level if they represent our best striking options.

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SaintPaulVW added 11:32 - Aug 5 Diallo looks good but he doesn't look like a defensive midfielder. Looks more like a replacement for Armstrong to me. If we can't get goals like we did last year, we really need cover for Romeu.
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Peterx added 11:59 - Aug 5 Was very happy with what I saw from Perraud. Forster has tipped my thinking to supporting him for the starting berth. Diallo and Salisu are looking better and better. Other than that looked like the team have been through a decent pre-season.
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SanMarco added 15:46 - Aug 5 I think JoeEgg's point is the key one. We don't look bad in most positions but to me it looked pretty power-puff when it came to looking like scoring. The biggest point about Ings' departure is that he needs replacing. We have lots of players who CAN play up front but how many of them are going to score enough at the highest level? Remember that Che scores most of his goals vs Sheff Utd...

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