WHEN Southampton opened their new £30million training centre last week Matt Le Tissier came out with an illuminating quote about the club’s ability to develop young talent.

“If you can’t develop yourself as a football player here, you won’t develop anywhere else,” said the Saints legend.

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The roll-call of players to come through the youth system on the south coast is undoubtedly impressive, and if Le Tissier is to be believed, if you don’t make it there, you won’t make it anywhere else at a comparable level.

But when England Under 21s take to Turf Moor tonight for the friendly with Portugal, there will be one player on the pitch who shows Le Tissier’s comments are a fallacy, and it is a player that everyone at Turf Moor can take a great deal of pride in.

As a primary school pupil Danny Ings trained with Southampton and played alongside Saints luminaries such as Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain.

But at the age of 10 he was released by the club, and the journey had to start again, playing Sunday League football until he was taken on by Southampton’s south coast neighbours Bournemouth.

It is there he began to make a name for himself, and it may just be that the finest thing Eddie Howe did in his 21 months in charge of the Clarets was to convince a precocious but unproven 19-year-old striker to make the move to East Lancashire with him.

Ings’ progression to the Premier League and international recognition hasn’t followed the conventional path.

Four years ago he was on loan at Dorchester Town in the Conference South, when most 18-year-olds tipped for the big time are usually on loan in the Championship and League One, or on the fringes of a Premier League side’s first team.

He may have cost Howe £1million to move in the same direction in August 2011, but it is a fee that is looking more of a bargain as the weeks pass.

He was by no means the finished project when he rocked up at Gawthorpe and he had to show resilience and character to recover from serious knee injuries in successive seasons.

Under the guidance of Sean Dyche he has become the goal scorer he was always capable of becoming, and since returning from injury he has looked a Premier League natural, showing a cool head to score his first top flight goal against Everton, and his confidence to try and score from his own half.

His talent may have always been there, but it is as Burnley that he has been turned into the almost-finished article.

Off the pitch he has made spontaneous donations to charity, become an internet sensation for giving his boots to disabled Clarets fan Joseph Skinner on the last day of the 2013 season and later this month he launch his own disability sports project, with the help of Burnley FC in the Community.

When Ings pulls on the Three Lions at Turf Moor tonight, it should be a proud occasion for the club and the town.