Ralph Hasenhuttl has some good news for Saints fans ahead of the trip to Wolverhampton Wanderers on Monday evening, he has also given an update on Danny Ings.

Ralph Hasenhuttl has not messed around and got straight to the point with regard to James Ward Prowse and Ryan Bertrand and it is great news.

"Both are looking good and are training with the team and should be available for this game," Hasenhuttl said, speaking at his pre-match press conference.

This is no great surprise as both had been pictured training at full pelt with the squad on Wednesday and given the extra couple of days to the game, with Saints being the final fixture of the weekend on Monday evening, they should only get stronger in the period since the pictures were published.

But the news on Danny Ings is not so positive and although it should be noted that being only 3 weeks since the Aston Villa game there is no reason why it should be, Ralph was a little coy about Ings progress.

"He is walking around. There is still time to go. It looks good. It was small surgery but it still good when he looks good."

This tells us virtually nothing, in truth he was walking around after the injury but prior to the surgery, by all accounts he could also run, but just not comfortably.

We will only really know when the player returns to training which he doesn't appear to have done so yet.

If he was going to make the optimistic estimate of his return to first team action of 4 weeks which would be next weekend , then I would have thought he would have needed to have been running by this stage prior to a week of training ahead of the game.

The Austrian is known for being very coy in these situations and Ings could well be already at this stage of his rehabilitation, but he hasn't revealed this today.

So it looks like the most likely return for the King Of The Scummers will be the Brighton home game on December 5th.

Ralph will be keen not to rush Ings back and will hope that Che Adams can keep scoring and lead the line as well as he did against Newcastle and that the likes of Theo Walcott, Djenepo, Shane Long Nathan Redmond and Stuart Armstrong can also provide an attacking and scoring threat to plug the gap until Ings returns.

Saints are hopeful that Ings aside everyone else is fit and ready for the trip to Wolves a game that could see us firmly up there with the front runners or conversely in 7th or 8th and looking over our shoulders a bit.

“Everybody else is in training at the moment, but I haven’t seen everybody coming back from the internationals,” Hasenhüttl added, speaking on Friday morning.

“All the guys are back today and it’s an advantage that we play on Monday, so we have a few sessions to work on a few parts, which is definitely good.”

Photo: Action Images

ElijahK added 13:28 - Nov 20 Other than the Newcastle game (as we went TOP of the flipping league!) these next two games are certainly 2 of the most important so far! I mean as much as Man U haven’t had the greatest of starts, our games against them and Wolves will be challenging and even more so seeing that we’ll most likely not have Ings for either of them. In my opinion, I think these next 2 games will be telling us how this season is going to go, as if we get 4/6 points, then yeah I can see us having a cracking season. Whilst if we get like 3/2 I think we’ll be going for a Europa league sort of position (like 7th). Whilst if we get 0/1 point, then it will be more of a mid table finish with us mainly just remembering the fact that we were top for like 40 hours, season.

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