Matej Vydra produced a moment of magic to end his goalscoring drought and keep Burnley looking up in the Premier League after inflicting defeat on a Southampton side still nervously peering over their shoulder.
Vydra, a first-half substitute, scored his first goal for 511 days to fire Sean Dyche’s side to victory in filthy conditions on the south coast after a freakish goal by Ashley Westwood opened the scoring. Danny Ings cancelled out Westwood’s strike direct from a corner, his 15th goal of the season, but Burnley held on to earn victory over Ralph Hasenhüttl’s side.
This was a reverse of the opening game of the season, when Hasenhüttl bemoaned seven weeks of pre-season training going to waste in an instant after his team’s second-half capitulation. But here, after a reduced winter break following their FA Cup fourth-round replay defeat to Tottenham Hotspur, four days of work unravelled inside 95 seconds. Ings, guarding the near post, inexplicably allowed Westwood’s corner to curl in, purposefully bending out of the way to allow the ball smooth passage, much to the surprise of the Southampton goalkeeper Alex McCarthy.
Westwood wheeled away, his routine corner having flummoxed Ings but Southampton responded with great gusto amid challenging conditions. Jack Stephens stormed forward from defence before Burnley eventually intervened, cutting the ball out of a corner before Ings charged to block Phil Bardsley’s pass upfield, his eagerness to make amends clear. Ings threw himself at the ball and the striker’s momentum sent him flying over the touchline and into the Southampton technical area, where he almost collided with Hasenhüttl on the follow through.
Ings was determined to redeem himself and, despite his team going home empty-handed, it was the striker who earned Southampton a lifeline 15 minutes after gifting Burnley the opener. Ben Mee and Jack Cork failed to clear the danger on the edge of their 18-yard box, inviting Ings to pick up the loose ball, wriggle into an alcove of space and power a strike into the pocket of Nick Pope’s goal; only Sergio Agüero and Jamie Vardy have scored more Premier League goals this season.
A vicious swirling wind, hail and relentless rain kept things interesting and the game occasionally drifted into slapstick, be it defenders skidding on the turf as they desperately tried to clear their lines or the Burnley goalkeeper Pope in effect capsizing after booting the ball downfield. Pope superbly denied Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg approaching stoppage time, while Southampton also had a penalty appeal turned down late on, when the video assistant referee Michael Oliver deemed Mee did not handball Stephens’s cross.
Vydra, though, made light of the conditions to score a classy match-winning goal having replaced the injured Chris Wood midway through the first half. Westwood flighted a wonderful diagonal pass towards Vydra, who effortlessly chested the ball away from Stephens with his first touch before dinking it away from the Southampton debutant Kyle Walker-Peters and arrowing a thunderous left-footed drive into the top corner of the Southampton goal.
