IT was so important that Burnley stood firm when Bournemouth tried to take Danny Ings back to the south coast in the summer.

Ings had his injuries in his first two seasons at Turf Moor and maybe you couldn’t have totally blamed Burnley at the time if they’d thought about it when Bournemouth came in with a bid of around £1m.

Perhaps if Bournemouth had come back with another £500,000 on top of that, they would have had to seriously consider it.

But thankfully the manager, the staff and the directors were clear that they wanted to hang on to Ings. There has never been any doubt about his ability.

Now if Bournemouth or any other club were to try to sign him, you would be talking about five times as much money.

Ings has really improved as a player this season, become a regular goalscorer and added a lot to his valuation.

That has been particularly important after losing Charlie Austin.

QPR are starting to miss Austin now he is injured but, with Ings and Sam Vokes, Burnley haven’t been short of goals.

We maybe didn’t play at our best at Bolton on Tuesday but when you’re on a good run of form sometimes you get that little bit of luck, to win when you haven’t played that well. I think we were due that luck.

Bolton might be struggling but it still isn’t an easy place to go and we hadn’t won there for 30 years, so to get the victory was a great result.

I think it was important that we did get maximum points.

We’re three points ahead of QPR now and there’s no reason why we can’t get automatic promotion.

Thankfully I’m not making the long trip to Bournemouth today in this awful weather, but fair play to the fans who are and hopefully the trip back will be short because we have three points.

Normally you would be happy with a draw at Bournemouth, but I think with the form we’re in we can be looking at getting three points.

If we can keep the same performance level as in recent weeks, I think we’ll have too much for Bouremmouth.

QPR don’t play until tomorrow so if we could win and go six points clear, that would really put the pressure on them. They would have to do their utmost to beat Reading.

We saw this week that Burnley won at home to Millwall and then QPR couldn’t respond, losing at Derby on Monday night.

The pressure is all on them and it would be great to get a win to put a bit of pressure on Leicester too – to say that even though they’re doing really well, that we want to go up as champions, although I would definitely take second place now!

There’s no pressure on us, no-one expects us to get automatic promtoion. But I think with the form we’re in, fans will be hoping for a real push now.