It’s about that time of the year when thoughts begin to turn to the Player of the Season award and Nathan Redmond has to be right up there among the leading contenders.

His brace against Wolves helped lift Saints to the point where Premier League safety is all but assured.

But leaving aside this game in isolation, it is his story over the course of the entire season that makes his case for the big award.

Given it was only 18 months ago that Redmond was being left out of the team for his own good, his confidence having sunk to rock bottom with his own fans booing him, his comeback has been remarkable.

Redmond was one of the few players who actually performed fairly well during Mark Hughes’ time in charge earlier this season, and then has taken it up a step further under Ralph Hasenhuttl.

The style in which Hasenhuttl wants Saints to play is far more swashbuckling than what we have witnessed from Saints in recent years and relies on pace and the ability to run with the ball.

Redmond has both of those qualities in his locker.

It easy to forget that he is only 25-years-old given he has been around the game so long he has notched up 300 career appearances already.

But it does underline that he can still be a player with improvement to come, and with all eight of his goals this season having been delivered since Hasenhuttl took charge, it suggests he has a manager who can get the best out of him.

Another of those who has the physical attributes to potentially flourish under the Austrian is Josh Sims.

Having been sent out on loan to Reading, and later sent back because he wasn’t playing in the Championship, he got a first Premier League start of the season in the game against Wolves.

Again, it was his pace and running that caused so many problems and once more underlined his potential.

The way Hasenhuttl has squeezed so much more out of pretty much every player has contributed to the uplift in results that means the final weeks of the season look like a celebration of survival more than a nervy ending.

This looked like it may be a decisive weekend and that was how it proved.

Cardiff’s defeat at Burnley stretched the gap between Saints and the bottom three into an eight-point chasm. And Brighton’s humbling at home to Bournemouth has left them deep in trouble ahead of their crunch meeting with Cardiff meeting tomorrow night.

Saints, on the other hand, are looking onwards and, crucially, upwards.