Southampton preview: Hasenhuttl ready to impart his tactical philosophy on Saints
At the start of a new football season, fans’ excitement is increasingly directed towards new signings – players who offer hope that this campaign can be different.
For Southampton, there are certainly high hopes for striker Che Adams, who has arrived from Birmingham for £15m, and winger Moussa Djenepo, who has joined from Standard Liege, but it is someone else who is the object of the most affection.
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He may have joined the Saints on 5 December last year, been involved in 25 competitive games already and enjoyed a fair bit of success, but the pervasive feeling at St Mary’s is that manager Ralph Hasenhuttl is only just getting started.
The former RB Leipzig boss inherited a prize job from Mark Hughes last winter, one which suited him down to the ground, and yet there were caveats.
A bloated, demoralised squad needed reshaping and re-energising to avoid the nightmare scenario of relegation from the Premier League.
Start afresh
Hasenhuttl achieved his first objective, winning 30 points from 23 league games to steer the Saints clear of the dreaded drop and finish in 16th place.
There were flashes of the Austrian’s ideas, impressive wins over Arsenal, Tottenham and Leicester, and enough glimpses of his passion and personality to endear him to supporters.
But the grim reality of the dreary, stale, uninspiring football of the Hughes era meant that once the spectre of relegation had faded the 2018-19 season was one to be quickly unforgotten about and moved on from. That is what this weekend, away at Burnley, represents: a chance to start afresh.
Hasenhuttl has had a full six-week pre-season in which to run his players around, impart his ideas and work on tactics. He can now put his trademark all-action, high-intensity, high-pressing style into practice.
“It’s about pressing, hunting, being hungry,” he told Sky Sports shortly after joining Southampton.
“When you have the ball, find a quick decision, a quick transition at the front. It’s about emotion, being full of passion and also keeping the tempo on a high level. Don’t slow down the game.”
Nasty opponent
Like Jurgen Klopp, to whom he is frequently compared following his work in Germany with Ingolstadt and Leipzig, Hasenhuttl wants his side to press high up the pitch, swarm the opposition and win the ball back in dangerous areas.
Possession for possession’s sake is regarded as pointless; Saints averaged 45.6 per cent under Hasenhuttl last season and just 34 per cent in their victories.
Formations are flexible too. Hasenhuttl has experimented with 4-2-2-2, 3-4-3 and 4-3-3, but whichever way they line up Southampton’s overarching aim, besides the simplistic one of winning, is to be a “nasty opponent” to play against – a description you could hardly attribute to Saints under his most recent predecessor.
With mobile forwards such as Adams, Shane Long and Danny Ings leading the line ahead of a midfield marshalled by the ever-improving Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg and a smattering of academy graduates, Hasenhuttl now has the players willing to carry out his master-plan.
After treading water under Claude Puel, Mauricio Pellegrino and Hughes for three seasons, Southampton finally have a coherent plan in place that allows them to look up, rather than over their shoulder.
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