Before we even get into this, some of you are probably wondering, why Southampton, why should we care and what is the point, they are not important. Great question, well if you are supporting a big 6 club, I would think learning more about the state of your academy+ side would be beneficial, looking at you specifically scousers and wanna be American scousers.
But on a more serious note, lower end EPL teams are people too and have just as passionate a fan base as the big 6, if not more so in some cases, and while Saints are a quaint club by top flight standards, we have been regulars in the Prem now for a decade and some of your favorite childhood UK based players, likely came through our vaunted academy doors at some point. I say ours, because I am also personally a Southampton fan for reasons unclear to even myself, other than I love a good core of young players, and the underdog. It is far to easy for Americans, in particular, to attach themselves to one of the several media darlings the best league in the world has to offer, even when some of those sides are relics of eras long passed or are yet to grace their billion dollar facilities with any silverware.
I digress though, we are here to talk about why, if Southampton are not in a relatively comfortable position above the drop by January, the new ownership group must look beyond Ralph Hassenhuttl for new leadership. To be transparent, I am certainly as anti-Ralph as they come, but hopefully will make it clear as to why below. I want to ignore the media speculation surrounding the “lost locker room” making its way through the notoriously, unscrupulous, English media as both players and coach deny it, though the firefighters in my family have a saying about “where there is smoke”. I want to look at things from as unbiased a position as possible, using data and yes, some eyeball testing, to concisely describe why Ralph Out is the best way forward for my beloved south coast darlings.
The biggest point against Ralph is that he fails to hang on to them. Since he arrived in 2018, no EPL side has dropped more points from winning positions than Saints. The exact number is 71 points since 2018, 15 more than any other team and a whopping 52 the last two seasons leading into 2022-2023. That is DISGUSTING. Theoretically, it should be unsustainable, yet perhaps Ralph’s greatest achievement is that is has yet to cost the club the ignominious reality that is relegation.
It is not enough to point at the numbers and say this is bad. One must then find the source of such horror, if truly to get to the crux of it. Let us start with this, there are roughly 3,420 minutes available over 38 EPL games every year. James Ward-Prowse, during the past two seasons, has played 6,635 minutes of an available 6,840 and that does not include Cup games. I understand your best guy needs to be out there as much as possible, but JWP is putting up GK like minutes numbers, in fact he lead the league in minutes in 2020-2021, playing the entirety of every single EPL game. The cover in the center of the park during Ralph’s tenure has been Diallo and that is really it, with cameo’s here and there from Will Smallbone and the like. In a high press system that Ralph favors, these numbers over the course of every match and every season, are not sustainable. Add that with Saints using the 3rd joint fewest players in 2021-2022, and you can see where the trend is going.
I want to also point at the Shane Long phenomenon, and no, not his record for fastest top flight goal ever. I wanted to dig up the stats on this but I am a mere mortal. Anyone who watches Saints regularly knows that during his tenure, in games we are winning, nothing suited Ralph more than the dreaded “Defensive Substitute” to see out a match in the form of pacey and rather bouncy, Irishman, Shane Long. Long, as energetic and pressing as he is, is a striker, often replacing, another striker in games where Saints had the lead. Now, at the time, Ralph favored a 4-2-2-2 so instead of adding Diallo in the the middle of the park for one of the strikers, we often saw Shane go on for one of the front two. The theory, I am nearly sure, was to defend from the front, a strategy that the 71 dropped points would suggest, failed miserably. This is not to hate on Shane Long, he is doing as his gaffer asks but I cannot imagine the mentality of the players leading by a goal in the 75th minute seeing a striker come on for another striker, when you have 2 players in the middle of the park on a team that is average in terms of possession stats.
The fact is this, Southampton are a thin squad asking their best players to log huge minutes across the length of a campaign. Sure, other teams do this as well but often rest players in the FA and League Cup, something JWP would know little about. The other issue is clearly, Southampton are taught to high press, that is it and the personnel decisions would support that, with a plethora of “positionless”, high energy players like Stuart Armstrong, Mo Elynounoussi, Nathan Redmon, Nathan Tella, Theo Walcott and more recently, Joe Aribo asked to do… jobs, I guess. The defensive structure of the team, especially late on, has been a problem, when possession goes out the window and what you really need is not Shane Long, but probably another body through the center of the pitch to help absorb the coming onslaught, something Southampton have failed to do at historic levels under Ralph.
Now those are the numbers of it, and to be fair to Ralph, previous ownership has been particularly tight with the purse strings. Under the new ownership, things have changed with Southampton bringing in both youth and talent to not only bolster the first XI, but provide some much needed depth to a likely heavy legged team. With this new influx, the likes of Lavia, ABK, and Livramento when he returns, Ralph has no more excuses, squad wise, to fail. He has the pieces (though a true 9 would have helped) for Southampton, worst case, to be safe from the drop rather comfortably. To this point they have sured up defensively, a much needed improvement under the newly minted international duo of Ghana’s Salisu and Germany’s ABK. Scoring is still a major issue but in a reversal, if not still alarming trend, Saints have picked up a league leading 7 points from losing positions but have really yet to put together a full, confident, 90 minutes. Going into the World Cup break, and the January window, new ownership will have to make a decision, with the new influx of cash and talent, is there a marked improvement under the Austrian or is it more of the same tired problems. With an entirely new backroom staff, the only person left for the blame to fall upon, is the smartly dressed man patrolling the Saints technical area.
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