Daryl's Notebook: Quick thoughts from Southampton vs West Ham
It's the return of the Notebook, for a little bit, and it's for a slightly momentous occasion.
Firstly, dear readers, I wish you a happy holidays and hoped you had a great Christmas & Boxing Day!
Taking a quick break from the ASEAN Cup Diary, it is the return of the Notebook where I will be taking notes from a match that I want to watch. As Ivan Jurić took charge of his first match as Southampton’s boss yesterday, my feeling was to be cautious of someone who has never managed outside of Italy before. It was not a spotlight appointment for sure, even though I am aware that he did great work at Torino and Hellas Verona and tried his best during his short stint at Roma.
But when I saw Alex Stewart, former co-founder of Tifo Football and someone that I have admired for a long time, posted this on his Bluesky, I know I have to watch the match and see the positive signs for myself. And I have not watched a lot of Southampton this season knowing that they would be on a downward trend after the first few matches of the season under Russell Martin. As such, this Notebook edition will be for some quick thoughts and analysis of Jurić’s first match for Southampton against West Ham, even though I know we lost the match, but I like to read the things between the lines, OK?!
Lineup
(I have still not watched the match at this point, so everything that I say here are just predictions based on Southampton’s lineup last night)
Jurić opted not to change the formation that Southampton has been using under Russell Martin, maybe not that much cause the Croatian chose the 3-4-1-2 instead of the 3-5-2. Looking at the few matches that Jurić managed Roma, this did not come as a surprise because his Roma side also played with a back three and with a 3-4-2-1 formation.
What’s interesting about this formation was it allowed (#18) Mateus Fernandes played as a #10 instead of being on the left or right of a flat midfield three. The Portuguese midfielder has been thriving as a playmaker and has good passing and dribbling abilities, and maybe playing behind the two strikers (and hopefully in between the lines) would bring the best out of Fernandes. The double pivot pairing of (#4) Flynn Downes and (#26) Lesley Ugochukwu was also interesting considering Ugochukwu has not been used that much by Martin. Both looked strong in defence and could win the ball well to help regaining possession while possessed the ability to pass the ball out from the back. Hopefully Jurić came up with something to patch our problem of players making individual errors while playing from the back.
Another pairing that caught my eyes was (#9) Adam Armstrong and (#32) Paul Onuachu. It was the typical big man-small man pairing up top of ye olden days of English football, and this could help Armstrong actually. Armstrong’s biggest strength from last season was the ability to run into the channels or run in behind the opposition’s backline because he was quick off the ball. This season, Martin took that to the extreme by having him and either (#19) Cameron Archer or (#17) Ben Brereton Díaz stayed extremely wide and left literally no one down the middle. With Onuachu, hopefully Saints would have a focal point of attack and someone who could hold up the ball for Armstrong to make the types of runs that he loved to make.
First half
Early minutes into the first half and that style change was already prominent. Whenever the ball was played back to him, keeper (#30) Aaron Ramsdale immediately looked to kick the ball long and aimed it towards Onuachu up front. There was still remnants of the playing out from the back and attempted to beat West Ham’s press, which would be hard to get rid of in just a few days, but Southampton looked a lot more direct in just the first few minutes compared to the whole Premier League season under Martin. Also, lots more progressive passes have been played as well along with the usual calmness and composed when playing out from the back.
A man-to-man pressing & mid-block also looked interesting. Saints had a narrow front three with Fernandes joining the striker duo and they aimed to close down players down the central area, potentially then forced West Ham to move wide where they could overload to regain possession. The players also looked more aggressive when West Ham tried to play through their mid block, particularly Downes and Ugochukwu, which was nice to see.
Lots of emphasis on using crosses to get the ball into the box, which made sense when the team had two wing-backs who were good at delivering crosses in (#2) Kyle Walker-Peters and (#16) Yukinari Sugawara, and a target man in Onuachu. Even though the Nigerian striker did well to wiggle his way out of pressure to be at the end of crosses, West Ham reacted well to that plan by swarming the box and looked to block crosses coming in from both wings, which had worked for them so far. They also tried to have two players staying on the edge of the box for any cutbacks made by Southampton wing-backs.
I would have loved to see Fernandes getting involved more into the team’s play because he was just nowhere to be found in between the lines. A lot of Southampton’s attacking sequences only involved passes being played from side to side and targeted the wing-backs, which did not give a lot of opportunities and actions for Fernandes to be involved. This was just 30 minutes into the game so there might have been changes later on, but this is something that I want to highlight for Jurić’s upcoming matches, especially when teams like West Ham will look to defend either in a tight low block or just swarm the box outright, and Fernandes might be a difference maker when things get tough. At least, though, the movement of both Downes and Ugochukwu to pull West Ham’s double pivot deeper into their half and created space in between the lines for Fernandes to operate in was encouraging.
Going back to Southampton’s man-to-man press, it looked decent but could also be very dangerous, and one of West Ham’s situations already demonstrated that. The away side could bring more players into their own half while playing out from the back to bait Southampton players to follow them. This left very few players at the back for the host and West Ham substitute keeper (#23) Alphonse Areola could play a long ball forward to the wingers, who could bring the ball down and beat Southampton’s wing-backs for pace.
Side note: Onuachu looked so good in the first half, and this was what Southampton was missing up front. I have said this a lot, but I don’t think Onuachu is a bad player, he was just misused by previous managers and he just turned out to be bad for the club. You don’t have to look very far to see his ability, last season he thrived at Trabzonspor as a step down from even the Belgian Pro League with Genk!
Second half
Lots of challenges being thrown early into the second half by West Ham, which I can only guess that it might have been an attempt to prevent Southampton from having longer possession sequences. The commentator also mentioned that a lot of West Ham players have missed a match after receiving five yellow cards so far this season, so this should not have surprised me.
Rough goal to concede, but it was clear that Southampton did not deal with West Ham’s corner well as they could not even clear the ball away from the box. When the ball was delivered back into the box, a few Southampton defenders lost concentration and firstly allowed (#28) Tomáš Souček to head the ball towards (#11) Niclas Füllkrug, and secondly allowed (#20) Jarrod Bowen to run in freely and picked up the ball from the German striker for an easy tap-in.
At the back, West Ham has started to build on their defensive solidity and Southampton’s attacks have looked a lot less threatening after 25 minutes into the second half. Now with (#3) Aaron Cresswell came onto the pitch, they switched to a back five which gave them more numbers to defend wide attacks, and have now technically switched off all of Southampton’s possible attacking plans. This, in turn, also gave them more control of the match to create more and more counter-attacking opportunities as time went on.
From there, the match turned into a cagey clash where both teams had opportunities to attack but could not find the final ball to score. Jurić brought on a lot of wide players like left wing-back (#3) Ryan Manning and the winger duo of (#20) Kamaldeen Sulemana and (#33) Tyler Dibling made slight sense when the main goal was to get the ball as close and as often to Onuachu as possible as they were fresh and could dribble down the touchline. Still, West Ham did not look like they would budge because they have started to close out the match a long while ago, particularly when they brought on Cresswell and changed to a back five.
Wrapping up
Like Alex said, I can see the positive signs from Jurić’s style as Southampton looked more progressive with their passes and no more aimlessly passing around the back and risked losing the ball inside the team’s own defensive third. The Croatian also started Onuachu and brought the best out of him by giving him the ball more often and let him did what he did best, which was holding the ball up.
I still want to stay cautious though, because this could easily be a small new manager bounce. With Onuachu, Southampton had a single attack plan, which was either playing the ball wide to the wing-backs and encouraged them to cross the ball into the box for Onuachu, or just played a long ball directly to the Nigerian striker himself. The team became a lot more reliant on him and when things did not work out, particularly when West Ham started to fall back and defend closer to their own box, they looked lost and did not know what else to do to create better goal-scoring opportunities.
I will follow Jurić’s next few matches with keen interest with hope that if things start to turn around for the team, it will be something promising to look forward to in the future. There is pretty much no chance that Southampton will survive relegation this season, let’s be real here. But at the very least, if Jurić’s team shows promising signs, we will know what to expect from them in the Championship and how the next few transfer windows will turn out.