Southampton, the transition-based team that doesn’t do counter-attacks

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For a team that once had their football likened to a game of ping-pong, Southampton don’t tend to return serve very quickly nowadays.

Last season, as Ralph Hasenhuttl began to consolidate the foundations of his favoured 4-2-2-2, the system’s essence largely pivoted in getting the ball from A to B. The narrow structure lent itself to funnelling attacks through central areas, encouraging players to pass and run vertically.

And, when possible, utilising quick turnovers in possession to exploit vacant spaces. In October, this writer wrote a piece on Stuart Armstrong, detailing how and why the Scot flourished as the team’s space invader; tasked with seizing and sprinting into large areas of open grass. He was the figurehead of adding impetus to attacks.

Therefore, in the ensuing seven months, you would assume that heavy emphasis would equate to an increase in counter-attacking threat.

Disclaimer: Prost International has a confession to make. Their early season premonitions didn’t go quite as suspected.

Southampton’s ball dominance has been one of the many surprises of this campaign, where the days of vacuuming every single pass into the opposition half has been displaced by a more cerebral approach to build up play. A desire to pass through the thirds and coax teams onto them has meant Hasenhuttl’s men are more likely to sustain attacks for longer.

Possession gains notwithstanding, all of this does mean that counter-attacks, a typical one lasting 14.7 seconds on average, are becoming quite the rarity.

This season, Southampton are one of four Premier League sides yet to score from a counter-attack. But unlike the darling of analytics Brighton and their perennial relationship with xG, theories cannot be based around a team not making the most of their fast break opportunities. In their 36 games, Saints have only attempted nine counter-attacks.

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Since January 19, when they beat Shrewsbury 2-0 in the FA Cup, Southampton have completed just one successful counter-attack since, coming against Brighton in March. A successful counter-attack is quantified by a deep transition that either results in a shot on target or a goal.

Against Fulham on Saturday, despite two of their three goals coming through free-flowing, line-breaking patterns of play, neither were classed as counter-attacks. More pertinently, the match followed a similar narrative of scoring goals without attempting one single fast break.

Yes, I know, it is indeed a baffling contradiction in their play. Particularly when you look at the aesthetics of Hasenhuttl football and how, habitually and unfailingly, words such as ‘pressing’ and ‘intensity’ form a prominent part of commentators rhetoric when they watch Southampton matches.

Various data analytics measure a counter-attack by a passage of play that starts from winning the ball in your own half before travelling vertically and quickly deep into opposition territory. StatsPerform.com say a counter-attack “occurs once a team regains possession and moves the ball into an attacking area via passes, dribbles or a combination of both.”

Southampton still being stuck on zero isn’t necessarily a bad thing, nor a particular bone of contention. It does, however, act as jarring misconception, especially when you consider their principles of play. To put their counter-attacking output into context, this writer has compared Southampton’s numbers with Leeds, a team perhaps most similar in football stylings. 

While Leeds’ man marking system is more prolonged and steadfast, both teams are flagrantly encouraged to mark men, rather than space. In the same amount of matches this campaign, Tuesday’s opponents Leeds have scored six goals from counter-attacks. From this metric alone, we can assume that Southampton’s brand of football doesn’t exactly prove the antithesis to counter-attacking. If anything, it should encourage it. 

Though reasons for this paradoxical data are somewhat perplexing, there are caveats. Due to Southampton’s insistence in winning the ball extremely high, a large number of their ball turnovers occur in the opposition half, thereby not quantifying as a counter-attack. 

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When teams play through Southampton’s press and resist the second, often third waves of high pressure, Hasenhuttl’s men tend to only be able to win the ball in deep positions. This notion is currently being felt more keenly and sharply, with Oriol Romeu – the side’s key provoker of turnovers – missing from central midfield. Regaining possession so deep into your own half means it would then take an considerable effort to then launch a counter-attack with any purpose.

Further explanations lead to Southampton’s rather lopsided slant of attack. According to Whoscored.com, Saints fashion 41 percent of their offensive patterns down their left-hand side. To put these numbers into perspective, Manchester United, a side well-versed and well-known to use the same flank as a conduit for their attacks, have only utilised that side one percent more than Southampton (42 percent).

It is worth bearing in mind Ole Gunnar Solskjær probably has more reason to use the left than Hasenhuttl, too. Paul Pogba tends to drift into those areas and supplement the acute understanding Marcus Rashford and Luke Shaw seem to have with one another. 

Subsequently, in various counter-attacking scenarios, in where there is a necessity for quickness of thought and instinctive variation, Saints’ propensity to heavily rely on the left might provide logic in to why so many fast breaks fail to get off the ground. Attacking the same channel results in predictable breakaways and being increasingly easy to read.

The lack of width on the right-hand side, due to Armstrong’s inclination to glide diagonally and into the left channel, means when a counter-attack could transpire, all four front positions in the 4-2-2-2 are ahead of the ball and gravitating towards the left. In turn, this makes it much easier for defences to foil Saints’ attempts than if Hasenhuttl had an archetypal right-sided winger, blessed with out-and-out pace. 

That leads us onto the next hypothesis. While Southampton have a myriad of technically adept players in the front four positions – all capable of working in tight areas and all possessing a change of speed – none of them have innate, unrefined straight line pace, capable of surging past defenders over a 20-to-30 metre distance. Think Gareth Bale’s infamous Copa del Rey goal in 2014.

Southampton have proven hamstrung by counter-attacks going the other way, too. Only four teams have conceded more goals through this method than Southampton (4). In mitigation, this is largely due to Hasenhuttl’s preference in wanting to sustain an immensely high line at intermittent points of the season.

The high line aims to condense the vertical distance between his centre backs and strikers, giving his midfielders less space to cover in central areas and more bodies around the ball to hunt in packs. The flip side to that belief, however, is a discernibly high line can sometimes be too high; opposing teams are galvanised to make fewer but more progressive passes, all the while having copious amounts of space to run into from through balls.

Check Heung-min Son’s day out at St Mary’s last September as a case in point. In just three passes from regaining possession, Harry Kane punishes a poorly structured diagonal Saints back-line, leading to Son’s goal. 

Southampton’s tendency to chase matches a little too zealously can also cause a detrimental effect. In the match against Leicester in January, 90 minutes that would foreshadow a downturn in fortunes in later months, Saints pushed too high when searching for an equaliser.

The distance between Jack Stephens on the ball and the midfield became too extensive and caused a disconnect. As a result, Stephens’ hopeful pass forward is cut out by Youri Tielemans. Though not all in picture, seven Saints players are caught ahead of the ball.

Note how Leicester and their two wingers in Ayoze Perez and Harvey Barnes (who stay wide, in contrast to Saints) are in positions to counter. Tielemans eventually times his pass to the onrushing Barnes who finishes past McCarthy.

For a team that places heavy emphasis on vertical milage, with and without the ball, it remains quite the head-scratcher that Southampton haven’t scored a goal from a counter-attack this season. Whether it is part of the many quirks in their play or a more ominous problem that will surface overtime, it is a facet that is yet to be refined this season.