Energy, intelligence and end product: How Kyle Walker-Peters is becoming Southampton’s secret attacking weapon
Danny Ings and Ché Adams combined to score Southampton’s only goal in a 1–0 win away at Burnley on Saturday night, putting Ralph Hasenhüttl’s side on the board after two defeats in the new Premier League season.
It was a terrible match for the neutrals, and it wasn’t much better for Burnley or Saints fans, either. However, it was the type of game that the visitors would have lost, perhaps convincingly, only a matter of months ago. After three winless attempts to outdo Sean Dyche, Hasenhüttl was finally able to construct a game plan that saw Southampton overcome the Clarets.
Ordinarily, a scrappy 1–0 win away at a counterpart of a similar standing is satisfying; a solid victory on the road, and little more. But for Saints, it seemed to be a significant step in the right direction. Having started the campaign in concerning fashion, an unlikely three points with few pressing issues throughout the match will ease a lot of fears. It will also vindicate some of Hasenhüttl’s methods: his persistence with the Ings and Adams strike force; his preference to use Jannik Vestergaard to win aerial duels and progress the ball; his reluctance, perhaps forced rather than favoured, to maintain the balance of the team until late on before making substitutions. His celebratory reaction to the final whistle spoke volumes.
However, in the midst of what has been a mixed opening to the 2020/21 campaign, Southampton’s shining light, aside from the irrepressible Ings and his relentless goalscoring, has burned as brightly as he did during the final quarter of last season. Kyle Walker-Peters is not perfect, and he remains an inexperienced, precocious player for whom Saints must provide patience and trust, but he is certainly proving to be a crucial cog in the team’s attacking approach.
During his formative years at Tottenham Hotspur, there was an expectation that Walker-Peters would develop into a competent Premier League right-back, whose attacking qualities would far outweigh his defensive capabilities. His dribbling skills had been noted as his standout trait, with his technical ability of the highest standard. It was his lack of physicality, indecisiveness and positional concerns in defensive transition that provided justifiable causes for concern.
Walker-Peters, despite being 23-years-old, is relatively inexperienced at the top level, having seen his first-team opportunities at Spurs harshly limited. He has since received plenty more chances to prove his worth at Southampton, and he has grabbed them with both hands, securing himself a £12 million move to the club earlier in the summer.
Widely considered a bargain following his exceptional form in the back-end of last season, it seems inarguable that Southampton are a considerably better team with Walker-Peters on the right-hand side than when they had Cédric Soares in contention, as well as the young but unconvincing Yan Valery. He is not without his flaws, and his tactical awareness in defensive situations — particularly in terms of his positioning, both in transition and when Saints are not in possession for spells — should gradually improve with more time at Staplewood with Hasenhüttl. However, his impact at the top end of the pitch has been enormous, and Southampton are reaping the rewards for having two, high-quality full-backs in their team, with Ryan Bertrand still criminally underrated on the opposite flank.
Walker-Peters was somewhat quiet by his usually exuberant standards in a tedious match at Turf Moor, but it was a moment of brilliance from him in the opening exchanges that set Southampton on their way to three vital points. With just over four minutes on the clock, Burnley’s usually-faultless defensive shape was somewhat muddled, with Charlie Taylor advancing from left-back to create a four-man block ahead of Phil Bardsley and the two centre-backs, with Dwight McNeil having advanced from the midfield to push higher up the pitch. This allowed Stuart Armstrong to pull away into space on the right, and provide Jimmy Dunne with a positional dilemma.
Their lack of pressure on the ball enabled Walker-Peters to move forward in possession, and bring the ball infield towards the right half-space, in which he was able to spot the excellent run of Adams, who had peeled away into the vacant space behind Dunne and in front of Kevin Long.
Walker-Peters, having drifted inwards to create a passing lane through Burnley’s left and inside of the sizable gap between Dunne and Taylor, was then required to time a pass perfectly through to Adams. He duly delivered.
Pope made the decision to bear down on Adams to make an attempt at preventing him from sliding the ball underneath his body and into the net from a tight angle, but the striker showed exceptional composure and speed of thought to cut the ball back to Ings, who held his run to maintain a dangerous position in the box as he proceeded to scramble the ball home.
The presence of mind from Adams allowed Ings to score a straightforward goal, but the timing, weight, and intelligence of the pass from Walker-Peters in the right half-space scythed Burnley open and disorganised their injury-ravaged defence. It should be noted that Dyche had a host of absences to manage on Saturday, but this excuse should also be countered with the fact that Burnley, without fail, set up with the same block and the same approach in each game, and they are notoriously tricky to penetrate. Southampton’s right-back supplied the necessary precision and delicacy to surgically cut through their back-line.
Hasenhüttl saw his side engineer a chance in a similar vein, also resulting in a goal, only last week, too. Once again, Walker-Peters found himself with time and space to pick out a ball that would bypass his opponents’ midfield and defensive lines, and he did so with pinpoint accuracy. He assisted the opening goal of Southampton’s 5–2 defeat to Spurs and utilised his vision, coupled with an evident penchant for weighting his passes over longer distances to a high standard.
After receiving the ball from Oriol Romeu just inside the Tottenham half, it was Ings, this time, who found himself running behind the central defenders and beyond the last line of the opponents’ defence. Ings, already pointing to where he wanted Walker-Peters to loft the pass towards, made a blind-side run away from the eye line of Eric Dier and beyond the reach of Davinson Sanchez.
With devastating poise, Ings brought the clipped ball from Walker-Peters down and finished exquisitely. Once more, a Southampton striker displayed quick thinking and instinctive movement to engineer a goalscoring chance, but still owed much of their success to the technique of their right-back, who is quickly becoming something of a secret weapon for Saints as they bid to break down deeper blocks in the Premier League — a problem that had plagued them in previous seasons.
This tactic of playing high balls beyond the opposition back-line and into the path of the forwards is hardly a new concept for Southampton under Hasenhüttl. They profited from executing this attacking mechanism, notably courtesy of long balls from Jack Stephens, who, against both Newcastle United and Tottenham Hotspur on separate occasions, lofted passes over defences for Ings to score goals. Again, this was, of course, largely a consequence of the incredible talents and composure of Southampton’s talisman, but the exploitation of passes to evade deeper blocks on the right-hand side has clearly been worked on by Hasenhüttl.
The energy, direct running and ability of Walker-Peters to drift infield and involve himself in combination play are aiding Southampton in their ongoing transformation from a team who can only play on the break to one that is capable, if still somewhat unsure of themselves, when it comes to finding ways through teams who are content to remain compact and display little desire to emerge from their positions in deep areas of the pitch to put pressure on the ball. It is also unquestionable that when Stuart Armstrong plays, Walker-Peters makes him even better, with the duo continuing to develop a good understanding at both ends of the pitch.
Southampton remain in desperate need of additional quality in the transfer market, and augmenting the squad with more creativity before the window closes in the next fortnight is crucial. However, for now, they must find different means of innovation, and Walker-Peters portrayed that he has the intelligence to instigate dangerous attacking situations for the team throughout the season with a commendable role in the telling moment of Saints’ 1–0 victory at Turf Moor.
