Son is the Missing Link of Tottenham's Tactical Evolution
STOKE ON TRENT, ENGLAND – SEPTEMBER 10: Heung-Min Son of Tottenham Hotspur in action during the Premier League match between Stoke City and Tottenham Hotspur at Britannia Stadium on September 10, 2016 in Stoke on Trent, England. (Photo by Laurence Griffiths/Getty Images)
There’s a lot to unpack from Tottenham’s 4-0 win over Stoke City on Saturday, but let’s take a quick look at the roots of the visiting team’s dominant performance.
Structurally, Mauricio Pochettino stuck with the 4-2-3-1 that served him and the team so well last season. Prior to this match, Pochettino had not gone a full match sticking in that shape — resorting in all or part of each of the three opening games to a rough 4-2-2-2 with two strikers in Harry Kane and Vincent Janssen.
The failure of that experiment more or less demanded that Pochettino return to a more traditional tactical set, and it paid off with four goals scored and none conceded.
Tottenham’s shape was misleading however. While it resembled the tactics of yesteryear, there was a twist here that ultimately brought Tottenham back into the game after a rough start and kept Stoke out of it.
Though the twist was evident all over the pitch, it was embodied most in the man perhaps most surprised to be in Tottenham’s starting XI: Heung-min Son.
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Speculation over the week was that Érik Lamela would miss out due to arriving late from international duty. Tottenham’s newest signing Moussa Sissoko was rumored to be taking his place on the right.
The Frenchman would have to settle for a place on the bench however. Pochettino named Son in Lamela’s place instead, placing him on the left while shifting Christian Eriksen to the opposite side of Dele Alli.
We here at HotspurHQ have slept on Son a bit this season. The South Korean arrived late due to the Olympics, only to be immediately called up again during the international break. He was favored to start from the bench yet again.
His inclusion on Saturday makes a lot of sense for the same reason that Sissoko’s inclusion would have made sense. The 24-year-old is a more direct player than Lamela and Eriksen, two playmakers that prefer to operate narrowly and from deep in the final third.
In the past Pochettino seemed a little confused as to how to use Son properly, but here he hit the nail on the head. The player’s mandate was simple: wait for service and challenge Stoke right-back Geoff Cameron and centre-back Ryan Shawcross head-on. Let Eriksen drop deeper and set tempo. Let Harry Kane and Dele Alli make runs through the middle. Just concentrate on stretching play and exploiting whatever space is available.
He was helped to this end by two things. Let’s have a look at them.
Stoke City’s US defender Geoff Cameron (L) vies with Tottenham Hotspur’s South Korean striker Son Heung-Min during the English Premier League football match between Stoke City and Tottenham Hotspur at the Bet365 Stadium in Stoke-on-Trent, central England on September 10, 2016. / AFP / Lindsey PARNABY / RESTRICTED TO EDITORIAL USE. No use with unauthorized audio, video, data, fixture lists, club/league logos or ‘live’ services. Online in-match use limited to 75 images, no video emulation. No use in betting, games or single club/league/player publications. / (Photo credit should read LINDSEY PARNABY/AFP/Getty Images)
Son’s Advantages
One, Ben Davies’ tireless support from left-back. Davies and Son combined for more passes than any other pair of players on the pitch. Indeed, the Welsh international completed more passes than anyone on the pitch and did so at the second most successful rate of any outfielder short of Alli. He was, in short, massively important to getting the ball down the left side of Tottenham’s attack.
What that meant to Son was that he always had reliable support for both passes and overloads on the left.
He didn’t stay wide all the time however. Rather, he made it so Stoke had to play wider and therefore could not densely pack the middle six yards of the penalty box.
Son’s second goal was the most obvious benefit here, followed closely by his assist for Kane’s first goal of the season. By stretching Stoke’s backline Son also indirectly created much more space for Kane and Alli to work through the middle. The pair combined for eight shots, three on target and two goals.
The second secret to Son’s success were long-balls. Tottenham’s promised to exploit this supposedly crude tactic to their own ends since early last season. The problem was they rarely had the players to properly pull it off. Only Alli had the timing and speed to break through opposition lines and get on the end of long punts.
Tottenham evidently realized over the summer that the long-ball can be much more than artillery rounds fired from deep in defense. They can also be cross-field balls that stretch play and open up areas of the pitch left empty by oppositions compactly defending.
This isn’t anything new, but Pochettino evidently feels the time is right to go all in. Through four matches, Tottenham have recorded the most accurate long passes of any team in the Premier League at a rate of 45.3 per match. That’s a tremendous improvement over last season’s 32 accurate long passes per match.
Son was among the primary benefactors of such Tottenham’s efforts on Saturday. His willingness to stay wide meant that he often had plenty of room to run into to chase down the ball then move toward Stoke’s goal.
There’s evidence too that Pochettino wanted the same to happen with Kyle Walker on the opposite side of the pitch. From the start Tottenham almost looked to be playing with three men at the back as Eric Dier dropped deep to cover the extremely advanced wide position of Walker. Were Eriksen on the opposite flank instead of right in front of him, Walker might have expected some similar service that Son received.
These weren’t tactics that directly resulted in goals, and they weren’t necessarily meant to be. They indirectly created opportunities elsewhere on the pitch while simultaneously keeping Stoke from getting too adventurous. Cameron was so isolated that he only recorded 19 successful passes on the night. Worse, the man he was due to support in attack, Jonathan Walters, only recorded six. That’s how one player can make his presence felt over nearly half the pitch.
We can expect to see similar such tactics utilizing all of Son, Walker and Sissoko — perhaps even Georges-Kévin N’Koudou eventually. It’s an especially valuable advantage to have against teams, like Stoke, who might figure they can close up shop and wait for their chance on the break.
With Son wide and the pairing of Cameron and Walters effectively nullified, Stoke were prevented from playing their own game.
So many words have been expended about Pochettino’s primary tactical evolution of this season being the two striker system. In reality, this added emphasis on stretching play both vertically and horizontally over the pitch might end up being the much more potent advancement.
There’s much more to say about this new burgeoning tactical set in the days to come. Suffice it to say that the results have started to come in, and they could be potentially devastating.
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