Southampton 2-2 Leeds United: Wave machine - The Square Ball 14/8/22

SAIL AWAY

Written by: Moxcowhite • Daniel Chapman

The unlovely quays beside Southampton’s St Mary’s Stadium offer little respite on the reputed hottest day in Premier League history, which some say is how we’re measuring climate change now (‘Temperatures never experienced by the likes of David Hopkin’). The hardly tolerable weight of the blaring sunshine is only increased by the towers of a cement works between you and the open sea, bringing dust on the breeze and turning your dreams of adventure so.

Southampton was the dock that RMS Titanic left in April 1912, millions of pounds of floating hubris, the largest luxury liner on the seas until a simple blow from its crystal rival in nature, ice, put it beneath the waves. The terrible hours that followed included a rush of the first-class, self-proclaimed by ticket, for the lifeboats, tipping over deck into depths their buoyant ballroom had meant to triumph above, where cash couldn’t help them any more. The disaster is an early example of what we now know as a meme, new communication technologies taking the tale worldwide when few stories of its kind had travelled that way before, exposing specific horror to general schadenfreude. 110 years later, the Titanic is as much known for that one Celine Dion song in a film, and as a joke about out of date news.

This dockside preamble could lead to a gag tangent about Leeds United’s new replica shirts being reported lost in a container dropped from a ship to the bottom of the sea, but I have something of grander scale in mind. About another big boat suffering from its narrowing confines, a hulking monument to the follies of the rich but stupid, the arrogant and gormless, its cracking girders puncturing opulent facades as its edifice of expense tips and falls not into the brave open sea but no further into adventure than the Manchester Ship Canal. Our relief from the heat this weekend was not Southampton versus Leeds, but the sight of Manchester United setting sail again into the same utterly obvious icebergs they keep steaming into, hilariously, weekly.

The story meanwhile at St Mary’s was of two coaches on different stages of their journey as pioneers, one seeming jaded by the mission, the other exuberant and keen, the latter ending despondent by the first’s return to the ideas they share. Southampton manager Ralph Hasenhüttl and Leeds manager Jesse Marsch are both envoys of Salzburg, disciples of Ralf Rangnick’s grand corporate plan that conquered the USA and Austria but, at Old Trafford last season, added more puncture holes to the hull. That only proved that Red Bull football can not penetrate the bubbles of ego and riches protecting the mutinous arseholes crowding the changing rooms at Old Trafford. Hasenhüttl and Marsch are trying to make it work amid different constraints.

The tale of Leeds and Southampton is twined without Austria. In 2009/10, Leeds were promoted from League One while Southampton, suffering a ten point penalty for going into administration, finished in 7th place. The Saints overtook us with back to back promotions, giving them a hefty headstart in the top flight, but the time hasn’t helped them escape the mundanity this Premier League compels upon you, a fight Leeds are now beginning. The strategies now are similar. Neither club feels able to regularly compete to sign polished 25-year-old players entering their peak, shopping instead for youngsters crowded out of elite clubs who can be trained up and traded, pairing them with once promising up ‘n’ comers, now faded, who they hope can be returned to sweetness while sharing lessons from their bitter career experiences. The Red Bull sports corps has mastered this process so both Southampton and Leeds have employed their graduate coaches, hoping to be early pioneers of that spirit on these shores.

Watching the first half, then, was like trying to pull two powerful magnets apart to let some light between. Both Leeds and Southampton begin their counter-attacking strategies with the idea of the net, a web of players surrounding the ball and putting its possessor under pressure until they crack. So, say, Leeds won the ball with their net. But that would cause the Southampton net to close in, and let’s say that wins the ball. Now Leeds must close in with their net. And so on. Net upon net upon net upon net, the ball harder to keep with every exchange as the tiny spaces fill with aggressive pressers. It was like Rondo Wars, and blessed relief when someone took the simple way out of booting the ball into the distance so we could see it done against the fresher background of a different part of the pitch.

Leeds had the better of this in the first hour because they’re playing so far this season with the zeal of new converts. A summer in Australia, getting used to this way of playing, helped by some imports who have succeeded with it in other leagues, was topped off by an opening day win over Wolves that has Leeds high on their own supply. Apart from the enthusiasm for the pressing net, they have the thrilled discipline in possession to quickly move into their positions and attack in shape. The heat didn’t bother Rodrigo, who said he’s played in hotter conditions in Spain, nor presumably Diego Llorente or Marc Roca, while Marsch said during the week that their history in summer MLS matches would keep Roca’s engine room partners, Tyler Adams and Brenden Aaronson, at high energy in high temperatures. Dan James, who replaced Pat Bamford after he missed a couple of half-chances and felt his groin twinging, simply looked like he wanted to puke, and had a good shot saved at the end of the first half. Rasmus Kristensen also looked sick, but that was because he missed the best chance for a first half lead, when Rodrigo flicked on a corner and Kristensen couldn’t bundle the ball in at the back post. United looked to be on a quest for efficiency, trying to get goals from set pieces to reduce the running about required, but an element of surprise helped too. Starting the second half, Rodrigo went to play as a striker, and turned in Jackie Harrison’s pinpoint low cross. Then he got success from a corner, finishing off Pascal Struijk’s flick-on, throwing out his arms and legs for an adorable goofball celebration of leading 2-0.

While Marsch is preaching to an eager new congregation, Hasenhüttl is having a crisis in the wilderness. Summer transfers didn’t work because nobody wanted to buy Southampton’s players, so now they have too many they don’t want, who don’t like not being wanted. Southampton have tired of what Leeds are feeling as new, so Hasenhüttl is trying to get the team playing in a new 3-5-2 shape, but all it got them at Spurs was dismantled, 4-1, and from Leeds, an 0-2 scoreline. He had his first changes prepared before United’s second goal, and they were about taking Southampton back to their true path, a trademark RB 4-2-2-2, and somehow Marsch did not recognise until it was 2-1 that his side were under threat by plans from his own textbooks. Or perhaps he’s so used to those ideas triumphing every season in Austria, he doesn’t know an antidote. Kristensen was beaten on Leeds’ right flank and Adam Armstrong’s low cross caused penalty box chaos Leeds couldn’t withstand. A few minutes after that, earnest debating in United’s technical area was translated onto a note passed to James, and a plan to do the three centre-backs thing from Southampton’s first half. With the energy of their three fresh substitutes Southampton kept leaning on the new-shape Leeds defence, and within five minutes a precise through ball from Sekou Mara put Kyle Walker-Peters in to equalise. Now came the game management moves we’d expected much earlier from Marsch, three substitutions no longer aimed at protecting the win, but avoiding a defeat.

After the match, Marsch said he was disappointed his backline gambit hadn’t worked. “We tried to move to five in the back,” he told LUTV, “and for me, when we’re playing five in the back, we should never then get beat on this ball that Jack [Harrison] gets beat on, and that cost us. And that was the main reason for switching to five at the back, was to close down their ability to get into our half-lane space. So, disappointing that we made a couple of mistakes that really cost us.”

But was the mistake Jackie Harrison’s, or was it more about trying to use a winger as a wing-back because the squad does not have a fit left-back who might have the defensive instincts to cut out the pass into the half-lane that had Harrison floundering like what he was, a player who shouldn’t have been doing that job in the first place? We began here by thinking about the depths, and squad depth is supposed to be the big new buttress keeping Leeds above the lower rungs this season. In midfield that’s true, but the game still ended with neither Bamford nor Joffy Gelhardt at no.9, nor a left-back who could make five at the back work as it should.

There are obvious solutions to those points, so despite the disappointment for Leeds of throwing away a two-win start to the season, the deeper thought after this weekend might be round the piano chez Hasenhüttl. If he’s been feeling the limits of his old RB playbooks in recent months, trying to devise new adaptations to dispel the jaded mood that comes for every mid-table Premier League club, what should he make of Marsch bringing a team that dominated and led by playing in the old style from the old country, then chucked it all when Southampton also went old school? Actually, who cares. More important is what Marsch makes of it. The two views of Saints confirmed his own way of playing, and in the end the difference was not having a striker to finish more chances or a left-back to defend the lead. But that news feels as old as the fate of the Titanic.