So much has changed for Tottenham Hotspur: a new head coach, a new style of play and, in Son Heung-min, a new captain and a new No 9.
Against Liverpool — perhaps unexpectedly — Spurs lined up with Son (wearing No 7) as striker and Richarlison (wearing No 9) on the left wing. Ange Postecoglou’s open-mindedness in not only player selection but configuration was on display once more.
The Spurs manager had started the season with these two configured the other way around, and this was his fifth different front-four combination in his first seven league games, with Dejan Kulusevski on the right and James Maddison in his trademark No 10 role.
And yet, things clicked in attack once more. Spurs scored twice, with Postecoglou becoming only the second head coach to see his team score at least twice in his first seven Premier League games; Craig Shakespeare, with Leicester City in 2017, was the first.
Spurs by no means flew out of the traps. Son only had four touches up until Curtis Jones’ red card on 26 minutes, and Postecoglou spoke at length with him while Yves Bissouma received treatment. At that point, he had the fewest touches on the pitch, with Richarlison (eight), Kulusevski (14) and Maddison (19) all more involved.
Though Postecoglou’s systems are high-possession, his strikers are often low-touch players. Last season at Celtic, Kyogo Furuhashi finished as the Scottish Premiership’s top scorer (with 27 goals) while averaging fewer than 14 touches per game — the lowest in the league of strikers to play at least 1,000 minutes — in a team averaging 72 per cent possession. Son scored the opener against Liverpool with his seventh touch. Case in point.
Against Liverpool, Son’s role was to occupy the centre-backs, pinning them to make space for Maddison and Spurs’ central midfielders. This was key given Liverpool’s intention to play a high defensive line and man-mark Spurs in the middle of the pitch.
Spurs had two main attacking patterns down the left in the first half. First, left-back Destiny Udogie would underlap Richarlison, either to take a defender away and create space or to receive penetrative passes to create crossing/cutback situations.
The second, which led to the opening goal, was Maddison dropping deep to play through balls for Richarlison. The Brazilian’s out-to-in runs behind right-back Joe Gomez were a constant problem and repeatedly put him in cutback positions, as seen when he squared it to Son to tap in.
That brought up league goal number six for Son this season. Only Erling Haaland (eight) has more.
There was so nearly a carbon copy in the second half. On this occasion, Spurs right-back Pedro Porro rolled inside, creating the angle for Bissouma to pass to Kulusevski, who returned the ball to him. Note Son’s position below…
With Liverpool pushed deeper, Bissouma passes to Maddison’s feet, and he turns out of pressure.
From here, he plays another through ball inside Gomez, but Richarlison has gone slightly too early. Son finishes the cutback but it gets disallowed.
Notably, Richarlison is the fourth different player to assist Son this season — welcome variety given how reliant Spurs were on the (admittedly productive) Son/Harry Kane partnership.
Kane’s departure in the summer to Bayern Munich threatened to compound Spurs’ attacking issues. They had become increasingly dependent on the England international, who scored 42.9 per cent of their Premier League goals last season.
In the past five years, only Teemu Pukki for Norwich City in 2021-22 (47.8 per cent) and Danny Ings for Southampton in 2019-20 (43.1 per cent) netted a higher proportion of their team’s goals.
At the end of Antonio Conte’s tenure, Spurs offered very little in open play. They resorted to crosses against low blocks when they were losing and frequently needed second-half comebacks to save games. Things would have been even more gloomy if not for them having the second-best attacking set-piece record in the league, with Kane’s back-post runs at corners a fruitful source of goals. The fact Kane set a new Premier League seasonal record for headed goals (10) is a testament to that.
But Kane had also evolved into Spurs’ chief playmaker, completing the most through balls in each of their last two league seasons — and plenty of those were to Son.
There is not a direct, comparable Kane replacement, but Postecoglou is reinventing the attack: Maddison has creative freedom while inside full-backs maximise one-v-one situations for the wingers, who the full-backs can then support with overlaps and underlaps. Having more bodies forward in this staggered manner helps to counter-press too.
“I think the way we’re playing suits him,” said Postecoglou on Son after the Liverpool game.
Kane’s profile is somewhere between a No 9 and a No 10, dropping deep to link play. At Spurs, Kane averaged 0.92 switches of play/through balls combined per 90, and last season that figure was 1.01. In this campaign, Son is at 0.32. An entirely different profile, with nothing ‘false’ about his interpretation of the No 9 role, somewhere between a No 9 and a No 7.
There were fewer runs in behind the Liverpool defence than in previous games, but Son has shown what he can do against a high line, which more Premier League teams are utilising this season.
His hat-trick goal away to Burnley, which he scored on the angle with his left foot, is a perfect example of Postecoglou’s style and Son’s strengths. Maddison is deep and splits the Burnley midfield by passing into right-back Porro, who has moved inside. Porro then releases Son with a through ball.
Had Kane stayed, he would have led the line with Son at left wing in the 4-2-3-1, as they did in their final pre-season game at home to Shakhtar Donetsk. Necessity is the mother of all invention.
Son is into his ninth season now at Spurs, and it is rare for forwards to last that long without making some alterations to their individual game; Kane’s was to become more of a playmaker, for example.
Mohamed Salah, who shared the Golden Boot with Son in 2021-22 during the peak of the inverted winger, moved centrally when Liverpool went down to 10. The Egyptian had a successful spell as a striker in 2018-19, playing in a 4-4-2 alongside Roberto Firmino or ahead of him in a 4-2-3-1.
That was the season when Liverpool beat Spurs in the Champions League final, and Son played as a striker in the knockout rounds as Mauricio Pochettino switched between a 3-4-1-2 and 4-3-1-2. While he did start games alongside Kane, Son playing as a striker was primarily a plan B when Kane was injured, with Son and Lucas Moura partnered together. That season, Son scored 11 and assisted six times in 24 appearances as a striker, but was hardly used there subsequently.
As different as their styles are, there are some similarities between Kane and Son, who has notably succeeded so far this season in the absence of the player whom he connected better with than any other combination in Premier League history.
Kane is undoubtedly one of the best finishers in the world, and Son is one of the very few who can rival him for ball striking with both feet, and often from distance too. But Son has refined his game from longer, faster runs in behind and cuts inside, to more precise box movement which allows him to attack cutbacks and low crosses.
Postecoglou praised how “(Son) was the one instigating the defensive pressure we put on Liverpool”. His captain is perhaps not as fast as he once was but still has better acceleration and top speed than Kane, being more suited to making repeated sprints to force opponents backwards and then continuing onwards to press the goalkeeper.
Under Postecoglou, Spurs are defending more intensely, averaging over twice as many high turnovers per game (6.4 versus 3) compared to their rigid 5-4-1 mid-block under Conte last season.
Role aside, Son’s start to this season is important relative to his first half of 2022-23. Even with a hat-trick against Leicester City on 17 September 2022, he only scored five in the first 22 Premier League games — he has more in just eight games this campaign — and had surgery this summer to correct an injury that he carried for most of last season.
It’s a reason why his minutes have been managed carefully this season; he has only completed two full 90 minutes in the Premier League (against Manchester United and Bournemouth).
“I don’t think he was 100 per cent last year,” Postecoglou said pre-match, acknowledging the impact of a mid-season World Cup, and added after the game that Son was “desperate to play” but was “never going to play the full 90”, particularly considering the intensity of his defensive responsibilities.
The late winner means Spurs ended a run of 12 games without a win against Liverpool, having last beaten them 4-1 in October 2017 at Wembley. Son is the only remaining player from that match six years ago to start yesterday’s win and, revelling in his central role, is looking better than ever.
(Top photo: Justin Setterfield/Getty Images)
