FORGET CHELSEA'S £200M SPREE - £6M SOUTHAMPTON SIGNING WAS MOST UNDERRATED SUMMER TRANSFER WINDOW DEAL

Have Southampton snagged the best bargain of the summer transfer window? Their Premier League survival may depend on it.

The early signs aren’t great for Southampton. Three matches into the new Premier League season and last year’s Championship play-off winners haven’t got a single point on the board, losing to ten-man Newcastle United, Nottingham Forest and most recently, Brentford. Life in the top flight is tough.

But that doesn’t mean there haven’t been bright spots and occasional glimmers of hope down at St. Mary’s. Their first Premier League goal, for instance, late on in a 3-1 defeat to Brentford – and while a consolation wouldn’t normally provide much cause for celebration, under the circumstances, the player who scored it just might. Yukinari Sugawara looks like the real deal and may quietly end up being one of the best buys of the summer.

The 24-year-old Japan international only cost a reported £6m to sign and the class with which he put his chance away made him look like a player who’s worth every penny and then a few more – a crisp first-time half-volley, deftly guided with the outside of his supposedly unfavoured left foot onto the inside of the far post and in. His first goal for his new club, and already perhaps the finest finish the Southampton fans will see this season. Yes, it was an ultimately meaningless goal in the context of the result but not, perhaps, quite so meaningless from a psychological perspective.

Relegation-threatened teams need a talisman, a player who they can look to when they’re beaten and bruised and desperate to scrape a result up from anywhere. Normally, that’s a goal-scoring striker or a wizardly midfielder. But there doesn’t seem to be any rule saying that it can’t be a wing-back, especially if they keep getting into those kinds of positions.

Not only does he have the only league goal of the season so far, he’s also created the most expected goals’ worth of chances and made the most tackles – at a 100% success rate, too. Not every player the Saints have has looked entirely cut out for the top flight so far, but Sugawara seems to be tailor-made for this level and there hasn’t been a beat skipped since he arrived from AZ Alkmaar, and while the sample size is obviously very small so far, everything he’s done in England tallies with what came before in the Netherlands.

A genuine creative force who set up 15 goals in his last two Eredivisie seasons (as well as scoring six of his own), Sugawara has the technique, quality of delivery and vision to create chances in a way that Southampton’s midfielders have yet to prove that they can. He won’t always be the man in a position to score and his efforts will likely be in vain if players like Adam Armstrong don’t find a way to step up, but he will create the chances required to win games. They just need to be put away.

It helps that while he’s an attacking player first and foremost, Sugawara really can defend, and while Russell Martin’s system pushes him quite a long way upfield much of the time he still does good work tracking back, making a very high percentage of his challenges and seldom allowing an easy path to goal. In the modern game, it feels like a player who only cost £6m should have a few weaknesses, and it’s pretty hard to see what Sugawara’s are just yet. Perhaps they will reveal themselves later.

The 13-cap international is just a part of a growing wave of Japanese imports to the United Kingdom, spurred perhaps by Ange Postecoglou who has waxed lyrical about the quality he found there when he managed in the J-League and who signed several Japanese players for Celtic. There are now five players from Japan in the Premier League and nine more elsewhere in the EFL as well as growing numbers in Spain and, especially, Germany. For years, Japan wasn’t seen as a destination worth sending scouts to. It’s obvious that that has changed, apparently with good reason.

Southampton signed no fewer than 18 players this summer, including two more Japanese players, Rento Takaoka and Kuryu Matsuki, with the former not joining the club until next summer and the latter out on loan in Turkey for now – but even amid all the many signings and the cash spent on players like Taylor Harwood-Bellis, Flynn Downes and Aaron Ramsdale it may be Sugawara who ends up being the most important signing of the lot.

Whether his skill and energy down the right flank are enough to keep Southampton afloat remains to be seen, although he will surely improve their chances. But he offers hope, and the suggestion that the quality exists within the squad to make a good go of the relegation battle. Any hey, if it all goes south and the Saints wind up back in the second tier next season, they can probably still sell him to Chelsea for ten times what they paid. It seems to work nine times out of ten, anyway.

2024-09-04T18:15:32Z dg43tfdfdgfd