Brave attacking formation could hold key to Saints success

A brave new formation featuring Saints’ leading two strikers could hold the key to a more attacking era under Mauricio Pellegrino.

The new manager started the 3-0 weekend friendly win at St Etienne with both Charlie Austin and Manolo Gabbiadini in the team.

That was almost certainly a reaction to the knowledge that he desperately needs to try and find more goals from his team than his predecessor Claude Puel did.

Saints only scored 41 times in 38 league games last term, with only the bottom five clubs netting fewer goals.

Only 17 of those came in 19 home matches - and none at all in the final five games of the season at St Mary’s.

That latter statistic no doubt played a major part in Puel losing his job.

Fans could now get a second chance to see if Pellegrino continues his experiment when Saints host Germans FC Augsburg at St Mary’s tomorrow in their penultimate pre season friendly.

If he does, then there will be just one more chance - against Sevilla at St Mary’s on Saturday - to fine-tune the formation prior to the curtain lifting on the 2017/18 Premier League season against visiting Swansea the following weekend.

Gabbiadini was preferred as the lone striker in Pellegrino’s favoured 4-2-3-1 system against St Etienne, with Austin one of the three in behind along with Soufiane Boufal and Dusan Tadic.

That could be considered a surprise, given no-one scored league goals as regularly as Austin did for Saints under Claude Puel.

Though he only netted six times - and two of them were penalties - the goals arrived at a rate of one every 156 minutes.

That compares to Gabbiadini’s rate of one every 183 minutes and the rate of one of every 415 minutes which both Nathan Redmond and Shane Long managed.

Put into some kind of context, Austin collected his goals quicker than Cherries’ top scorer Josh King, whose 16 league goals came at a rate of one every 160 minutes.

Austin has never played in a system where he didn’t feature as a central striker. Ever since leaving Poole Town in September 2009 and signing for Swindon, he has played up front.

Doing so, he has scored 125 league goals for Swindon, Burnley, QPR and Saints at a ratio of 0.51 every game.

Though only 25 of those goals have come in the Premier League, they have still been scored at a rate of one every 168 minutes.

Saints do not possess anyone with a top flight scoring record as good as that.

Gabbiadini’s greater pace, however, could well have won him Pellegrino’s vote as the central striker in his favoured system.

As well as the need for more goals in his debut campaign in English football, Pellegrino will also be desperate to see his more creative players increase their number of assists.

Though he has played behind a central striker in his Serie A career, Gabbiadini is not known for his ‘assist providing’ rate. Indeed, in his 11 league appearances for Saints following his £14m move from Napoli, he didn’t provide a single assist.

Austin provided just one in his 11 league appearances - the same amount Nathan Redmond provided in the entire 2016/17 league season.

That was still one more than club record signing Boufal managed in 1,103 minutes of at times frustrating action in his first season in the Premier League.

Pellegrino is not short of options for the three roles behind his central striker. In addition to the names just mentioned, Dusan Tadic and James Ward-Prowse were among Saints’ leading assists providers last term - with five and four respectively.

And if Shane Long is not considered a central striker option by Pellegrino - and so far it’s safe to assume he isn’t - then he will have to compete for a place in the ‘three’ as well.

Pellegrino has to try and find more goals from the same personnel as Puel had, with the addition of Sam Gallagher in place of the departed Jay Rodriguez.

Gallagher has Premier League experience - three starts and 15 sub appearances under Mauricio Pochettino in 2013/14. But he has not appeared for Saints in the top flight in the last three seasons and his best chance of breaking that run in the early stagesof Pellegrino’s era is as an impact sub.