Will this be the year of Dejan Kulusevski?
Tottenham are not an exclusive two-man show anymore. Kulusevski's dominance showed there is more to Conte's side than just Kane and Son
theathletic.com
After his first few training sessions with Antonio Conte in January, Dejan Kulusevski was struggling to walk, but this season he looks ready to dance around the rest of the Premier League.
There was plenty to like about Tottenham’s thumping 4-1 win over Southampton on Saturday afternoon. This was one of those rare opening-day wins that leave fans even more optimistic about the new season than they were before the game.
But nothing was more impressive — or more exciting for Spurs’ season — than the performance of Kulusevski on the right of their front three. He made the first, scored the fourth, and spent all afternoon teasing Southampton with his implausibly wide range of abilities. By the second half, it was a pure exhibition: through balls, dribbles, swerves, dinks, cutting inside once, darting outside the next.
We are used to the idea that everything Spurs do goes through Harry Kane and Son Heung-min and that every other attacking player can only be a bit-part errand boy. Since the decline of Dele Alli and the departure of Christian Eriksen, this is how it has been, an exclusive two-man show. Signings brought in to share the attacking burden — Steven Bergwijn, Giovani Lo Celso, Tanguy Ndombele — have failed.
To watch Kulusevski over the last few months, and especially here on Saturday afternoon, has been to witness the evolution of the man who is looking like he could be Spurs’ next great attacking player. It almost makes you wonder if we are entering the era of Kulusevski, whether we are fully aware of it yet or not.
That might sound excessively optimistic, typical August giddiness before the long slog of the season sets in. Two hard games every week tends to have that effect. (It should also be remembered that Kulusevski is still technically on loan from Juventus because Tottenham have not yet decided when to trigger his permanent move.)
But it is impossible to watch Kulusevski play and not get drawn in by him.
First, because of how rapidly he is improving. Kulusevski made his Premier League debut in this fixture almost exactly six months ago, a second-half substitute in a game Spurs lost 3-2. For Kulusevski, it was a dream come true to play his first Premier League game for Tottenham. But to many outsiders, he looked slow, off the pace, and not quite sure of himself.
Certainly, it was a huge adjustment for Kulusevski to make. He was leaving Juventus where Massimiliano Allegri’s light-touch coaching worked well for the senior players but left the youngsters looking for guidance. He wanted to get back to the physically demanding coaching he had enjoyed under Gian Piero Gasperini at Atalanta or Roberto D’Aversa at Parma.
So those first few weeks for Kulusevski in London were tough as his body got used to what Conte and his staff put him through. Early on, it was sometimes not easy to walk after a tough training session. But Kulusevski loved it. The initial hope was that it might take him three months to get up to speed. The reality was that he was flying within a few weeks. He finished 2021-22 with five goals and eight assists in the league. Rank every Premier League player by assists in 2022 and Kulusevski is top with nine, even though he did not arrive until the end of January.
Even now, with a Conte pre-season behind him, Kulusevski looks like a completely different player than he did then. And, at the age of 22, it feels like he has huge expanses of potential improvement ahead of him.
This is the other reason to get so excited about Kulusevski. His ceiling feels so high you could only see it from the stadium’s Skywalk across the roof. Because what sort of a player even is he?
Nominally, he is a wide player, starting for Spurs out on the right of the front three. He is not an old-fashioned winger, who speeds down the outside, but a modern inverted one, who cuts inside onto his stronger foot. His assist for Ryan Sessegnon’s equaliser here was a case in point: whipped perfectly for Sessegnon to pounce on Kyle Walker-Peters’ dallying at the far post.
When Kulusevski gets further forward, he loves to cut inside, open his body up and shoot for the far bottom corner. That is how he scored Spurs’ fourth here, perfectly curling the ball around Jack Stephens. This was only his sixth league goal for Spurs but it could already be described as the classic Kulusevski finish. You might say that it is predictable but that does not mean it is easy to stop. Just ask Gareth Bale and Arjen Robben, who built great careers on scoring goals like this.
Kulusevski makes it four against Southampton (Photo: Tottenham Hotspur FC/Tottenham Hotspur FC via Getty Images)
Of course, the one thing that Bale and Robben have that Kulusevski does not is elite-level speed. He is not quick in the conventional sense. (Although there was one burst down the right here, outside Mohammed Salisu towards the byline, where he did look like an old-fashioned winger. And Conte has moved him to right wing-back within games before.)
But this does not mean Kulusevski is not an exceptionally committed athlete. He is attentive not only to the food that he eats but even to the pH level of the water that he drinks. The players he most looks up to are those who have taken the best care of themselves physically: Cristiano Ronaldo, Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Bruno Alves, with whom he has played for Juventus, Sweden and Parma respectively.
What Kulusevski has in common with those three veterans is an upper-body strength that, combined with his technical skill, makes him almost impossible to knock off the ball. This is maybe the most distinctive part of his game (how many attacking midfielders are built like him?), and it means that when he is dribbling or turning with the ball, he is very difficult to stop. There was a stepover spin past Moussa Djenepo that demands rewatching. So even if Kulusevski is never going to be as fast as Bale, he can always find a way to beat an opponent.
There is another side to Kulusevski’s game beyond the barrelling wide man. Kulusevski has always seen himself as a No 10. And when you see him take the ball on the half-turn and slide a pass through, you can see precisely why. There was a two-minute spell early in the second half when he threaded one perfect pass through to Sessegnon, eventually got the ball back, swerved away from a group of defenders and dinked a delightful little pass through to Cristian Romero. (D’Aversa, Kulusevski’s coach at Parma, once compared him to Pavel Nedved and in glimpses, it makes sense.)
Maybe this is why Kulusevski is so hard to pin down. He plays out wide but does not like to run outside, or have the speed of a winger. He may have the instincts of a classic No 10, but he plays for a coach who does not use one. What is clear is that he has all of the ingredients Conte needs in his players. After the game, Conte was describing the general characteristics required to play his “modern football”: “The players have to have quality, to be strong physically, a good engine, stamina… to run, to run a lot.”
Without even intending to, he could not have described Kulusevski more perfectly than that.
Last edited:
