Brilliant interview with Ralph in the Telegraph

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Ralph Hasenhuttl interview:
Piano practice, pressing and how playing without fans helped Southampton

If you ever stay in the same hotel as the Southampton team the night before a match then you might just find a 6ft 3in Austrian bent over a piano playing Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody or The Show Must Go On. “If they are walking around before they go to bed then, yes, maybe the players listen to me playing,” Ralph Hasenhüttl says. In fact he jokes – or maybe not – that hotels are selected on the basis of how good the piano is.

At home Hasenhüttl decided against shipping over the Bluthner grand he has back in Germany and bought himself a Steinway. “But only write that if I get another good one from them. It’s an advert!” Hasenhüttl adds, laughing.

There is method behind his interest. “When I’m in a good mood and I want to treat myself I play difficult songs otherwise I play easy ones because they give me more joy and I am less angry about not being able to do the right thing,” he says. “What do I play at the moment? A lot of older pop songs: Queen, Elton John. I also play Take Five [by Dave Brubeck]; it’s very tough…It’s a different way of listening to music. It’s not only listening but feeling the music and it definitely helps you to switch off. It’s very good for the brain because when you play left and right-handed together you use both parts of your brain.”

Sport has always been Hasenhüttl’s life — he was an accomplished tennis player as well as a professional footballer before he became a coach and enjoys playing golf and running — but music has always been important. “You will be surprised at how quick your mind is learning new things,” he says. “Never stop doing this because it definitely helps you to stay alive. It helped during lockdown. My mother also plays and she’s now over 80. She says it helps her stay fit in her mind.”

In fact everything Hasenhüttl, 53, does is about facing “challenges”, pushing himself and – above all – pushing Southampton to be the best they can possibly be. “The most important thing I have learnt over the years is that you have to give a picture of yourself that looks good otherwise the players are looking at you,” he says. “If you are tired or not full of energy or not convinced about it. I describe it as ‘you can only light a flame in somebody if you are burning in yourself’.”

It is precisely two years ago since he took over as manager and he has transformed the club. Southampton are on fire. Everyone is, to carry on the musical theme, singing from the same song-sheet with Hasenhüttl quite clear what the greatest challenge was. “For too long this team was relegation-threatened and then it was ‘we’re safe, we’re safe’. The biggest problem was changing that mentality,” he says. “It needed a complete re-set.”

Hasenhüttl knew the scale of the task. “When you come to a new club the first idea is to save them,” he says. “If you then do that then, okay, let’s see what we can do and what we can do with young players because we don’t have the money to buy anyone for £50million, £60million. There was no alternative, to be honest. Then it is automatically one part of your job that you have to take care of the general philosophy of the club.”

He raises the infamous 9-0 home defeat to Leicester City in October last year – although he claims the 2-1 loss to Everton a fortnight later was worse – but argues it actually helped him accelerate the changes he wanted. “Since then we are something like fourth in the table,” Hasenhüttl says. “What happened was a complete turnaround and a way of playing football that I wanted to play.”

He is full of praise of chief executive Martin Semmens and the pair have forged a strong relationship with Hasenhüttl delighted to sign a new four-year deal last June. “This is not about money,” he says. “It is more that we have a club that goes in a different way and if you want to sign this contract you have to be 100 per cent committed to it otherwise it doesn’t make sense. They don’t have to lie to me, they can be honest with me, I know the limits we have and then it is up to me if I can live with it and work with it and still see the chance to develop this club.

“What I definitely have here is a club where I can change what I want to change, where I can play what I want to play and work how I want to work. There is 100 per cent trust and there are a lot of advantages if you have that situation as a manager. The biggest is you don’t lose any energy in the day discussing with idiots.” Really? “In our job there can be a lot of politics and I don’t have that here,” Hasenhüttl adds.

He is fascinating about the football he wants — “the older you get the more experience you have as a coach and the more you are looking for the bigger picture” — passionate about the ‘Southampton play-book’ he wrote during lockdown to provide a set of beliefs, teaching coaches throughout the club to play in the same way and use “the same language” but also about the need for “short-term success”. “You can’t have a long-term picture and short-term you lose every game,” Hasenhüttl says. “It’s nice to have a philosophy for the future but if you are not part of the Premier League any more it doesn’t work. You also have to have arguments in your favour and the best arguments are wins.”

Lockdown and the resumption of football behind closed doors was key to making the changes. “We used this time definitely for giving us the clear message of being braver with the ball and taking more risks because we knew it was a different opportunity,” Hasenhüttl explains. “It’s calm in the stadium. You have time. No-one stresses you from outside. If you want to play one more pass back, you do it. No-one will go ‘oooooh’ from the outside so this was definitely the beginning to be braver.”

So will the return of fans, as much as it is craved, possibly inhibit the team? Hasenhüttl emphatically thinks not. “We must be at a point in our development when it does not make any difference for us and I am very positive that it is the ‘automatism’ now,” he says.

Ah, “automatism” – one of his evangelical buzzwords – leads to a fascinating explanation as to what he expects with those choreographed moves and the fast-paced, front-foot football he demands. “It is about ‘triggers’ especially when we start our pressing because it is important that it’s not one or two [players] pressing and that it’s the whole team pressing. We often speak about it being impossible to be half-pregnant. Either you are pregnant or not. Half-pregnant doesn’t exist so either you go or you don’t go and when you go you all go together otherwise it doesn’t make sense.”

What are the ‘triggers’ to press the opposition for one of the Premier League’s hardest-working teams? “We have different ones,” Hasenhüttl explains. “There are around five or six triggers that we use but it depends on the opponent, depends on how high we want to start the pressing. It can be a long pass, it can be dribbling, it can be a sprint at a player who has a bad touch. We have a few triggers. What’s important is that when we start our press everybody does it so therefore every player needs to be in the right position against the ball. You never switch off, you must be part of our ‘net’ and when this works well everyone knows what they have to do. It’s automatic what we’re looking for, we know what the trigger is and when we have to go. It’s a lot about passing distance; running distance.”

It is, in fact, learnt behaviour – automatic – with Hasenhüttl praising his “very critical players” who “really want to know why they have to do something” adding: “But I think this is normal in modern football. If you say to players ‘run there’ then they must know why. If they don’t see any reason they won’t do it so it’s important to tell them why. They need details.”

So what can Southampton achieve this season? “I don’t know. I definitely don’t know,” Hasenhüttl says. “I mean I always speak about a realistic target being the top 10 but I have also said I have no problem with reaching unrealistic targets…The biggest joy you have as a coach is when you outperform for the quality of the team you have. This is why I love this job so much.” And Hasenhüttl is definitely in love with being at Southampton. “I cannot imagine a more enjoyable job than the one I have at the moment,” he says.

It will be music to the ears of the club and the fans.