Southampton fans must be pinching themselves at the moment. The team that just over a year ago lost 9-0 at home to Leicester City are now sitting pretty in fifth place in the Premier League table, just four points off Tottenham Hotspur and Liverpool at the top of the tree.
It’s been a meteoric recovery and rise under coach Ralph Hasenhuttl, who has masterminded an impressive improvement in all areas of the team, leading them to become more favoured in the English Premier League odds.
One of the major driving forces who deserves recognition is club captain James Ward-Prowse. The midfielder has been instrumental in Southampton’s good form, and has developed into a complete player with plenty of strings to his bow. He has four Premier League goals to his name so far this season, including a brace of free-kicks against Aston Villa. He has also registered three assists, and is in the top 10 for passes as well, proof of his metronomic presence in the Southampton engine room.
Hasenhüttl has been quick to wax lyrical about his skipper, describing the all-action role Ward-Prowse plays for the team. “He is not only fantastic at free-kicks but he also displays a massive workload every game,” Hasenhuttl said. “He can run more than any other player. He is robust. He is gifted. He is technical. He is very, very smart. This is not such a bad combination, to be honest."
At 26, Ward-Prowse is now entering the peak years of his career, and this maturity is beginning to show in the way he plays the game, with a distinct composure and wisdom evident in his playing style. In the modern game, a central midfielder who possesses the wealth of attributes that Ward-Prowse does is hard to come by, and so Southampton should count themselves fortunate to have a midfielder of such dynamism.
As a youngster, much was expected of Ward-Prowse, but the Englishman found it difficult to nail down a first-team place and deliver consistent performances. But over the years, he has improved gradually, and having served his apprenticeship and learned the ropes as far as Premier League football is concerned, he now looks something like the finished package. His good form has brought about further England caps, having first made his debut in 2017.
But while his international career is still somewhat in its infancy, Ward-Prowse has already racked up 290 appearances for Southampton, and with so much of his career still ahead of him, there’s no reason why he couldn’t become one of the club’s all-time greats and perhaps even push Terry Paine’s appearance record of 815. Of course, if his good form continues then bigger clubs will undoubtedly come sniffing, but there is a sense that Ward-Prowse could become a rare example of a one-club man, given his affinity with Southampton and the fact that he was born and bred on the south coast.
The effect Hasenhuttl has had on his midfielder is clear for all to see. There is an aggression to Ward-Prowse that didn’t exist before the Austrian’s arrival. Where once there was an airy creative midfielder, capable of providing sparks but not sustained fire, there is now a fully-formed machine, sculpted inexorably in his manager’s image. The raw academy graduate has finally evolved into the finished article.
“I am incredibly proud of being the academy boy and coming through but that only gets you so far,” Ward-Prowse told The Guardian recently. “When you are in the heat of a battle, you need to have a different side to you than maybe what the academy boy has. This manager has shown me that. If you want to win stuff and be successful, you need to have a different edge to you.”
That ‘edge’ is exactly what Southampton have gained this season, and with Ward-Prowse playing such an influential role, there could yet be glory for the Saints come the end of the campaign.