If you watched today’s friendly between Tottenham Hotspur and the K-League All-Stars in Seoul — a thrilling 3-4 Tottenham win that provided a lot of excitement for the fans in attendance — you also got your first chance to see their newest signing in action.
But if you’re reading this, maybe you weren’t able to wake up early enough to watch the match, so online comp videos are all you have. Well, I’m here to tell you that after watching Yang play in the first half, I saw enough to justify Spurs’ €4m purchase, and think he has the potential to be very, very good.
The comp video is embedded in the article header above, and you should watch it. Here are some of my takeaways.
He doesn’t look out of place physically.
Yang’s a young guy, but unlike some of Spurs’ youth signings he looks like he can physically handle himself against real competition. That’s a good sign — the Premier League is a physical league, and he’s gonna get kicked a LOT when he actually starts getting minutes; probably just as well that he likely won’t for a while yet.
He’s got some pretty impressive skills already.
Some of the reactions I get from watching Yang play is that he’s a) quick, and b) has an instinctive sense of where and when to run. Those are super important, especially in an Ange-Ball system that likes to get in behind and stretch defenses. He’s also got some good ball-handling and dribbling ability — most on display when he turned (and pretty much embarrassed) Emerson Royal in midfield. I don’t know too many of Tottenham’s current offensive players who could make that turn in that situation! Yang also shows for and receives the ball well; he blazed his best scoring opportunity over the bar but he did very well to run past his man and into position to receive the pass.
He’s pretty raw, especially with his initial touch and passing.
While his running and ball-carrying look pretty good, a lot of Yang’s passing was ROUGH, either a foot behind or a foot ahead of his intended target. It’s a little hard to parse out how much of that is because he’s playing on a cobbled-together all-star team that likely hasn’t trained much together and how much is that he just may not be a very good passer right now. At this stage it probably doesn’t matter much — he’s young enough that his passing can improve with time; running and carrying ability isn’t as easily taught. Yang also had some particularly heavy touches when receiving the ball that didn’t serve him well; better initial ball control might have opened Spurs’ defense a little more in that first half.
Yang also looks a little one-footed, which again — that can be trained. He’s less one-footed than, say, Archie Gray at the moment but it was pretty clear when receiving the ball that he preferred his left foot to his right. (That said, that turn on Emerson was done almost exclusively with his right, so what do I know?)
CONCLUSION
This is a super small sample size in a preseason friendly match in oppressive heat. Yang’s a teenager who has only played top level football in Korea for a season and is getting ready to move to a top club in the best league in world football. It’d be irresponsible to suggest that he’s ready to make an immediate impact based on what we saw today.
What I saw from Yang was a kid who wants to impress, has a floor of “competent winger,” and a ceiling that could be very, very high with time and training. He looks like someone who can embrace Ange’s tactics and would fit in well with the way Postecoglou wants to play. There’s a lot to like in that video, just as there’s a lot of room for improvement and that’s to be expected. That said, I see why people are excited by him but he’s going to be a work in progress for a while, and that’s okay. Spurs have a bunch of those in place, and I didn’t see anything to make me believe Yang’s not worth at least what Tottenham paid for him right now.