Each day we pick out a player and cut through the noise to give analytical, objective insight. Stoke and Australia defender Harry Souttar is in focus on Wednesday.
Harry Souttar
- Age: 24
- Position: Central defender
- Club: Stoke City
- Country: Australia
The World Cup always provides a chance for players from smaller countries to shine and Qatar 2022 was no exception with fresh faces from Morocco, South Korea, Senegal, Ecuador, Japan, Ghana, Tunisia, Iran and Canada among those to catch the eye.
It was also an impressive tournament for Australia, who progressed to the knockout stages despite being landed with an incredibly difficult group featuring defending champions France and Euro 2020 semi-finalists Denmark.
And one of their standout players was Harry Souttar - the giant Stoke City centre-half who helped the Socceroos keep important clean sheets against Tunisia and Denmark to secure second spot in the group.
As you would expect from a player who stands 6ft 6in tall, Souttar is a dominant force aerially - he ranked inside the top 10 for aerial duels won by defenders at the winter World Cup in Qatar.
He also resides in the top 15 for Sky Bet Championship defenders in that statistic both this season and last, averaging 4.3 aerial challenges won per game this season and 4.4 in 2021/22.
Souttar missed large chunks of both of those campaigns - the second half of last season and the first part of this campaign - due to a serious knee ligament injury that kept him out for several months but he is now back to his best as shown in Qatar.
He averaged 5.4 aerial duels won per game in his only real fully-fit season with Stoke in 2020/21, enjoying a superb debut campaign with the Potters having earned a move through impressing at League One outfit Fleetwood.
Leicester City are among the sides linked with a move for Souttar and there is no doubt the Aussie would be a huge help to a team with a long-standing weakness at defending set-pieces. West Ham and Wolves are believed to be interested, too.
Souttar, though, is not just a big man - arguably one of his key strengths is his reading of the game, which has rocketed him to the top of the Championship statistics for clearances per game during his time in the Potteries.
Yes, big booming headed clearances account for some of those, but he is deceptively quick too and his long strides help to break up opposition attacks, holding off outmatched forwards before delivering the ball upfield.
He is not perfect, of course - for a player of his height you might expect a higher return in the opposition box than just two goals in his two-and-a-half seasons with Stoke, although as mentioned this campaign and last have been interrupted by injury.
Souttar has looked slightly rusty since his return from Qatar, his pass success rate of 63.8% well down on his usual averages and his fouls per game markedly increasing to 2.2
But that is a small sample rate of just six games and Stoke have historically fared much better when he has been available to them, collecting 1.36 points per game with Souttar involved and just 1.21 when he has not featured.
The fact that Australia included him in their World Cup squad having played just once in 12 months - and that he then played every minute of their campaign against the likes of Kylian Mbappe and Lionel Messi - is an indicator of how high his ceiling is.
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