Arsenal v. Man U: their first half was better than our second

By Tim, January 26th, 2012 | Tags: | Category: Andrei Arshavin is mentioned in this blog, Arsenal, Premier League Campaign | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)

Arsenal’s First Half v. Man U

Man U first half v. Arsenal

Arsenal’s second half v. Man U

Man U second half v. Arsenal

I don’t want to be too simplistic but looking at the FourFourTwo Stats Zone Powered By Opta* application on my iPad I noticed a few things.

First, simply put, Arsenal’s first half was very poor in terms of passes in the final third against Man U but was, when compared to Man U’s second half, pretty much a wash. Except! They scored a goal in their period of profligacy and Arsenal didn’t.

Second, Arsenal’s second half was superior to their first half but the amount of rebound fell well short of the effort Man U put into their first half. Arsenal attempted just 68 passes in the Man U final third compared to Man U’s 100 passes in Arsenal’s final third in the first half. Still! Both teams scored just one goal in both of those halves.

Third, you can see how Man U targeted the right back in both halves but how Yennaris was better equipped to deal with the threat in the second than Djourou was in the first.

And finally, the debate will continue to rage over Wenger’s substitution of Arshavin for Ox but don’t see a huge drop in passes in the final third after the Ox’s sub. Arsenal still completed 25/31 in those final 15 minutes which is nearly half the attacking passes in the second half in just the last 15 minutes. But! Defensively, is where Arsenal failed there. United completed just 11/20 passes in the Arsenal final third in the last 15 minutes of the game but crucially, they completed 7/7 passes in Arsenal’s final third from the moment that the Ox was subbed to the moment that Welbeck scored — including the three in the build-up to the goal.

One sub, seven minutes, seven passes, one goal.

Is that the lack of concentration that we keep hearing about? Is this just down to Arshavin? What else do you see?

Qq

*I’m being silly in mentioning the entire name. I was NOT paid to put this here. In fact, I paid for the damn app myself. Grrrr…**
**I also was not paid by Apple to mention the iPad. GRRRRRR…

In which I unburden myself temporarily

By Tim, January 25th, 2012 | Category: Arsenal, Press Bias | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)

Some of you may already know this but for those who don’t; on Sunday I unsubscribed from nearly every major Arsenal news feed. This means that I no longer get ESPNSoccernet, the Telegraph, the Guardian, the Mail, the Mirror, or This is Staffordshire* in my daily diet. And much like a person makes a major change in the food they eat because of a health crisis, this shift in my reading diet after the Man U loss has revealed some hard truths. As well it should. After all, few people find themselves in a dietary crisis after a lifetime of eating well.

I used to get up at 4am and almost before my feet hit the floor, open my Google Reader. Once there I would skip down to the “News” folder and start skimming through the daily news feeds from all of the sources listed above.

Skimming was intentional. I know that I could set up an Arsenal only feed or filter out the content that wasn’t Arsenal related but doing that meant I would lose some of the context. For example, what is the point of understanding Arsenal’s semi-annual financial report unless it’s in the context of the financial reports of other clubs?

Another reason skimming is important is that I didn’t grow up in the football culture and I don’t live near the club that I’m covering. So, I need to immerse myself as fully as possible into that culture and, in a sense, catch up with the rest of you. Things like “banta” and chanting aren’t completely foreign concepts but I need to try to understand the subtexts of those cultural artifacts in order to comment intelligently.

I would get my breakfast ready, coffee on, and spend an hour to two hours just reading football related news feeds first thing in the morning. Then at lunch, more news feeds. Then after supper, more news feeds. Then before bed. And if I woke up in the middle of the night worried about something. How else would I have know important details like the fact that the Rwandan president has called time on Arsene Wenger’s tenure at Arsenal?**

I’m exaggerating, slightly, but the reality is that I spent an extraordinary amount of time sifting through the output of just a small handful of media outlets’ content to find maybe 10 stories that interested me, per day. There was a lot of duplication in there, there was a lot of contradiction between sites and even within, there was a lot of opinion, and the vast majority of the opinion and coverage of all the clubs was negative.

I’m not telling anyone anything shocking to say that newspapers thrive off negative coverage. Objectively, the Arsene Wenger era has been the most successful in the history of Arsenal and one of the most successful in the history of English football. And it doesn’t matter how you measure that success — trophies, players, fans, money, stadiums, reputation, etc — Arsenal are a successful football club. Also just as objectively, Arsenal are going through a rough patch.

It’s natural for the newspapers to cover the negative over the positive in that situation. In fact, I’d argue it’s natural for them to make the negative the norm. You only need to see the negative coverage of Man U, who are objectively the most successful club in Premier League history and who are not going through a rough patch despite losing players to injury and not splashing big money this January, to see that no matter what’s happening at your club the reporters will make the negative the norm.

How many red cards did Arsene Wenger’s Arsenal get when they were winning trophies? If you know the answer to that then, again, I’ve proven my point. It’s more complicated than that, of course, but I’m not writing an ethnography on English sports reporters here, rather, just pointing out that negativity has and always will sell and when multiplied with the number of stories that I was reading, it was and still is a bit of a burden.

I imagine it would be less burdensome if there wasn’t so much ubiquitous reblogging, republishing, and repeating of so much content. Well, I say “content” but I really mean “bullshit.” And the thing is that it’s not just simple multiplication of bullshit, it’s some kind of exponential function of bullshit. Bullshit begets bullshit and each of those bullshits begets their own bullshit and so on until we are entirely covered in bullshit.

See, what happens is that if negativity sells then people have to out-negative each other. One writer calls for a player to be fired, the next guy is dissatisfied with just one player and calls for a clear out of multiple players, the next for assistant coaches to be fired, the next guy for the manager to be fired, and then the board, and then the owners, and then….? What? Do we call for the Premier League to be fired? the FA? FIFA? Europe? The UN? God himself?

Now, imagine that you could take all that gluttony, that negativity, and all that bullshit that you’ve been carrying around for the last few years and put it down for a second.

It’s like double-rainbows all the way across the sky, man.

Trust me.

*I had to keep up on what people were saying about us in Stoke!
**I don’t read Brooks Peck’s “work”, someone from twitter sent me that link this morning and I thought  perfectly illustrates every point I made above and below.

The mythical Koscielny

By Tim, January 24th, 2012 | Tags: , , | Category: Arsenal, By the Numbers | 51 comments - (Comments are closed)

A few years ago there was a series of commercials for McDonald’s that ran over here in the States where Larry Bird and Michael Jordan played a game of horse for a Big Mac. The first commercial featured the two retired NBA players proposing increasingly more preposterous shots for the other to take, culminating in a shot from the roof of the Hancock Center and with Jordan uttering the catch phrase “nothing but net.” As far as commercials go, it was goofy and kind of boring but what it did well is play on the mythology of both Bird and Jordan as two of the NBA’s all-time clutch shooters.

Of course, the commercial only works because it’s a wink and a nod to that mythology. We all know that Larry Bird can’t make a shot from outside the stadium, through an open window, off the wall, off the billboard and get nothing but net. That shot would require backboard.

It’s that mythology of sports stars that has always fascinated me and makes me wonder if heroes of the past like Hercules or Goliath weren’t just the Michael Jordan’s of their day: the stories of their feats of strength passed down from generation to generation and magnified to create a mythology of the god-like powers they possessed. I can only imagine the stories they will tell of Michael Jordan in 1000 years. Perhaps he will be some sort of giant slayer, dunking on the 16 foot tall Patrick Ewing with the jawbone of an ass — Charles Barkley.

Arsenal’s pantheon of heroes is long and varied as well. I recently heard someone call Ian Wright “the most clinical finisher ever” or something to that effect. And for many who harken back to a time when Arsenal played the best defense the world has ever seen, there’s Tony Adams, who never missed a header and kept 39 clean sheets in one 38 game season.

Current players get this treatment as well, sometimes deserved and sometimes not. One good header in an important game sets an impression that a player is good in the air just as four goals in a game can set the myth that a player is “one of the most technically gifted players ever to play for Arsenal.”

Usually, the false idols are found out over time and those with true stature in the game perform consistently. Or as they say in England, form is temporary, class is permanent.

One player who has shown a great streak of form for Arsenal this season is Laurent Koscielny.Tied with Stoke City in 7th, Arsenal’s defense is one of the worst in England at the moment and yet Arsenal supporters should take solace in the work that Koscielny is putting in for the team. Among active players, Koz leads Arsenal in interceptions per game, clearances, offsides won, and in the category that most vexed Arsenal over the last three to four years; aerial duels.

That said, his numbers rank low in comparison to someone like, say Gary Cahill. In aerial duels, Gary Cahill is 7th in the Premier League having won 63 duels in 19 games while Koz is much further down the list with just 42 duels won in 20 matches. Clearly Cahill is better in the air than Koz, right?

Uhhh… no.

One thing we know about Arsenal is that they try to keep possession. This results in fewer chances for the opposition to put the Arsenal defense under pressure and subsequently lower raw numbers in most defensive categories like “total aerial duels”. That’s one reason why I like to look instead at percentage, in which case you would see that Koz is winning a respectable 68% of his duels and Cahill is much further down at 61%.

This fact that Koz is winning 68% of his aerial duels compared to 61% by Cahill intrigued me. What percentage are his teammates winning? What percentage are players on comparable teams to Arsenal, in terms of possession, winning? What about other numbers? What about last season, how does this compare?

First, what I did was take the top four possession-based teams: Arsenal, Man City, Chelsea, and Swansea. Then I sorted their player lineups on WhoScored.com by aerial duels won per game and took the top three defenders. Thinking that I wanted a bigger picture of data about headers I also went and included clearances in there as well. Put it all in a spread sheet, color coded by team (red and white for Arsenal, blue and white for Chelsea, light blue for Man City, and white on black for Swansea), and then sorted by percent of aerial duels won. This is that chart:

Ok, so I included Santos because all of his numbers are extraordinary but ignore him for the moment. The top of table shows what I think you’ll all agree is “common sense.” That is to say, John Terry is widely considered a good defender in the air and Arsenal’s defenders are down at the bottom along with Swansea.

Still, Kozscielny’s numbers are pretty good. In fact, if you look at last season compared to this season you’ll see that Koz has markedly improved in his percentage of headers won from 53% to 68%:

Whereas his aerial duel numbers are up, Koscielny’s clearances numbers are down slightly but he’s still tops of the Arsenal team in that number with 114 or 5.7 per game.

The numbers below Koz are what’s worrying for me. Mertesacker has gone from a player who won 74% of his aerial duels in the Bundesliga to a player who is winning just 57% of his aerial duels for Arsenal. That said, this is his first season in the Premier League and as such, just like Koscielny needed a season to bed in, it’s too early to call time on Mertesacker. If he can get that number up to 62% or so, around where Cahill has been for the last two years, that would be a good turnaround for the season and something to build on for next year.

But it’s Vermaelen that is most worrying. I have no doubt that common sense says that Vermaelen is Arsenal’s best aerial defender. But having written about him for nearly three years now I am not at all surprised that his duel percentage is just 55%. He’s not as good in the air as everyone thinks.

Now, before you say “yeah, but he plays at left back!” Look at the chart, there’s a reason I included Santos and Gibbs: their numbers are almost an exact copy of Vermaelen, except that Santos is some kind of bad ass (more in a second) in the air whereas Vermaelen and Gibbs are kind of “meh.”

Where I think that pair deserve some credit is in the fact that they try to get stuck in. Their aerial duels attempted per game numbers (ADA/G) are very respectable when you look at someone like Djourou who has just 17 duels in 14 matches.

And finally, a bit of a non-sequiter, take a look at the Arsenal defensive numbers for the season and you will see just how badly Santos and Sagna are missed. Santos only played 8 League games but in those 8 games he managed to lead Arsenal in tackles, interceptions, and place third in aerial duels won per game while winning nearly 90% of those challenges. Oh, and in the category of average passes per game, Santos was 4th on the team with 61. Meanwhile, Sagna only played 6 League matches for Arsenal but amassed 12 tackles, 15 interceptions, and just one foul.

Arsenal have their fair share of myths, some rightly earned and some not so rightly earned. Under the duress of playing for an Arsenal side that is largely disorganized defensively, under constant aerial bombardment, and in a rebuilding season in both midfield and defense, Koscielny has earned a bit of a mythical status for me this season.

It may also turn out that it’s not the 2-1 loss to Man U that was the mythical turning point for Arsenal in 2011-2012, but rather the 3-1 loss to Olympiakos. Because that was the match in which St. Andre was injured.

Qq

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