In colloquial Marathi, we have a phrase, (तुझी उंची किती तु करतोयस काय ) which loosely translates as — How tall you are and what are you attempting to do. An evident mismatch between ability and intention. And a perfect example of it is Arsenal, the skill it has, and the way they want to ‘play from the back.’
Playing from the back is a solution similar to what a Puneri Indian Cricket fan prescribes to Virat Kohli. To solve Virat’s troubles of getting out at mid-on, the answer is — ‘Don’t hit towards the leg side, only hit towards the off side!’ Simplistic, Logical, yet we all know stupid to its core.
Let’s go back in History before the ‘fad’ came about. Football was all about the second ball. The goalkeeper hit a long ball, vaguely targeting a teammate. The ball came down with a nice loop and enough time for an opponent to reach the target. Both players went up; one of them headed the ball, the other one, off-balanced, fell to the ground. The header typically inaccurate fell in an empty patch of grass. This was called the second ball. The team which reached the ball first gained control and momentum.
The problem was that there was little or no correlation between the team that kicked the ball, the team that won the header, and the team that gained control. The three behaved as mutually exclusive events.
In such a scenario, you may wonder, why win the header? Before you ponder on this question, remember that I have beaten you to it. In my footballing career…Well after playing in the fifth division league, in the non-footballing district of Pune, in a country ranked 100+ in the world, and still laying claim to a footballing career, is an audacity that only a true Punekar can attempt.
Anyways, as a center-forward, the moment my goalkeeper got the ball, my job was to run as far into opponent territory as possible. This was the part of football I hated the most — My goalkeeper hurling a hopeful long ball near my zone. I hated it because I was not good at heading the ball. Again, not good at heading is an understatement because I headed the ball just once in my career! Before Will Smith could regale us in ‘Concussion,’ I got a first-hand experience of what an impact to the skull can do. For the rest of that match, I played as a Zombie; if my teammate said run, I ran. If they said, shoot, I kicked the ball without any consideration for direction.
To wriggle my way out, I developed a technique. I never strayed far away from an opponent. I always ensured that an opponent defender would be close by to challenge and leap for the long ball coming towards me. I trusted him to leap for it and win the header. My role was to just jump with him, with the intention of messing his balance and thus affecting his accuracy. With his inaccurate header, there was always a fifty-fifty chance that my team would regain the possession.
Here an armchair analyst might look at our amateur game might conclude — it is pointless to hit the long ball. A better way of retaining control of the ball is to hit a ground pass to your teammate. This way, your odds are a hundred percent of retaining possession.
It seems that many of those armchair analysts cleared their GRE, TOEFL, and IELTS examinations and proceeded to do Masters in Data Analytics on the European shores. Again speculating here because speculation seems to be the norm. It seems some of those graduates were picked by European Clubs, and we got the fad of ‘playing from the back’ — A fancy name for a goalkeeper sending a ground pass to his teammate.
With the theory done, let’s look at its practicalities. The first thing you need for the strategy to work is a goalkeeper who has an accurate ground pass. Pause and remember, Goalkeepers, are shot-stoppers who work with their hands to deflect balls that go towards the net. Their training is jumping, diving, and punching balls for ninety-nine percent of the time. In the remaining one percent training, you expect them to develop an accurate passing kick, as precise as Beckham. You need a natural talent for that; only two goalkeepers have it. One is Ederson, who plays at Man City, and the other is Allison, who plies his trade at Liverpool. By converse logic, it means Arsenal does not have that critical goalkeeper.
And by absurd logic, Arsenal still wants to play from the back.
Arsenal goalkeepers inevitably hit either too hard or too slow. They lack the judgment to pass a ball with perfect weight such that it lands in the running path of a player. Hence, their passes are straight line passes to where they see their defenders standing.
What better gift can you hand your opponent than predictability in your game. The opponent knows the exact path of the ball, and a good pressing team like Liverpool invariably intercepts the pass ninety percent of the time. The pass does reach the target for the remaining ten percent, an Arsenal player, an Arsenal defender. Defenders: who by their training are shot blockers, opponent tacklers, and a fundamental instinct to ‘clearing’ the ball when under pressure. Very few defenders have the natural talent to dribble and control the ball. Again I need not mention which teams have signed those defenders. The point is Arsenal is in short supply of such defenders. Thus, even if the ball reaches the target, there is a ninety percent chance that the opponent will steal the ball from the player’s feet.
For the mathematically inclined who want to work with percentages of a certain percentage — here is the answer; chances of Arsenal retaining the ball are one percent.
Call me naive, call me amateur, troll me by any nomenclature, but you cannot deny that a fifty-fifty chance is better than a one percent chance. And this is where Arsenal is, unable to figure a way out. They lost their Champions League spot last year. They have now lost their Europa League spot, descending mid-table. However still, Arsenal wants to continue ‘Playing from the Back.’
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