The minutes of Erik Nevland

Villa, home: subbed after 70 minutes, lone striker, replaced by McBride.   We scored almost immediately after he went off, then added another later on.

Boro, away: subbed after 64 minutes, lone striker, replaced by McBride.  Not much happened for us that day.

Man Utd home: on in 91st minute in a game we’d lost horribly.

Reading away: on in the 83rd minute, scored in the 90th.  A game we’d dominated but not put away.  Nevland made it safe.

Liverpool home: on 76, bad game for Fulham, lost 2-0, can’t remember any impact.

Man City away: on 71 for McBride, straight after we’d scored a goal (seems unlike Roy doesn’t it?).  Hauled down for equalising penalty.  We scored again in the 90th minute.

Birmingham home:  on 67 for Kamara, scored 87 to seal win.

Portsmouth: on 72 for Dempsey, we scored in the 76th minute to win 1-0.

Hull away:  on 85, 2-1 down.

Bolton: on 85, 2-1 up.

(also Leicester in the cup when he scored but was offside)

It’s a pretty decent track record so far.  Noteworthy that he’s started twice and been fairly invisible (not entirely his fault), then come on as a sub and done well.    It’s hard to know the extent to which he was the beneficiary of a team hitting its stride or whether he was a vital part of that team hitting its stride.   I think it’s fair to say that he did his bit.

Roy’s sub patterns much more varied, although I guess with McBride coming back to fitness this was a clear need, and Kamara got a couple of knocks I seem to recall.  The Portsmouth sub (on for Dempsey) was a fairly attacking move.

In summation, you shouldn’t really read the above and spontaneously combust over his lack of use this year.   He’s done a good job when called upon but there’s nothing there to suggest that his absence is costing us dear.   One player simply doesn’t make that much of a difference, particularly a fringe player, however effective he might be.

My guess is that we’ll see more of Nevland as the season wears on, but that he’s unlikely to grow from his current role.   We’ll probably see the odd start and he might do well and he might not (just like most forwards!) but there’s nothing here to get angry about.

Sitting on the dock of the bay

John Paintsil’s heart-warming words remind us that “Roy not making subs” is not the same as “Roy doing nothing”.

Playing ten against eleven against a team that is leading by two goals wasn’t easy for us. When we went into the dressing room, the Manager changed things around and we pushed forward, pushing the right and left backs more forward and that changed a lot for us.

I’ll do the Telegraph density maps later in the week, but from them it’s clear that Simon Davies was operating as a second forward, playing, in total, further forward than both Zamora and Johnson.  Now we get confirmation from Paintsil that the full-backs were pushing on.   I noticed Paintsil roving in the second half, and thought he did that quite well, but Paul Konchesky worries me somewhat when asked to do too much attacking.

Paul Doyle of the Guardian has something about Roy’s subs too, incidentally.

That could be construed as an admission of the lack of his squad’s depth, and certainly the absence of a specialist left winger was punishing, though either Seol Ki-Hyeon or Clint Dempsey could reasonably have been expected to be more visible than the ghostly Zoltan Gera. Chris Baird and Toni Kallio may also have been more reliable in the full-back berths than the negligent John Pantsil and Paul Konchesky. But not “definitely”.

“Definitely” was the key word in Hodgson’s explanation. By using it he left himself open to accusations of indecision or excessive caution. If we reflect on a record of success that extends well beyond last season’s great escape, we may instead deduce that his refusal to gamble on a substitution attests to the strength of his conviction in his methods, a belief, borne of his rich experience, that if you keep performing well you will eventually be rewarded.

Fair enough, all this.  I think that, as usual, we’re slightly overreacting, but it’s a trend that does bear watching.   Roy must have purchased the likes of Andreasen, Andranik and Etuhu for a reason; I’m sure if we’re patient we’ll see them.

The main thing is points on the board, and we’re about par for the course at the moment.  No need to panic just yet.

Tackles

From the telegraph, via the press association, who count these things impartially.  The talk of Seol not tackling is nonsense.   He does his bit.

He might or might not be a good player, but he is not the player people think he is.

Growing your own: Wenger and youth policies; Hoesen v Briggs in juggling contest

Excellent piece in today’s Times.  In short, you need to spend big to get a world class youth policy.  Well worth a read, this, and shows just how far off we are in this regard.

Meanwhile, here are the Fulham youngsters on Soccer am, a skills showdown or somesuch between Danny Hoesen and Matthew Briggs.

Roy’s thoughts

Here.

I pretty much agree with him.  I thought we’d done alright until I met the others at the pub and they weren’t very impressed.  All a bit confusing.

Re. Subs – can see Roy’s point.  I’d have changed it, but I’m not as aghast as most.   Incidentally, I did the Observer fans’ bit and tomorrow morning there may be some words from me in the paper about the lack of subs.  I didn’t really think that, they just asked me for “one more thought” about the game when I’d finished all my other rambles, and I couldn’t think of anything.  So I wondered about the lack of subs because I knew it was a hot topic.   And the way they do these things it’ll look like I was outraged, probably.  And really I’m not.

Anyway.

Fulham 1-2 West Ham

How quickly good things can turn bad.  In the space of ten first half minutes a straightforward game went belly up, with two goals and a player conceded.  And that was that.

We started well.  The passing was as good as it normally is, and the feeling that we have a genuinely reasonable team was enhanced with every slick attack, every near miss.  In the final analysis we realise that Robert Green in the West Ham goal had nothing of note to deal with all day, but territorially Fulham had this game under control.  It was there to be won, and won well.

Then Carlton Cole beat Brede Hangeland to a bouncing ball near halfway.  This set off an attack down our left flank, an attack that was not halted.  Schwarzer spilled a hard cross-shot, Cole mopped up the rebound.  Stunned silence.  It had been going so well.

It got worse.  A simple dolloped through ball caught us square, Schwarzer decided to play sweeper, Etherington beat him to the ball, and we were two down.

And worse again.  Andrew Johnson, who may well be trying too hard, left a boot in for the second time in the game, and saw his second red.

Half time.

West Ham were on top now, but Fulham got help when a penalty was awarded in our favour for hand ball.  Danny Murphy sent Green the wrong way.  Would this see the initiative return to the whites?

No.  Sure there were more attacks, but as the game wore on they became less and less threatening.   Zamora, alone and weary, headed wide when well placed.  Bullard hit free-kick after free-kick into the West Ham wall.  Murphy probed and nudged the ball around, but now there was no space to play in and West Ham contained us easily enough.

Disappointing.  On the one hand we played our game again, and did it quite well.  On the other our defence was carved up far too easily today, something that cannot be repeated if we are to progress this season.  Schwarzer mades some good saves but was culpable twice today, Paintsil was willing but erratic, Konchesky’s game is going backwards (especially with the ball at his feet), and Hangeland had one of those games to remind us that he’s not the finished article.  Hughes was Hughes, which is to say he generally did well.

In the same way, the midfield did as the midfield does.  Simon Davies seems to be regaining form, Murphy played well enough, Zoltan Gera had his moments, and Bullard was everywhere (but in a good way).  Decent performance from this group.  They are what they are and it should be good enough most of the time.

But we must come up with more of a cutting edge.  Johnson was busy but harmless until his dismissal, and Zamora is showing himself to be capable, hard-working, but not completely ruthless in front of goal.  This team will make chances, but needs to do a much better job of turning them into something worthwhile.  Time and again today we found ourselves gasping at another near miss.  We need to do better, especially against ordinary sides like West Ham.

When was football best?

Good article at 200 percent.

It is often said that the best World Cup is that one that was held ten years after you were born.

Too true.  1986.

Organisational stuff

Paul DePodesta again.

The flex was a complicated offense, well complicated for 6th graders who could barely discern the difference between man-to-man and a box-and-one. By many accounts, it was complicated for high school varsity players as well, as it involved crisp passing and a lot of coordinated movement away from the ball. So, this small school in Northern Virginia that wasn’t necessarily competing for national championships started teaching the flex offense… in the 6th grade.

Guess what offense we ran in the 7th grade? 8th grade? And so on.

There were two primary results from this process: 1) by the time anyone reached the varsity basketball team the flex offense was second nature and 2) we won a whole lot of basketball games – many more than our talent (or certainly my talent) would have ever dictated.

I wonder to what extent Roy’s famous ‘patterns’ are worked on down the Fulham teams.   Roy mentioned at the fans’ forum that he does work with the junior sides, more than perhaps he is obliged to.   But I wonder when all the movement off the ball, rehearsed patterns, etc, come into play for younger players or reserve players.  Do they get all that expertise, or is this first team only business?

Oops – one last Blackburn thing

Telegraph on the Blackburn game – I forgot I hadn’t posted this.   Shows we got things about right with the possession winning bars (given it was an away game, etc).  Also Gera and Davies swapping wings confused the density map tracking so we can’t really tell what the team looked like.   Looks fairly normal though.

Look at this though.  It’s West Ham’s 3-1 win over Newcastle:

Did them on the counter attack, no?    West Ham’s forwards spent a lot of time just beyond the halfway line.  Newcastle had the edge on what we’re going to have to call ‘field position’ (where the ball is won; the higher up the park the better, generally, as you have less far to go to get to the goal, less danger of losing it in a dangerous area, etc) too.   So either West Ham got lucky here, or they played pretty cleverly on the counter attack.   Something to watch tomorrow, as our defence isn’t the quickest.

Peckham’s Dickson Etuhu speaks

Here.   Good comments, I think:

I couldn’t have asked for a better move to be honest. It was the hardest decision of my career, because Sunderland didn’t want me to go and I had a lot of friends there, but as soon as I spoke to the Manager here at Fulham I knew that I had to come here, because he can teach me and make me the player I should be.

Peckham boy too, which I hadn’t realised.  Nigerian international and all.  Still, good luck to him.  I’m looking forward to seeing him play.

Good day for me.  Expected disasters at work didn’t materialise, and after work I nipped up to town to get some guitar strings.  I have an old classical guitar that I can’t play very well (most people say this, but I really can only play to basic chords) and it’s a string light, battered (I dropped it down the stairs when I was at uni), and now covered in dust.  So I need to clean it up, which I’ll do on Sunday, but I also needed strings.  So I nipped up to Denmark Street where all the guitar shops are.  I’d love to love it there, but the people in the music shops are so damn pleased with themselves I’m almost ashamed to go in. Everywhere you look are the cool kids you thought you’d left behind years ago, playing unspeakably clever things on their guitars and generally being intimidating.  This surely says more about me than it does about them (and one of my best friends is a guitar wizard), but I couldn’t get out fast enough.  There’s an excellent crime bookshop on Charing Cross road (I think it’s called Murder Ink) so I nipped in there to pick up the latest Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, accidentally wandered into their erotica and romance section (who knew?!), then picked up a few back issues of Alfred’s magazine.   Huzzah!

Then I got home, and not only was there a package containing Juliana Hatfield’s autobiography “When I grow up”, but also a mystery ticket explaining that something else was supposed to be delivered but wouldn’t fit through the letterbox.  Cool!   Alfred Hitchcock can wait. I’m onto Juliana, a fantastic account of what it’s like to be a once worshipped indie star now playing to the same 200 people over and over again.  (not in England though. She hasn’t been here much so gets… maybe 600 people).  Priceless stuff for a fan like me, and in early October we’re going to see her live at the South Bank, which is going to be fantastic to the power of about 90.

Tomorrow’s Friday, then it’s down to mum and dad in the west for the night, then back up to see us play another team in claret and blue against whom we rarely succeed!  Huzzah.

Life feels pretty good again though.  Funny how it all works out.  Swings and roundabouts, I used to say when I was 18 or so, whenever I could.  And I was right.   On Saturday we may well beat West Ham.  Imagine.

How predictable is this?

Saw this in Smith’s last night.  I quite like Pietersen, but this is a) bloody typical and therefore b) not remotely surprising.  Tsk, etc.   Michael Atherton would never have stooped so low.

Weird scenes inside the goldmine

UEFA is about to ruin the perfectly formed European Championships by increasing the number of competitors from 16 to 24.   On the one hand, great, more football. But 16 teams means that the whole thing is small and perfectly formed, no dead games, just great fun. Ah well. $$$$.

Roy Keane on the X Factor phenomenon: alright, not the X Factor, but he’s not happy at the abuse he gets. I can’t understand where all the anger comes from either, but it seems to be part of the game. Fans demand more. They feel they have a right to make their views known. And probably they do.

Was Brazil v Ghana in WC 2006 fixed? You know, I do remember it seeming a bit fishy. Ghana had been bloody good to that point, then just died on the vine.

Tomasz Radzinski back in Belgium. Thanks to Simon for that link.

Ian Pearce has signed for…. Oxted. Bloody hell. I would think he could still be a dominant league 1 player, but perhaps that’s not what he wants at this point. Wow though.

A step back

Jim Dodge, from the excellent “Rain on the River” book.

I’ve had enough of a lot of things at the moment, mainly to do with work and the unavoidable ‘off switch’ that seems to accompany working a longish notice period, but there’s other stuff too.   I’m going to tune out for a bit – ignore the message boards, ignore the news, just enjoy football for what it is, a fun diversion.

I drove my parents mad asking “why?” every five minutes when I was growing up; I’m driving myself mad now.   My degree was in psychology:  why do people think what they think?  My job is market research:  why do people think what they think?   So you can see why I’m like I am.   I have a million books aimed at finding out more about all sorts of things.   To find out why.

I think I need to just let it all be.   Things are what they are.  Sometimes we’ll win, sometimes we’ll lose, some people are always going to love Jimmy Bullard even when his passes are more dangerous to the Barnes Wetlands centre than our opposition; some people will hate Seol Ki-Hyeon even if he scores a hat-trick against Chelsea then then wins Strictly Come Dancing having saved Dame Helen Mirren from a terrorist attack on the way to the BBC.  Fine.   I’m not going to try to understand anything.   No, I’m just going to admire highly skilled athletes doing cool things with a football for a couple of weeks.

Meanwhile, discontent brews

Clint Dempsey to ESPN.

When asked if he thought he’d get an opportunity soon, Dempsey replied, “No.”

“What keeps me sane is the national team to go to and play,” he said. “Right now I’m playing well for them, and I find confidence in that. Having two different teams to play for and being able to feel like you’re appreciated with one of them is always a good thing as a player.”

Well that doesn’t sound so good, does it?  Bummer.

I think everyone knows I’m a big Dempsey fan.  Just enjoy watching him, the way he plays, and after Adam’s work, well that’s just another reason to want him to do well.  But it doesn’t sound like it’s happening.

Jamie’s report from Burnley: Burnley 1-0 Fulham

A thoroughly depressing evening. Roy Hodgson set the tone with an uninspiring choice of starting line-up, and the Fulham players on the pitch followed up with an utterly lifeless performance. To say this game was dull would be an understatement – writing only a couple of hours after having left the stadium, the ‘events’ of the match have already merged into a blur of nothingness in your correspondent’s mind. I don’t think either keeper had a save to make for the first 88 minutes. At which point, suddenly, our defence (like the rest of us) fell asleep and Pascal Zuberbuhler found himself faced one-one-one by Burnley’s young substitute – the striker finding it the easiest thing in the world to round Zuberbuhler and slot the ball into the empty net. Game over, and another predictable ‘shock’ defeat to lower league opposition was complete.

Who takes the rap, then? The manager for making eight changes, massively disrupting a side that was playing some good football in previous weeks? Or the players who were selected and produced such a listless performance? For example, Adranik and Andreasen, two midfielders who presumably think themselves good enough and would have been desperate to stake their claim for a permanent place, were both disappointing in central midfield – the former tidy defensively but misplacing countless passes whilst the latter was simply anonymous. Konchesky was uncharacteristically lacklustre and Gera struggled as he had at Blackburn. Even the previously impressive Andrew Johnson made little impression, although he was the victim of poor service – the ball mostly hoofed up to him, either high in the air or at great speed, giving him little chance of being anything other than a minor nuisance to Burnley’s grateful central defenders.

There was one period of Fulham pressure for seven or eight minutes midway through the second half, when suddenly it looked as we had awoken from our slumber and  might impose our Premiership class. The otherwise nervy Fredrik Stoor made a couple of promising bursts down the right and Clint Dempsey came as close as we ever would with a low shot from just outside the area. But the spell soon faded, and in truth the only players to leave the pitch with any credit were the industrious Dempsey and the centre-back pairing of Kallio and Baird. These two, in fairness, looked reasonably solid before their late aberration allowed the goal, and Kallio especially appears a more than capable back-up should one of our centre-halves get injured. Indeed, probably two of the most exciting Fulham moments of the match were a couple of mightily impressive last-ditch sliding tackles by the lanky Finn, both instances culminating in him rising majestically from the ground with the ball at his feet as the opposition forward lay bewildered nearby. Small crumbs.

The 300 or so away followers who foolishly made the journey north began the match in good voice (“We won here one time, we won here one tiiiime, in the nineteen-fifties…”) but were soon reduced to a near comatose state by the soporific spectacle on the pitch and ended the evening cold, bored and more than a little irked about what had occurred. It’s an argument to be had in more detail elsewhere, but surely the fans deserve better from Hodgson than the obviously second-string and unmotivated eleven he sent onto the field, especially having commented after the Leicester tie that the League Cup is ‘a very important competition … we will always try to send out our best team.’ Not so, it seems. And one thing’s for sure – this kind of depressing debacle will do nothing to help us beat West Ham on Saturday.

Burnely tonight!

Chopper reminds us that we don’t win there.

Roy talks about changes.

Our man in the North (Jamie) is going to the game – check back tomorrow for his report.

Confirmation bias

What?

Paul DePodesta works in the front office of the San Diego Padres baseball team. So? Well he’s a very bright and interesting man, writes a blog about his experiences at San Diego too. I liked this little nugget:

Very simply, confirmation bias describes the act of accepting only those facts that buttress a pre-existing opinion while discarding those facts that run contrary to one’s opinion. In short, we’re much more comfortable continuing to believe what we already believe.

So true.  And this…

So, there we sit discussing the skills of a highly qualified and tested group where the distinction between players is very, very thin. However, what becomes clear is that for the players we want to keep in big league camp, we generally talk about what they can do. For the players we want to send down, we tend to focus on what they can’t do, so the decisions seem obvious (which they’re not). Understand, I keep using “we” because every one of us in the room is guilty – we can’t help ourselves!

I think we see a lot of this in discussions about Fulham players. This is tied into what Colin’s doing at Championship at Best. If you haven’t filled the survey in yet, go for it.

Kevin Nolan worried that Bolton are going soft

This article is about Arsene Wenger, but check out the bit at the end:

Wenger will be unimpressed by an admission from Bolton’s Kevin Nolan that he told a team-mate to foul Theo Walcott. “I said to Jlloyd Samuel, ‘Give him a little kick and see if he comes back at you’,” Nolan said, adding: “We are in danger of losing that side – the roughing up of people.”

I wouldn’t look at this twice were it not for several recent attempts to clean out Jimmy Bullard.  The first of which was by Kevin Nolan.   Nice man.

Looks like things are moving in the right direction for Sheffield United, at West Ham’s expense.  Good.  How this ever got to this point is a mystery to me; extraordinary gutlessness from the league at the time.   Anyway, it partly explains why we were able to buy Zamora and Paintsil:

West Ham’s keenness to sell players this summer is now thought to have been prompted by a need to raise funds in anticipation of the judgment. Freddie Ljungberg was paid to leave to get him off the wage bill, Bobby Zamora and John Paintsil were sold to Fulham, and Richard Wright and Nolberto Solano also left.

Finally, the formatting’s gone again.  They must have updated me.  Oh well.

Or

Dan at WithAPlum has put it far better than I managed.

Fulham will lose some games because Roy Hodgson is a patient man. Fulham will win some games because Roy Hodgson is a patient man. Fulham will lose some games because crazy things happen in a sport decided by three or four definite events over the course of ninety minutes.

(that’s an excerpt – click above for the whole thing)

Subs, etc

Yesterday a lot of us wanted subs.  We didn’t get them.  Blackburn made subs and won late on.  2+2=4, right?  Maybe so.

Roy has been a football manager since 1976.  We’ll call that 30 years, allowing for partial seasons, etc.  Nowithstanding international work, let’s say that he’s managed 45 games a season over those 30 years.   That’s 1,350 matches.

In all of those games Roy will have had the option of using substitutes.  Sometimes he’ll have been ahead and in need of reinforcements to see it out; sometimes he’ll have been behind and needing to change things; other times it’ll be tightly balanced, and any small move could tilt things either way.  He’ll have seen it all several times over, and probably tried all conceivable approaches to substitutes in that time.  He’ll have sent on forwards early to shake things up, he’ll have left a struggling team unchanged because he senses that it’s just about hanging on.

Sometimes he’ll have made changes that work.  Sometimes he’ll have made changes that haven’t worked.  Sometimes he’ll have done nothing and been either rewarded or penalised for it.  Whatever.  He’s had the time to get a feel for these things, to build an approach.  There will presumably be no hard and fast rules, he’ll just play it as he sees it, relying on instincts honed over 1,350 football matches.

One thing I’ve always felt about football is that the game is very random.  I say this a lot and people rightly question the stance, but I pretty much stand by it.  In the old days of FA Cup replays you’d sometimes see a draw, then another draw, then a hammering in the second replay.  These days you sometimes see two teams play one another twice in succession, perhaps because of a cup engagement, and sometimes you’ll see very different results.   In football there are a number of moments on which entire matches hinge.  Remember England beating Germany 5-1 in Munich?  Germany could have been out of sight in that match before England hit their stride.  England beating Croatia 4-1 recently?  Our first goal came when one Croatia defender cleared the ball against the backside of another.  Not that these incidents diminish what comes next, but sometimes weird things happen and games spin out of control, and there’s little anyone can do or could have done about it.

It happens all the time at Fulham too.  We were able to beat Manchester City after being 2-0 down because Joe Kamara did something good, but another Joe, Hart, let his shot between his legs after being superlative until then.  Then Danny Murphy hit a penalty and Hart saved it, but that rebound could have gone anywhere.  It came back to Murphy, who converted.  Kamara scored in injury time to seal an improbable win.  We beat Birmingham, who missed a golden chance in the first half, then lost Liam Ridgewell to injury.  Ridgewell’s replacement was our old friend Franck Queudrue, who promptly lost Brian McBride for goal 1, and then set up Erik Nevland for goal 2.  I could go on.

Football falls on these tiny moments, some go your way, some don’t.  And just as you can flip a coin and get a head 4 times in a row if you try enough, you can also get a run of good fortune when you need it most and therefore stay in the top division if you’re lucky.

Which is not to undermine the team’s play in those games, because they were well prepared and kept playing their game, and this is entirely my point.   If Roy Hodgson gets his team physically and mentally prepared – and he stressed this at the fans’ forum – then sometimes that will be enough on the day and sometimes it won’t, but if you take care of things to the best of your ability then theoretically you maximise your chances of winning each football match.

But there will always be mistakes, unponderable weirdness, and surprises.  Roy knows this and said as much at the fans’ forum.  Football is unpredictable.  As a manager his job is to prepare, to control the controllables, and to go from there.  On the field anything can happen.

Perhaps he takes this too far.  Jose Mourinho would sometimes remove a misfiring winger after no time at all if it felt like the game wasn’t shaping up to plan.  Jose Mourinho had a big ego, felt that he could control everything, that he could shape football matches.  And perhaps he was right.   Perhaps Roy is too passive, believing that things have been set up to plan and from there we might win and we might not, but the controllables were controlled and that’s the main thing.  I don’t know.  But again, Roy has developed a feel for making his substitutions over a long period of time, backs his own judgement, and has largely been successful in so doing.  So yes he might have been slow on the trigger yesterday, but something will have told him to hold off, something would have made him think that things were going to be alright out there.  Just turns out that it didn’t work out.  Sometimes that’s the way it goes.