Closer each day
I’ve suggested before that I don’t think there’s much different about the way we play home and away. I suspect we play for a win at home, and while we probably do away too, there’s half an eye on a draw too. Put another way, if we’re drawing at home we would usually try to turn it into a win; if we’re drawing away we’d usually be happy to protect that point.
As far as the team is set up, I have long been fascinated by one of the Telegraph’s stats: where on the pitch we win the ball, on average. Think of it this way: if we are camped in the opponents’ half we’ll generally win the ball higher up the pitch; if we defend deep or play a counter-attacking game we’ll generally win the ball on the edge of our own box.
The decision of where to defend is partly made in advance and partly a reaction to circumstance. The conventional wisdom is that the higher up the pitch you defend the better, because winning the ball nearer the opponent’s goal gives you less far to travel with it, and you’re further away from your own goal too, so less at risk. Against that, if you defend too high up you leave massive gaps behind you, which can be very dangerous if the opponents either have pace up front, or are given time in midfield. We saw Bolton try to push up against Liverpool at the weekend, but they didn’t close down Liverpool’s midfielders, who picked them off with throughballs all game. Generally you adopt a compromise, a position that theoretically gives you the best of both worlds.
All of which is leading up to a quick analysis of where we’ve been defending this season.
It’s not the be all and end all, but we can see a degree of consistency here. We – on average – win the ball 25 metres from our own goal, and opponents win the ball 28 metres from their goal. In other words, we’ve been very slightly on the back foot this year. Generally speaking this is a good indicator of territorial advantage: you can see that Arsenal really pegged us back (as did Portsmouth, which surprised me a little) and that the highest line we’ve played this year was against Bolton.
Again, there’s noise here: it’s an average of where the ball is won, which can be distorted by all sorts of things, but the further up the pitch you win the ball the higher the number, so it does work as a proxy for how deep you played in a game. And guess what? We’re the same both home and away. We lose the ball a bit further away from the opponents’ goal away from home, which is presumably a slight lessening in attacking intent, but the overall pattern is remarkably consistent game by game.
No great revelation here, but something to ponder.
Just a thought: our defensive line was deeper against Arsenal so that it would be more difficult for them to exploit the space behind our defence with the express pace that they have in their midfield and attack. As a result, the rest of the side (especially the midfield) also have to drop deeper, so that there isn’t a huge amount of unprotected space in front of the back four.
Against Portsmouth too, we had Defoe’s blistering pace to deal with against Hangeland, a defender whose speed isn’t exactly his greatest asset. Again, we have to play deeper.
On the other hand, a physical team like Bolton aren’t exactly fliers – instead they base their play around set pieces. As a result, we play and defend higher up the pitch, safe in the knowledge that if we concede a free-kick, it is further away from our goal than it might otherwise be; and that if there is a through-ball behind our defence, Kevin Davies isn’t exactly going to leave all others in his wake with his [ahem] blistering pace.
Seems to be more relevant than whether we are playing at home or away – and a sign that Roy knows what he is doing and is organising the defence and the shape of the team well.
Seems like a bunker-down mentality can be seen in the draw statistics.