Last year v this year

When supporting the impending apocalypse theory of our 2009/10 start, people are saying that it’s not the result, but the performances that worry them.

To this I have countered that we rarely look good losing (think about it; we’re ugly losers).   But they do have a point.  We haven’t seemed to play particularly well.

One way to guage performance is to look at shots/shots on target stats.    This is something the mathematical modellers at the Fink Tank do, as it gives a good overview of how teams are playing.     Here’s this year v last year for us then:

Last year:

Portsmouth away:  12 shots, 6 on target.  Allowed 24 shots, 7 on target
Villa away: 6 shots, 2 on target.  Allowed 16 shots, 2 on target
Chelsea home:  5 shots, 2 on target.  Allowed 24 shots, 8 on target
Total:  23 shots, 10 on target.  Allowed 64 shots, 17 on target

This year:

Portsmouth away:  13 shots, 2 on target.  Allowed 17 shots, 2 on target
Villa away:  8 shots, 0 on target.  Allowed 10 shots, 2 on target
Chelsea home:  6 shots, 1 on target.  Allowed 16 shots, 4 on target
Total:  27 shots, 3 on target.  Allowed 43 shots, 8 on target.

So we’ve shot about as much but not hit the target.  We’ve conceded far fewer shots, and have allowed fewer of those to hit the target.  I don’t know that this tells us too much, but I don’t think there’s enough of a difference to suggest ‘crisis’ by any stretch of the imagination.    We’ve had some tough games (latterly without our best players) and struggled.   I really think that’s all there is to it.

Do our eyes deceive us?

Everyone thinks Jonathan Greening had a tough debut.  But both the Guardian and the Telegraph show him as having seen more of the ball than any Fulham player in recent memory.    He didn’t do much with it, but was he as bad as people are making out?

By the Telegraph’s numbers (it looks like the Guardian were asleep on the job again, given the picture on the right) he gave the ball away 13 times, which seems like a hell of a lot in the modern game, but given the amount of the ball he did see, this is probably quite reasonable.   In all the time we’ve been seeing these things I can’t remember a Fulham player passing the ball 91 times.    His ’success’ rate is right in line with what Murphy does.

Villa 2-0 Fulham

While waiting for the game to start I was having a nose around the Observer’s Review section, and more specifically around an interview with art collector Charles Saatchi.  He was asked about (artist) Mark Rothko and the nature of infinity, and replied as follows:

“My understanding of infinity goes something like this: every 100 years a sparrow flies to the top of a large mountain, and cleans its beak by scraping it on the highest rock. By the time the mountain has been scraped away to a small pile of dust, that would be the equivalent of the first second of infinity.”

Of course this is pretentious drivel, but I kept thinking about this sparrow on a mountain-top throughout the game.  We really didn’t look like we would score, ever.

The first thing you need to know about today is that we were missing Danny Murphy.  “As Murphy goes, so go Fulham” and all that, and today Murphy wasn’t there and Fulham were dreadful.

The second thing is that Bobby Zamora and Andy Johnson were also missing, and without them we might as well have been playing with an ice cream and a custard cream up front.  This is slightly unfair to Diomansy Kamara, who at least had a go at being useful, but it was so easy to imagine Zamora in there making things hard; it was so easy to imagine Johnson running the channels, pulling defenders around, winning free-kicks.   We’re a different team with these two aboard.

Villa scored early.  Fulham’s defenders played the ball around carelessly on the edge of the area, conceded a thoroughly avoidable corner, and Ashley Young’s fizzing cross was nicked over Dickson Etuhu and onto John Paintsil head, from where it flew into the net.  Paintsil was thoroughly blameless here – he had no time to react – but it was a ridiculously soft goal.

This drew Fulham out somewhat, but Villa pressed extremely well, not just the player in possession but seemingly all available passing options too.  Our players always seemed hurried, always put under pressure, and rarely made anything happen.  We had isolated spells of pressure, but couldn’t make Villa’s makeshift defence give way, couldn’t create any chances worthy of the name.  Dempsey and Duff swapped flanks time and again, but ended up trying too hard to make something happen, and both had 5/10 games.  Jonathan Greening, on his Fulham debut, was probably a touch below that.

While it was 1-0 Fulham always had a theoretical chance of making something happen – a free-kick perhaps, or a random bounce going our way – but Gabby Agbonlahor made it 2-0 with a ripper of a drive from 25 yards, and that was that.   He had space and time, but his shot came from nowhere, blasted a foot off the ground and through Schwarzer all too easily, beaten by the extraordinary power of the shot.   Modern balls…

So there we are.  We’re about where we should be given the fixture list, so no need to panic yet.  Fulham don’t look good when they lose away from home – it’s just the way things are – so the idea of today’s performance being some kind of indicator of the season ahead strikes me as being somewhat off.  We must wait for the easier games to come around and, assuming we can field our better players, should expect them to be more enjoyable than today’s non-event.

Europa league – hot love now!

PAF! indeed.  Tis what it’s all about, folks.  PAF!

Group E

AS Roma (Italy)

Basel (Switzerland)

Fulham (England)

CSKA Sofia (Bulgaria)

Can anyone doubt the excellence of being “in Europe” now?     No, they can’t.

Fulham in for goal machine Marc Janko: all that glistens?

In other more detached news, the Daily Mail say that we have beaten Celtic, Blackburn and and Man City to sign Marc Janko.  Note the word “beaten”.  Not “beating”, “beaten”.   If so, this is quite exciting.   Janko, you see, scored 39 goals in 34 games for Salzburg last season, and while Austria is Austria, not many people score goals like that.

Still, you know me:  let’s try and get some context.

First hypothesis:  he’s not the second coming of (Brazil’s) Ronaldo or he wouldn’t be at Salzburg at 26.    So, we may assume that a) lots of goals are scored in Austria, and b) Salzburg attack a lot.    These two pretty much have to be true, or there’s no way he’s getting 39 goals.   And:

Sure enough, nobody in the entire league seems too concerned about defence.   Salzburg conceded 50 in 36, while scoring 86.   That’s not even the best in the league:   RapidVienna scored 89 and conceded 43.    So hypotheses a and b confirmed.   He’s in a very favourable situation to score goals.

You can see his game-by-game here.    To his credit, he did score against other big teams, but on the negative side, he appears to have ‘only’ scored 3 goals in 12 European games.    That’s not bad, but it’s not superhuman either.

So we’re still working with the ‘good but not great’ theory.     What else?   His deputy appears to be one Robin Nelisse, who scored 12 in 34 appearances (many as sub).   Nelisse was second top scorer, and at least he wasn’t banging them in every week (that would’ve been a warning sign that Janko really isn’t all that).

Back to football lineups:

Aha!

So, we have:

• A (relatively) very good team
• Playing very attacking football
• In a very attacking league (where defences are either poor or undermanned)
• Using one man up front (so he gets to profit from the above alone rather than ’sharing’ with a strike partner – I may have made this phenomenon up)
• Who is good enough (in the Austian league) to make hay under these very favourable conditions
• But who, so far, has not dominated in European competition.

What we have here is a fairly talented player who might be worth a punt.   And we’ve (apparently) got him on loan, so can take that punt.

(Possibly) Wilkommen, MarcJanko!

Loads of happenings today

First and foremost, Kagisho Dikgacoi has been granted a work permit and is now a Fulham player.  I can’t wait to see him in action.    As you’ll recall, he had a trial with us earlier in the year but wasn’t match fit.  Roy saw something in him and invited him back, and the rest we know.   Frankly he could be anything, but as a regular player in a much improved South Africa side he’s earned his work permit.   Let’s see what happens now.

“I am so happy that my transfer to Fulham has been finalised. I have spent most of the summer training with the players and getting to know them and all of the coaching staff. I have been given a wonderful chance to be part of a fantastic team playing in one of the best leagues in the world, this is something very special to me and an opportunity that I am going to grab with both hands.”

Tremendous.

Eddie Johnson is profiled on the official site.

Talking of which, you seem to be enjoying yourself on the training pitch. We watched you celebrate a goal like you had just single-handedly won the World Cup…
[Laughs] Whether it’s in a stadium or on the training pitch I just love scoring goals. I love getting up and coming to training, it’s a good environment to be in. I’m a goalscorer, and if I’m honest, the last 18 months haven’t been great in that sense – I’ve missed that feeling of sticking the ball in the back of the net. In the past I’ve possibly lacked a bit of confidence, but I have that again now and I have a feeling that it’s going to be a good year for me.

I’ve been treating every training session as if it’s a proper game, and I’m more focused than ever because I know it’s on the training ground where I’m going to make the Manager take notice. Dave Jones at Cardiff said to me, “if you can’t score in training, how do you expect to score on a Saturday?” And he’s right… It was a good goal though!

I’d like to see Roy find spots to use the likes of Eddie.   Of course the same must be said for Nevland and Kamara, both (rightly) afore him in the pecking order, but still.   There must be occasions when burning pace is needed.   He seems like a likeable fella and I hope we see him in a few more games this season.

As you’ll know, we’ve beaten Amkar Perm 3-2 on aggregate, losing 1-0 today in Russia.   I was watching the BBC text updates and it seemed to be a steady procession of [Perm player] shoots… blocked by [Fulham player] but hey, it’s an away European game, played without some key players and on a strange pitch.   No sense complaining about anything.  WE’RE THROUGH TO THE GROUP STAGE!

Roy is gracious in victory.

“I have great sympathy for my colleague [Amkar Manager Dimitar Dimitrov] and for all of the Amkar team because in the last part of the match at Craven Cottage and in the 90 minutes today, they’ve shown that they are a good quality team and they have stretched us to the limit in order to get our qualification.”

In other news, I have a new piece up at The Times.   It’s not about anything in particular but a couple of people say they liked it, so that’s kind of them.

Diamonds

Jonathan Wilson’s latest on Chelsea’s diamond formation. (thanks to bq)

So, how can the diamond be countered? The lack of width remains the flaw, and the key is to try to shift the battle from the centre to the flanks. Hull rode their luck to an extent on the opening day, but it is no coincidence that it was their 4-5-1 rather than the 4-4-2 of Sunderland and Fulham that came closest to stopping Chelsea.

Midfielders played wide and high stop the advances of the full-backs, while a hard-tackling trio in the centre will at least make Chelsea fight for possession, while shielding the back four when Chelsea have possession. In addition, a team’s wide midfielders block Chelsea’s full-backs, their own full-backs should be free to either become an extra man in midfield or provide additional defensive cover.

I think this is a more important reason for our display than “not wanting it” or any of the other attitudinal complaints we’ve seen.  Wilson, in his “inverting the pyramid” book, notes that in England people tend to regard formations as (largely irrelevant and) simply where the players stand, but as he discusses here, these configurations can have a very real impact on how games progress.  In short, we never did work out where the Chelsea players were, and so couldn’t stop them passing to one another in spaces where our players weren’t.

Notts County doing a Fulham

Sol Campbell ready to sign for Sven’s boys

In the same piece, Fulham are going to sign Kalu Uche after all:

Fulham expect to complete the signing of Kalu Uche, the Nigeria forward, for about £2.5 million from Almería subject to a wrok permit, international clearance and other paperwork.

I wonder what the ‘other paperwork’ is.   Also, here is The Times saying “wrok permit”.    Tsk.

Le Mans have offered us centre-back Gregory Cerdan.

Murphy signs again, Greening in, Zoltan had a bad’un after all

The long and dangerous saga of Jonathan Greening has ended, and now he is a Fulham player.  (“Greening signs!” says an excited email from the club.)  Annoyingly, he wasn’t registered for Saturday’s game because his agent refused to sign off on the deal until 90 minutes beyond the deadline, following six hours of haggling over his cut in the deal.   Triffic.    Greening would have made no difference to the game, but it would’ve been useful for him to get some pitch time ahead of Thursday.

Thursday….  we’re without Johnson and I expect Danny Murphy to stay behind as well.  Murphy, who has signed another new contract with the club (till 2011 now), hobbled off against Chelsea after having his calf trodden on by Ricardo Carvalho.   I won’t bother with the chalkboard this time, but the old “as Murphy goes, so go Fulham” maxim was in evidence again:  he didn’t get much of the ball at all.   If we think teams are wising up to us this year it’ll be interesting to see if they make an effort to shut him out of matches.   We’ll need other players to step up, either way.

It’s going to be a tricky time for Fulham, what with all these double game weeks and tricky opponents, but we’ll get a good run together before long.   Europe needs to be celebrated while we’re still in it.   We’ve already been spoiled with what was, in retrospect, a really good game against Perm (weirdly it didn’t seem like it at the time), and I’m hopeful of plenty more of these as the season wears on.

Right, some more bits and bobs, this time from The Telegraph’s fine football page.

This morning I rather daftly proclaimed to the world that Zoltan Gera only gave the ball away three times on Sunday.   That’s what the Guardian chalkboards said, and those numbers come from Press Association specialised counter people.   So why would they be wrong.   People noted that this was not correct, and yes, it did seem low given the torrid time our Hungarian hero was having.   Well the Telegraph have information on all this too, and now Zoltan’s passing was 15 of 25 to teammates, which would go with what people saw.  Here’s a picture:

So there we are.  Duff did better and was much more adventurous when he did have the ball.  I don’t know how they work these things out because Gera did cross the ball to Dempsey, which surely counts as an ‘attack’ pass, but there we are.    Mumbo jumbo, as people are never slow to tell me.   Still, if we learn something once in a while it’s all worth it.

As an interesting aside, this:

We had a lot more of the ball on the right.  Which, all considered, wasn’t playing to our strengths.

Fulham 0-2 Chelsea

A frustrating afternoon spent chasing shadows.   Chelsea controlled the game from start to finish, and Fulham really didn’t threaten Petr Cech’s goal.

Part of this was because of the injury to Andy Johnson on Thursday.  His absence was felt all over the pitch:  we missed his sharp running, constant harrying and intelligent runs.  Clint Dempsey filled in up front, but looked lost and isolated, and to make matters worse, we missed his presence in the midfield.  Damien Duff, in his first Fulham start, was unable to repeat Thursday’s pyrotechnics, and had a disappointing afternoon on the left wing.  Over on the other side it may be fair to say that Zoltan Gera needs a break.  He’s a determined and decent footballer, but all players lose form at some point and Gera’s been down so long he looks like up. Next week – assuming Roy doesn’t decide to punt the UEFA cup in anger – we should see a different midfield configuration.

The middle of the pitch is another concern.  Greening and Dikgacoi are expected soon, and frankly we need them.  Today’s injury to Danny Murphy reminded us that we are thin in that area. Trying to battle back from 2-0 down to one of the league’s best sides is hard enough at the best of times:  with Dickson Etuhu and Chris Baird pulling the strings it really is a big ask.  (I’m a fan of both, but they’re not an ideal engine room are they?)

And so it goes.  The game was painful to see, with Chelsea passing, passing, passing, Fulham failing to keep the ball at all, and so on and so forth, interrupted twice by Chelsea breakthroughs.  First Didier Drogba slipped through an offside trap (John Paintsil may have been late out) and made it 1-0, then in the second half Nicolas Anelka’s turbo boost took him well clear of anyone in white, past Mark Schwarzer and from there a goal was easy.

After that it was a question of watching the clock tick by and checking the cricket score.

Sunday morning

It’s a lovely morning here in South London, a fine day for the serious business ahead.

Fulham are without Johnson (A), but also perhaps Dickson Etuhu, whose groin may have been behind his early withdrawal on Thursday.    This could see all kinds of things happen:  Chris Baird, Jonathan Greening, or something else.   All adds to the intrigue.

Chelsea are a fine side and we’ll have to be at our best today.   As Roy pointed out in the week, the defence, despite not conceding many so far, is not yet where it was last season, although our attacking play has been quite good.  The trick, as ever, will to take our chances when they come, something that’s harder to do without your centre-forward.

We shall see.

In other news, Jozy Altidore appears to have had a minor stormer for Hull City yesterday.   I’m a huge Altidore fan and was delighted to see him get going, first with a clever acrobatic through ball that set up the winning goal, then with a couple of nice turns and shots.   It was an impressive start to his English football career, and if he can build on this Phil Brown’s done well.

We all love Jon Greening, he smiles on the tv

Which suggests he’ll do a Murphy kind of job, doesn’t it?

The signing is about done now, first on loan, then on a permanent.   Good player, and should be a real asset to the squad.

99 problems but a pitch ain’t one

I forgot to add this, a guide to Perm from the Football Supporters Federation.

On the ground:

The Zvezda Stadium was formerly known as the Lenin Komsomol stadium until the fall of the Soviet Union. Opened in 1969, like many other Russian stadia it is covered with artificial turf to help keep conditions playable during the Russian winter.

On the city:

The city is dominated by the enormous Kama River, Europe’s fourth largest. The river is at its narrowest as it flows through the city to the north, but is still over 1km wide at this point.

Nice.  For river fans, here are some good pics.

Here’s how it all fits together:

So technically, people worried about transfers from Moscow ought to be able to find a way by boat.

Anyway, it promises to be a tremendous second leg, and I’m gutted that there’ll be no way to see it.  It’s a trip I’d love to make.

A new garage door

When I was growing up Dad would periodically repaint our garage door.   Sometimes green, sometimes brown, but every so often he’d give things a new lick of paint and somehow this was really exciting in my small boy’s mind.

The funny thing was that every time Dad did this, Bill next door would also paint his garage door.  It was a kind of unspoken garage door arms race, on Bill’s part at least.   Dad was just giving ours a fresh lick of paint; Bill seemed to take it as a challenge.

Bill was a funny bloke.  Very serious man, the sort who would be lovely much of the time but sometimes not let you have your ball back when it crossed garden boundaries.   Occasionally, when nobody was around, I used to climb into Bill’s back garden to retrieve balls previously given up as lost.  This involved shinning up onto the garage roof, crawling over a few yards, then dropping down next door.  Then you just repeated the trick in reverse.   To a small boy it was as good as breaking and entering, the thrill of the forbidden, the thrill of climbing, the thrill of height.   Ball retrieval had it all.

Anyway, you never know what goes on in folks’ lives.   To me Bill was a strange but good natured man who sometimes wasn’t especially warm to kids (a kind of Mr McGregor in Beatrix Potter type man perhaps).   But he took great pride in his gardens (front and back, lawns too) and so having kids rampaging back and forth retrieving various balls probably wasn’t part of his master plan.   And even if he didn’t really mind us fetching these balls, he was right to establish it as a minor problem so that we were conscious of not making trouble.  If he’d smiled accommodatingly every time we’d have thought nothing of running all over his garden; this way we tried to be careful and lived in some fear of upsetting him, which was probably just how he wanted things (and rightly so, in retrospect).

Where is this going?  Nowhere.   Only that I’ve fiddled with the look of the site again, and it’s because Dan and Nick did too, and well, I thought I might have a change again too.   Make it look smart.   I am Bill in the garage door arms race.    But what to do about that pen?

Duff versus Bosingwa

Question:

Nullifying Bosingwa… play Dempsey on the left for his defensive work, or Duff to push Bosingwa back?   Or doesn’t it matter?

Fulham 3-1 FC Amkar Perm

A strange game, with long periods of quiet nothingness punctuated by moments of brilliance.  All the goals were spectacular in their own way, and the fact that there could have been several more (at either end) suggests a quite unFulham-like evening.   In the end we settled for 3-1, which is good but not that good.  The game is not yet dead, the Russians look quite handy, and with their away goal will fancy their chances in what should be an exciting second leg.

Andrew Johnson struck early.  Clint Dempsey arrived in the middle of the park, flipped a nice first time ball out to Bobby Zamora, and the rejuvenating forward flashed another first time pass across the area, behind the defence, and into Johnson’s stride deep in the area (he didn’t miss).  A whirlwind of a goal, devastatingly orchestrated and finished.  Terrific start.

But that was about that for a while.  Johnson nearly added another very similar goal but was denied by a fine save, then Dempsey almost scored too, only to be denied by a man on the line who came from nowhere to save the day.  At the other end Perm had moments but struggled to find a shot they liked, and only tested Schwarzer late on with a dipping 20 yarder that he saved well.

The feeling seemed to be that another two goals were needed after the break.  The first came soon enough, as that man Dempsey turned in midfield and whacked a thunderbolt past the helpless keeper from what his countrymen might call ‘downtown’.  It was a blur of a shot, a stunning strike, and the crowd sang Clint’s song with joy.

But amazingly, that might not have been the high-point on the night’s euphoria scale.  Damien Duff, our exciting new signing, was introduced with 15 minutes left.  Within seconds of coming on he had flown past his marker (thanks to a big dummy, a searing turn of pace and some determination to keep going when the ball jammed between the two of them) and put in a wicked cross that ended up at the lethal feet of Zamora, who duly buried the thing with power and precision.  3-0, and what a moment for Duff.  He looked chuffed as nuts, turning round to the ecstatic crowd as if to say “Hello, Fulham!  I am Damien Duff and this is what I can do.”   If he plays like this in the league we’ve made a hell of a signing.   That moment aside he moved with a purpose, and agression, and a quality that we rarely see.  It’s players like this who, if initial impressions aren’t deceiving me, are seriously adding to the squad.   I remember when we signed Simon Davies and he came in and passed the ball to teammates, something Fulham players weren’t big on at the time.  That felt like a watershed moment of sorts, and so does this, with Duff doing things nobody else in the team can.  Wow.  Hopefully.

Perm ruined the fun by blasting a well deserved consolation as time marched on, and proceeded to lob the kitchen sink at us for a while after that.  We held on and probably should go through, but it’s by no means a foregone conclusion and the players will need these shooting boots in the return leg.

Or will he?

Yesterday we speculated that, if Duff is Duff, he’ll get some crosses in.

However, it’s not necessarily that simple.   Generally speaking, if you consult any of the various heatmap/chalkboard type devices after a Fulham game you’ll see something like the above (less the world class graphics).  The red bits are the forward runs (heat!), the blue bits are the under-used flanks (cold!).

The general idea has been for the full-backs to provide width, Johnson and Zamora to work in the channels, and Dempsey and (to a lesser extent) Davies/Gera to cut inside and attack space where the forwards have vacated.    There were several good examples of this last season, and it’s all part of Roy’s compact four without real width.

As I’ve stressed before, all my coaching books say that in defence you try to make the pitch small (lots of bodies close together, watertight organisation, play compressed, etc), but in attack you want to make the pitch big, which you do either vertically (over the top) or horizontally (stretch it across the field).   We did the defensive bit really well last year, but not the attacking bit.

So the question is:  did Roy run things as he did because we didn’t have a proper left winger like Duff to make stretching the game worthwhile?  In which case we’ll see more proper wing play.   Or is that how Roy likes things and Duff will have to operate quite narrow still?

Of course, the answer is not black and white, and Duff, being Duff, will probably have more ‘wide’ moments than any of our current midfielders, simply on the grounds that this is what he does.    But equally, that’s not really how we play.

Put another way, I’m really interested in how he fits into the team and how he’s used.    My optimistic heart says that we’ve picked up another Murphy style gem.   I can’t wait to see how it plays out.

Damien Duff will cross the ball

Damien Duff has signed, and, as suggested at various points earlier in the week, we here at CCN like this.   He brings a left foot, big club/match know-how, and various other attributes not currently found in the Fulham side.

I had a look through some of his chalkboards last year (one trick pony, me), and while you really need to know how the team’s playing to interpet these (probably), it does look like Duff likes to stick the ball into the box.  As we know, Fulham can quickly knock this out of him by making him defend/not giving him any targets in the box, but if we interpret last year’s defensiveness as, in part, an attempt to walk before we could run, then the arrival of better players may well herald a new approach to playing.

Manchester United last year got all those clean sheets because they had a wonderful combination of a perfectly drilled team, a defensive setup, but game-breakers at the other end who could make something happen when the odds were against them.   Fulham had that same defensive stiffness, but it all too frequently meant that our sub-Ronaldo forwards were often starved of service/help, and not able to make anything happen.   All being well, if you upgrade those attacking players slightly, while maintaining the defensive solidity, you score more goals and concede few again.   It all sounds so good on paper.

So the question is where to play our new man.   Pay cut or not, he’ll still be one of our top earners, so the expectation will be that he starts games.   This could be tricky.  Clint Dempsey, in the dark, pre-Portsmouth “I’M BACK!” goal days, bemoaned the fact that he’s had to re-establish himself every season he’s been at the club.   Here we are again:  Dempsey has made the wide left position his own, and look, we’ve signed a left-winger.

In some ways this is fine:  Clint’s looked knackered for a while now; in other ways it isn’t:  either you bring Duff in for Dempsey, or you move Dempsey to the right flank, either way he loses his position.

What of player of the year turned playing through pain all season hero Simon Davies?  He needs to play when he’s fit.  Zoltan Gera’s second run as a starter may end the same way as the first did, and so be it, but what to do with Duff/Dempsey/Davies?  For a while it won’t be an issue.  Davies is still injured, so presumably Clint slides over and Duff joins in as soon as Roy thinks he’s ready.   And all managers like to have selection battles.   It’ll be interesting to see how this one resolves itself.

Either way, another good player.  Nice one, Roy, and welcome Duffer.

Mexico!

More top stuff from Adam Spangler in Mexico.  That’s our friend Bruce in the header, incidentally.

Adam gets brownie points for this:

Azteca was a let down. It’s a big dirty stadium without charm. Walking around the seats is like rock climbing–it is so steep; there is so little room I wanted a harness. Whereas older stadiums in Europe have charm, Azteca just has poor design, poor construction and mass disorganization. The crowd was loud when they screamed or blew their horns, but nothing special. Nothing more than a NFL or MLB playoff game. Seriously, was it just this game? I don’t get it. The field–the actual grass–was beautiful, but I cried at Craven Cottage. There were no tears at Azteca.

(Adam hopped over for the end of the Great Escape, and saw us beat Birmingham and Portsmouth to stay up)

Daily chalk

Back to the bread and butter:  chalkboards!

Nothing really stands out about Saturday’s game.   Perhaps the most notable point is what might be considered a complete absence of confidence in Zoltan Gera’s play.   Here:

Have a look at those passes.   Very many (almost all) are backwards. This is fine for forwards with their backs to goal, or maybe for central midfielders keeping things simple, but your wide men are surely the players who (in this system) have the most license to try to make something happen.   These passes could be integral parts of tidy build up patterns, or a player being too careful.   I think the latter more likely.

For context, here is weary Clint’s board:

That’s not a lot different, and there aren’t any killer passes there either, but Clint’s playing a lot of balls into good areas.  Not into really good areas – that would require more penalty box play – but they’re passes into the middle of the pitch outside the area, into the channels, etc.   It just looks more attacking.

Finally, while we’re on the subject, a word of commiseration for Frederic Piquonne:

The man had a good game, and one wonders what he might have accomplished had one of Defoe or Crouch still been around to enjoy his hard work.