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.
we had a lot more of the ball on the right because they were, very noticeably, attacking predominantly down their left flank… it was a rough game, we had very little attacking impetus after the opening minutes and seemed resigned to maintain possession with no desire of pressing forward in the process…
kamara had good energy when he came on and, if he doesn’t get sold, i’d prefer moving dempsey to the right and joe up top at next opportunity, allow nevland to remain first off of the bench.
greening should prove an adept signing and he did sign at the right time, as he’ll be needed the coming weeks.
Comment by El Steve — August 24, 2009 @ 8:21 pm |
Behind the prestigious P.A. imprint, the stats-compilers are presumably lowly bods paid little more than Fulham stewards — doubling up in that role, even. (They might just as well have been to have been so wildly inaccurate. Disillusioning, that.)
As for poor old Zoltan, we all had such high hopes of him. I certainly expected him to have, at least, instant control of the ball arriving at speed, but it turns out he doesn’t. Not on a consistent basis, anyway. The widely unlamented Radzinski was better in that respect even. The upshot is that he can’t really cut it at Premiership pace and this needs to be accepted.
That doesn’t make him entirely useless, and I’d still pick him on Thursday for his tackling back and height defending beyond the far post when all those crosses come in – assuming he remembers to get into position for that purpose.
Comment by b+w geezer — August 24, 2009 @ 9:47 pm |
You know I think that’s it – he’s hurried isn’t he? They say great players always have extra time on the ball. Zoltan always seems in a rush. I think you’ve hit the nail on the head there. And as you also say, there’s really nowhere on a pitch where that’s going to work well for a player. I think back to those runs he used to make into the box though (he missed a load of chances when he first signed) and wonder where they’ve got to. That always seemed to be his gift, for want of a better phrase.
Comment by weltmeisterclaude — August 24, 2009 @ 10:14 pm |
On an alternative note I like the new CCN badge. Much better than that protruding Bic the WordPress theme provided!
Comment by Chopper — August 24, 2009 @ 10:28 pm |
My tuppence on the stats debate again.
“Behind the prestigious P.A. imprint, the stats-compilers are presumably lowly bods paid little more than Fulham stewards — doubling up in that role, even.”
Exactly b+w. Rich’s points above (e.g. of course Zoltan ballsed up way more than three times; or, alternatively, where is his pass to Dempsey?) seem to demonstrate this. In fact I’d venture to suggest that we, being the obsessives we are, watch the game a lot more attentively than the stat-compilers might. Of course we also get emotionally involved, but I like to think that those of us who try to remain positive – or at least impartial/fair – about players, such as the esteemed writer of and visitors to CCN, should be able to trust their own vision and feeling having watched a match.
I’d also be wary of (necessarily) automatically negativising emotional involvement as a factor (whilst admitting the dubious status of ‘negativise’ as a word). After all, if everyone’s getting stressed with Zoltan, that tells you *something*, right?
Comment by JamieR — August 24, 2009 @ 11:36 pm |
I’m still bemused about all the statistics and what they mean. It’s like the “new currency” when it came in. Since I am an American, I was supposed to really feel at home with the decimal system, but it kicked my butt. I had no idea how much anything was actually worth for a very long time. So it is with all these football statistics — none of which seemed to exist in the 60’s and 70’s when I first mainlined football into my system. Aside from “the assist,” something I glommed on to immediately, the only stat that provides any enlightenment to me is the three-positioned possession stat, showing the percentage of time the ball spent in [say] Fulham’s end, midfield, or Chelsea’s end. It’s much more enlightening than “time of possession.” Aside from those two, the rest of the stats just puzzle me, and I’ve been a baseball fan for several decades, so stats are nothing new to me.
All of this is prologue to this question: If Duff was so much more efficient and effective on the left according to the stats, then why did it seem to me that on at least a half-dozen occasions, he and Konchesky seemed determined to occupy the same square yard of turf. Every time this happened, movement stalled on the left wing. Now, I couldn’t tell you where the next pass went when this happened [although the stats will], but I can tell you that it contributed significantly to our ineffectiveness in attacking on the left.
Sorry for the essay, guys.
Comment by HatterDon — August 25, 2009 @ 2:54 am |
Apropos of the whole stats debate, and the cultural context for it, there’s a new book that relates. A review in the Economist implies it is well worth reading, whereas the one below implies it isn’t necessarily.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/aug/09/why-england-lose-simon-kuper
Comment by b+w geezer — August 25, 2009 @ 6:25 am |
I’ve read that and it’s quite good. The first half feels as if it’s about to tell us something terrific, the second feels like it’s filling space. They touch on all sorts of good angles, and should have made a lot more of the Lyon chapter (how Lyon came from nowhere to be the dominant force in france), explained why they think goalkeepers are under valued and centre-forwards over valued (I agree but it would be nice to see more info), etc. After that it descends into notmuchness. But on balance still a really interesting read. I just wanted it to go a bit further.
Don – we’re just scratching the surface with what we have available. My view (because of my job in many ways, but also because everyone’s got an opinion and sometimes objective data might help) is to look for evidence of things. It’s hard to do this, but I think we occasionally come up with an interesting nugget here and there. Colin found that Erik Nevland, relative to other Fulham players, is quite bad at retaining possession. This might be one reason we rarely see him unless a goal is needed. Earlier in the year I noted that everyone in a Fulham shirt shot far less accurately than their recent career norms last season, which led to an interesting discussion or two. And that’s stats, which we don’t do a great deal with. More useful (I think) are the various chalkboards which, when they’re not ignoring Zoltan Gera’s misplaced passes, give us a great idea about the game’s shape, who’s done what, who’s trying to do what, etc. Again, it’s just digging around looking for an angle.
Comment by weltmeisterclaude — August 25, 2009 @ 6:51 am |
HatterDon, I too thought that Duff and Konchesky weren’t yet on the same wavelength. We know what PK can do and I share the general optimism about Duff, so I’m sure they’ll work it out. Duff, Dempsey and Davies, when fit seem streets ahead of Seol and Gera in his present form. I haven’t seen Riise yet but imagine he could climb above Gera in the pecking order.
Whatever the stats say, it was obvious watching Gera on Sunday that things weren’t right. Whether it’s technique or confidence that he’s lacking (or both) I’m not sure, but these last few weeks were a great opportunity for him to be a regular starter. Sadly he seems to have blown it.
Comment by Nick Johnson — August 25, 2009 @ 9:12 am |
I think Zoltan might be a ‘flat track bully’ (to give a cricket term) – good against average teams, but gets found out against the good teams who give him less time and space.
What I observed from Sunday is that in the times he did control the ball (which did not seem a lot) he would be facing our defenders then feed the ball back that way. Where all the better players on the pitch would take the ball and turn towards the goal then look for a pass or to run. I think he had lost all confidence and was taking the ‘easy’ option for a pass.
I just checked with the chalk boards and my observations were correct – only 3 (2 successful) of his passes were forward. The other guys seem to get around 50% forward passes.
Comment by Geoff — August 25, 2009 @ 9:24 am |
I’be been defending Gera on FofF because I think there’s a feel of him becoming this season’s Zamora.
I simply don’t buy into the notion that he’s not trying and his long career shows that he’s not useless but at Fulham he does have to fit into Hodgson’s system and my suspicion is that he is doing his best diligently to track back, cover the opposition, fill gaps etc and this leaves him unable to carry out his attacking duties essentially because of a lack of pace.
He was better than most against Perm and as bad as the rest against Chelsea. He doesn’t, for me, stand out as appallingly useless but he’s not as good as Davies, Dempsey and Duff and may well fall behind Riise when he gets his chance.
Where I think we can get value from Gera is as a sub, where he can either do his defensive duties or use his attacking abilities depending on the match situation.
I simply think that ultimately he can’t do both well enough.
Comment by Tony Gilroy — August 25, 2009 @ 11:06 am |
Could it be that Gera just feels too much pressure when he’s worried about his spot in the first XI?
Last year, he started out very well, but once Dempsey started to be his replacement (first as a sub before taking over his starting spot), he was worthless the rest of the year.
With Davies out this year, he got his starting spot back and was playing OK before reinforcements started to come in (Riise, Duff, etc).
Is it purely coincidental that he had his worst match as a Fulham player this past Sunday with Greening watching from the Cottage? Perhaps he just can’t handle the pressure of competing for his place.
Comment by George H — August 25, 2009 @ 2:36 pm |
I think Fulham’s performance on Sunday was pathetic. Not just Zoltan, but our overall game. The same rigid, mechanic tactic and system as last year. I would not be surprised by surprise defeats to teams we had beaten last year. Because our tactic is well known to every team and they are well prepared for that. I hope the opposite will be proven however.
As for Zoltan, I agree very much with Tony and George as well. Zoltan is a very talented player with lot of creativity, but without confidence creativity is lost. And also he looks suffering in this system. He tries really hard though, and puts lot of energy in but still, something is missing. I hope he will fulfill his potential at Fulham for the benefit and the success of the team!
Comment by Gbr — August 26, 2009 @ 1:23 pm |