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Coutinho fuss
Certain people have blind spots with some players. My brother for instance didn’t see the fuss about Lampard, much to my bewilderment. He thought he was a specialist at blasting the ball and it bouncing of a defender and going in, he would never budge. Thought it was Essien and Makelele that allowed him to hog the attacking limelight. This was my brothers blindspot.
I am like that with Philippe Coutinho. I by no means think he is a bad player, he is above average, but that is all. When I heard the figures being bandied around for him, I almost puked when I heard €100 million, let alone €146 million, I thought Barca were insane, and I still can’t reason it in my head. It has to be the greatest farce in football transfer history. He scored 54 goals in 201 games, around 1 in 4, fairly good. He created 35 assists in 152 league games, 1 in 5, averaging 8 per season. Fairly decent but not setting the world on fire here. How, oh how did a figure of €146 million get created for this player? Even a divisive €30m Giroud has a stat of roughly 1 goal every 2.5 games, or at least did when people debated if he was good enough for Arsenal.
We hear the argument that price is not a reflection of the player, but how badly the buying club need him and how little the selling club need to get rid, I get that to a point, but €146 for Philipe Coutinho is mental. He is the new Fabregas for me. I never quite got the hype around Cesc, even in the early days and felt slightly justified when he was courted by Barca for so long, and effectively shown the door for not being good enough. Goes to Chelsea, and pretty much the same thing happened, I never got the fuss. I thought the exact same would happen Coutinho, and it has, he just isn’t as good as people think he is. Liverpool actually improved drastically once he bloody left. How does a €146 million attacking player leave, all the money is spent on a CB and GK and they end up scoring more goals than ever? That should not happen the season straight after a transfer like that, it is unheard of.
Now he is linked with United for some reason! I hope this is just an effort to sell papers, as few clubs could afford him and City and PSG sure as hell don’t need him and Real won’t get a sniff I would imagine. I would hate to see United buy him and hope to god it won’t happen. Surely it won’t with the front players in form like they are now, even if Mata and or Lukaku is sold in the summer. Not because he has priors with Liverpool, because he just isn’t that good. Anyone agree or is this my blindspot?
Rowan, Red Devil Dub
Biggest conclusion
There is a lot going in football at the moment, but I can’t shake one thought. Who in their right mind would hire Jose Mourinho now?
At Utd he has proven that he can bully a team into being decent for 12 months, throw away a load of money at signings he won’t play, cause many of your players to stall in their development and will inevitably be fired/leave after 3 years. This time however, a manager who’s previous experience was with a Norweigan football club, has come in and completely transformed the players and team.
Big Sam is more employable than Jose right now.
Rob A (are 1/2 trophies for medium damage a good deal?) AFC
Premier League club sponsors
I appreciate the effort but Sega Dreamcast feels like a bit of a stretch for Arsenal – not least because we actually won sod all between 1999 and 2001.
While it doesn’t really fit with any allegory about how rubbish we are at the moment, if you’re going with Walkers for Leicester and Sharp for United, then you have to choose JVC for the Arsenal.
They were our first sponsor, the sponsor that adorned our shirt during our greatest moment ever at Anfield in 1989, and with Adidas hopefully rereleasing some classic shirts next season, you’re probably going to see a good deal more of JVC at the Emirates next season.
As the old tagline went – JVC and Arsenal – a perfect match.
Graham Simons, Gooner, Norf London
Slightly aroused by Bielsa
Is it wrong to be ever so slightly aroused at the Marcelo Bielsa transcript? Phwoar, in depth statistical analysis of tendencies in lower league football…
Ollie, Bristol
Can you elevate the Bielsa piece to top spot on your site? It’s astonishingly good and offers a rare glimpse behind the curtain.
I enjoyed every word.
Gregory Whitehead, LFC
Dear Editor,
If we didn’t have Klopp I’d take Bielsa every day. Brilliant.
Rory Johnston. LFC, Galway.
Not enough was said in the lady mailbox about Bielsa’s brilliant press conference. What an entertainer! Looking forward to having him in the Premier League!
Thinking about it led me to some predictions of the future:
-May 2019 Bielsa wins the Championship with Leeds restoring them to their rightful league
-April 2020 Leeds pass 50 points and are mathematically safe, eventually finishing in a commendable 11th place
-August 2020 Arsenal announce Bielsa as new manager after Emery’s contract expires
-September 2020 Pontus Jameson follows his manager, finally replacing Shkodran Mustafi after Sven Mislintat’s Bayern Munich fail to offer the extra £1 to the asking price.
-late September 2020 Arsenal fans enjoy watching their team, home and away
Mike, Arsenal fan in Leeds who dares to dream
Wait until all these proper football men find out that in the Champions League teams literally train on their opponents pitch the night before!! Unbelievable. Bloody UEFA.
And, I worry some of them may explode when they discover this one, teams actually train opposite each other before football matches start! ON THE SAME PITCH! W.T.F. Anybody can stand there and watch the team train during this period. Unbelievable. That goes completely against the spirit of the game.
The only solution is to build solid steel boxes around each player and only release them out 5 seconds before the game starts. That’s how it used to be. Bielsa and the other non-proper football men would struggle then wouldn’t they eh, this spying is what’s holding back British managers (let’s open a book on how long it takes Big Sam/Keys wheels that line out).
James (stop buying/reading the sun, mail and listening to talksport and all this faux outrage will go away… probably)
Defenders taking penalties – Top 10
James in Warrington had a point about Danny Murphy’s ‘Defenders shouldn’t take penalties’ statement. Murphy was asking why forwards and midfielders aren’t stepping up ahead of the more ‘technical players’, and I think this reinforces James’ point: who’s to say defenders are less technical? Or was he saying ‘some’ attackers are less ballsy?
Anyway, I think F365 should do a top 10 of best defender penalty takers and top 10 worst attacking forward penalty takers.
Pearce and Dicks are the obvious shout outs for the defender list (I wonder how many will be left footed), but can I also add in the legend that is Clive Wilson.
I think Defoe was/is a rotten penalty taker, considering his excellent finishing capabilities in normal play.
Andy, (I’m certain I once saw Clive Wilson on an escalator in Hull), London
Average position
This whole Arsenal’s average position being 6th and therefore they are crap thing did set off my bullsh*t alarm immediately, but I thought I’d see if the numbers backed this up.
Now, I think there are really only three clubs to consider when it comes to being near the top of the top division with any consistency when you look back as far as 1946, so I’ve used Arsenal, Man Utd and Liverpool as my examples. Apologies if I missed some other obvious candidate, but I am supposed to be working, so time is limited.
Average league positions are Arsenal – 5.78, Man U – 4.89, Liverpool – 6.43. Now, these aren’t 100% accurate, as both Man U and Liverpool spent at least one season in Division 2. For a season in Division 2, I’ve treated them as finishing bottom of the Division 1, but where they’ve been promoted I’ve treated them as finishing in the first place outside the relegation zone. Probably fairly generous as an adjustment, but it only goes to prove the point further.
Anyone would immediately state that Liverpool and Man U are historically more successful than Arsenal, and the number of league (and European) titles won obviously proves that. The fact that Arsenal are still very close to Man U in terms of average position and actually ahead of Liverpool, despite the fact they’ve won far fewer titles, shows just how consistent Arsenal are at finishing near the top of the table.
I’m not sure what I was really trying to prove here, other than that using average league position over 72 years to prove a point about where a team should finish this season is utter, utter nonsense.
Final point on the blatant misuse of maths – Arsene Wenger’s effect on Arsenal’s average position. He only moved the club up 1 place (actually 1.24 places, if we’re being picky, and I think we know that I am). Arsenal’s average finishing position from 1946 to 1996 was 7.02, with Wenger’s tenure raising it to 5.78. If Wenger had finished top in every single season he spent with the club, the average goes up to 5.18. He wouldn’t have even brought the club up 2 complete positions, THE USELESS B****RD!!
All this is unfortunate, as I largely agree with what Johnno has to say, but misusing stats makes me angry.
Ross, AFC
VAR/Brexit
For VAR see Brexit. The more we have tried to find a way of it working, the more we find ways that make it all an impossible mess, and are going to struggle to go forward with it or pull back from it. Just stuck on a precipice for eternity.
Steven Hunt
Here comes the science bit
To answer Airit’s question about why there are fewer left-sided players who can play on the right, this is down to the fact that left-sided dominance is much rarer than right-sided dominance. About 10% of people have a cerebral dominance for the left side of their body. This usually covers everything from eyesight to handedness and footedness and is due to laterality of the cerebral hemispheres of your brain. Basically, your physical ability and co-ordination of the left side of your body is controlled by the right side of your brain and the right side of your body is controlled by the corresponding centres on the left side of your brain. There are some people who neurologically may only have a slight difference between sides and any difference can be reduced by practice, but for the vast majority of us, one side will always be much more able than the other, to a greater or lesser extent. So if 10% of footballers are more comfortable on their left than their right there is a much smaller pool of players to move to right back from left. The players Airit mentions are practically all much more comfortable on the right and would only ever be called to move to left when there’s no left sided player which I’d reckon happens a lot more often.
This is also why it hurts my brain when people complain about players only being one-footed. It’s the way their brains are built and no amount of training will make up the difference – a featherweight boxer can train and train but they’ll never be a heavyweight.
Bren (extremely right-side dominant), Dublin.
Dean Saunders
I read Mediawatch with glee this morning, as it finally seemed the world was waking up to what an absolute tit Dean Saunders is.
As a Wolves fan, he’s given me the single worst half a season of football I’ve ever seen.
I wouldn’t ask the man to run a lemonade stand.
Jonny, Wolverhampton