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| If you're here for XG stats and to the point analysis, I'd probably move on... |
The other day, I was thinking about the weather. I realised I don't really know for sure why it's cold in winter, I think it's something to do with the bit of the earth we're on being further away from the sun or something like that. But then, that doesn't explain why it's colder this week than it was last week. That's down to air pressure or wind or something like that. That got me thinking about how I don't really know what wind is and how everything is interlinked. About how the weather in say, Siberia is connected to the weather in Florida or New Dehli and how it's all a bit mad when you stop and consider it.
I thought how it's a bit like football formations and tactics. Every little tweak and change has an impact. Sometimes it's a clear day and the sun shines, so it's hot. Other days, it's cloudy and it's cold cos the suns rays don't get through. Easy enough. That's like if you just swap a better player for a worse player, like swapping Anthony Evans for KDH for example. KDH is clearly better, so the team benefits.
Other changes have more subtle impacts. They're kind of like when you look out and it's bright blue sky, so you go out in a t-shirt and freeze then the weather explains about 'low pressure in a northerly direction' - i.e - it gets more complex. When we swapped Jimmy Husband for Luke Garbutt (seemingly an upgrade) Sullay went off the boil. Why? Perhaps cos Garbutt took away his free kicks and corners (thus psychologically diminishing his impact) and also makes him do more work tracking back, thus physically exposing Sullay's weakness. On Saturday we played Keshi and he got forward a lot, but left a big hole. We were both more threatening and more exposed. When Nottingham left, Ekpiteta got better and so on. Things aren't so simple in those cases.
The point is, it's quite complex to work out what exactly is the best balance and most effective line up. Ollie Turton is a case in point. Whilst he rarely stands out, whenever he's shifted from right back, bad things happen. No one really knows why, but it's just the way it is. Like the weather and electricity.
I then wondered why I was thinking about Turton and friends so philosophically. Surely this isn't right that a bloke of my age is spending his time, staring at clouds and thinking about rank average footballers that most people have never heard of? Haven't I got better things to do with my time?
That's the beauty of football though. It's deceptively simple yet endlessly complex. It's almost untamable - think of how many periods of sustained success we've had through the years. How many seasons where we've dominated, week after week, how many times you've genuinely been confident for the most part that we'll win. There aren't many.
That's the truth for most teams in most leagues, the world over. Even the mega rich, the ones who've spent the GDP of a small post Soviet satellite state on assembling a team of stars, recruited by a team of data scientists who themselves were recruited by team of recruitment specialists can struggle. Football can blow up in your face. What one season is a surefire winning formula can fall apart as a player ages or is injured. It's like a set of jenga blocks, It might look so solid, but it's ready to topple at any time.
I thought how it's a bit like football formations and tactics. Every little tweak and change has an impact. Sometimes it's a clear day and the sun shines, so it's hot. Other days, it's cloudy and it's cold cos the suns rays don't get through. Easy enough. That's like if you just swap a better player for a worse player, like swapping Anthony Evans for KDH for example. KDH is clearly better, so the team benefits.
Other changes have more subtle impacts. They're kind of like when you look out and it's bright blue sky, so you go out in a t-shirt and freeze then the weather explains about 'low pressure in a northerly direction' - i.e - it gets more complex. When we swapped Jimmy Husband for Luke Garbutt (seemingly an upgrade) Sullay went off the boil. Why? Perhaps cos Garbutt took away his free kicks and corners (thus psychologically diminishing his impact) and also makes him do more work tracking back, thus physically exposing Sullay's weakness. On Saturday we played Keshi and he got forward a lot, but left a big hole. We were both more threatening and more exposed. When Nottingham left, Ekpiteta got better and so on. Things aren't so simple in those cases.
The point is, it's quite complex to work out what exactly is the best balance and most effective line up. Ollie Turton is a case in point. Whilst he rarely stands out, whenever he's shifted from right back, bad things happen. No one really knows why, but it's just the way it is. Like the weather and electricity.
I then wondered why I was thinking about Turton and friends so philosophically. Surely this isn't right that a bloke of my age is spending his time, staring at clouds and thinking about rank average footballers that most people have never heard of? Haven't I got better things to do with my time?
That's the beauty of football though. It's deceptively simple yet endlessly complex. It's almost untamable - think of how many periods of sustained success we've had through the years. How many seasons where we've dominated, week after week, how many times you've genuinely been confident for the most part that we'll win. There aren't many.
That's the truth for most teams in most leagues, the world over. Even the mega rich, the ones who've spent the GDP of a small post Soviet satellite state on assembling a team of stars, recruited by a team of data scientists who themselves were recruited by team of recruitment specialists can struggle. Football can blow up in your face. What one season is a surefire winning formula can fall apart as a player ages or is injured. It's like a set of jenga blocks, It might look so solid, but it's ready to topple at any time.
There's always the opposition as well. You can cruise through one game, looking like world beaters, turn up to the next and look like shite. Why? Cos the opposition do something different. That adds to the complexity further. Not only do you have to put all the pieces together and assemble a working machine, you have to consider the way the other team is going to try and disrupt the mechanism. One team might just bet that their machine is better than yours and let you do what you want. The other team might just try and smash it up or anything in between the two options.
So, I suppose I'm saying, why not think about the Goal Machine and Jerry together or alone or whether Ballard should start ahead of the Viking? The world is chaos and order, the world is cause and effect, the world is unknowable but knowledge is everywhere, meaning forms and patterns emerge in our minds as we can't help it. We never really know who we are or why are here, but it feels so often as if we're on the verge of discovering. Everything is nothing but seemingly something and football is as good as anything else to think about.
So that digression out the way, are we any good? Is there a magic combination that would unlock the meaning of life (presumably promotion) to be found whilst staring at the tactics board?
I don't think there is in the squad as it is.
I think we're decently average and have elements of a very good team. Foundations, if you like. We're like a half built building and at this point, it's difficult to tell if the building is going to be beautiful or functional but it is at least recognisable as a structure.
We have a decent defence and a decent keeper. Sure, you can pick out mistakes (which league 1 players will make, tbh, all players will make) but by and large, they're good and there's some strength in depth aside from in between the sticks. The defence is fine in other words. We could play four, five or three and field quality, whatever we do.
In midfield we have a huge supply of players who look like they're just short of being 'the answer' - Kemp, Anderson, Woodburn, Sullay and Robson are theoretically good. Sullay on his day is stunning. Robson looks like he oozes class, Anderson is a box of tricks, Kemp is a willow-the wisp flickering shadow who can ghost into little gaps and so on. Yet, they're not seeming like these players consistently enough. Robson isn't showing a range of passing or vision. He looks like he should be able to thread a ball or have a go and every now and again he does, and it looks like it comes easy to him, but he doesn't do it often enough. Sullay can go past an entire defence without seeming to even notice he's trying to be tackled but he ends up just jogging up and down on the left looking a bit forlorn. Kemp runs like a nutcase but doesn't seem to get passed to and Anderson has his hands on his hips looking a bit grumpy as much as anything else.
We just haven't seemed to have clicked in midfield often enough. We've got Dougall and CJ who work perfectly well, Grant Ward who seems comfortable enough most games but maybe not really a central midfielder. Everyone (aside from CJ) seems to be waiting for someone else to make something happen. The most 2020 Blackpool thing ever, is a 20 pass move where loads of technically gifted players pass it about till eventually Ollie Turton lofts it over everyone's heads from the right hand side and we start again.
We've never quite got the midfield spot on. We do well against good sides where we can be tigerish and counter but when we have to make the running and make things happen, stuff never quite seems to fall into place.
I worry that possession is too important to us. I muse to myself about whether the coaching staff still need to learn that league one players aren't deadly. That we need to drill the midfield to take more risks above retaining the ball in order to create more chances. Yes, losing the ball is a risk, but equally, the lower down the leagues you go, the less adept sides are at punishing you for it. In the same vein, the lower down the league you go, the more chances your players need to score the same number of goals. For example I'm not sure Critch quite gets Bez. He's brilliant (no, he is!) and shit (sorry Bez) in the same player. Cos he's a lower league player and you can't expect a player like Bez to be a ten minute impact sub. He'll have five shots in a game, one will be unreal and he'll look like the greatest player on earth, the next one he'll fall over his own feet. A player like Bez will make as many chances as he misses but he doesn't fit into a possession based game cos he loses the ball, so we've barely seen him.
I don't watch much Premier League, but last time I watched City, they basically just fannied about for 60 minutes stroking the ball about, doing fuck all of any real purpose, then scored 3 times then switched off. That doesn't work in division 3 because no one is Aguero. We can keep the ball quite well, but then the next bit doesn't happen. The old Liverpool used to just bore the opposition to death, then Ian Rush would score twice. Again, no one is Ian Rush. No one at this level is that clinical and if they are, they're already a target of someone much bigger than us. How many Jamie Vardy's are there? Not many. We need to make more chances or find a needle in a haystack in the form of a striker who scores most chances he gets.
Up front, we're well short. Neither of them can play on their own and as a two, they're functional enough, but it's mad to rely on literally two strikers if you're going to start with a pair. Unless we're going to stumble on a big, mobile, pacy, clinical striker with vision and the ability to bring other into play as well, we're going to have to play with two.
The Goal Machine is as good as your going to get at what he does. A portion of his game is frankly above this league at times. Ok, he's not fast or deadly but he'll win the ball, bring it down, hold it up as well, if not better than players the league above us and he has vision. He is like a significantly better John Murphy and that's a massive compliment as I love big Murphs. What we lack is Brett or Scott Taylor (or for younger viewers, a DJ Campbell) who can really work off him. Someone who presents a real problem with searing pace and clever movement. Murphs got stick when he was here for being a big lump, but he had two great partnerships and that speaks of his worth as a player as much as the goals he got himself. I think Madine could be the making of someone else in the same way Murphs was (Brett and Taylor never scored as many again anywhere without Murphs). That someone is someone we don't yet have.
I feel as if I'm slagging of Yates when I write that, but Yates would benefit from playing with a mobile striker in a different way than Madine would. He comes deep, he wins the ball, he likes drifting wide and Madine isn't really the man to be linking with on the edge of he box. For all his qualities, running onto a through ball isn't the goal machine's strength and Yates playing with a mobile partner might bring him a lot more space, which he always seems to lack and on the rare occasions he finds it, seems to do pretty well with. He's actually quite clinical looking, he just doesn't seem to have many chances to actually shoot or head at goal. Perhaps with someone pacy pulling a defence about, he'd get more.
On top of all of the above is the lingering feeling the season won't end and none of this matters. I don't know what the right thing is. I'm just a shit rambling blogger who writes too long articles to stop himself thinking about other things. But it's odd. Strange that all the hours watching and debating, questioning, thinking, second guessing and hoping, cursing and celebrating will mean nothing. It's a strange, strange season. We've not even seen the whites of these players eyes*. Not sung their names. I don't think anyone in the squad has a song. We've never applauded them off the pitch or implored them to 'for fucks sake sort it!' I'd say we've never been so distant,but I suppose we have. The difference is, we're distant but invested yet not properly connected. These players are little more than sprites that run around that we summon up on a Saturday or Tuesday and dismiss with a closing of the laptop lid.
For all that we're watching a soulless stream, devoid of atmosphere and for all that perhaps we're a side that aren't going to fulfil our dreams just yet (they will, wizardry takes time to learn, look at Harry Potter as a cast iron high quality, deeply relevant, serious football example of the fact that magic is learned over a period of time) if the season ends, there'll be a yawning gap. A massive hole where something was and now it isn't.
Football is something in a big dark world of nothing and we're fucking tangerine. Win, lose, draw or game postponed (other), we're still tangerine.
*most of us haven't anyway...
So, I suppose I'm saying, why not think about the Goal Machine and Jerry together or alone or whether Ballard should start ahead of the Viking? The world is chaos and order, the world is cause and effect, the world is unknowable but knowledge is everywhere, meaning forms and patterns emerge in our minds as we can't help it. We never really know who we are or why are here, but it feels so often as if we're on the verge of discovering. Everything is nothing but seemingly something and football is as good as anything else to think about.
So that digression out the way, are we any good? Is there a magic combination that would unlock the meaning of life (presumably promotion) to be found whilst staring at the tactics board?
I don't think there is in the squad as it is.
I think we're decently average and have elements of a very good team. Foundations, if you like. We're like a half built building and at this point, it's difficult to tell if the building is going to be beautiful or functional but it is at least recognisable as a structure.
We have a decent defence and a decent keeper. Sure, you can pick out mistakes (which league 1 players will make, tbh, all players will make) but by and large, they're good and there's some strength in depth aside from in between the sticks. The defence is fine in other words. We could play four, five or three and field quality, whatever we do.
In midfield we have a huge supply of players who look like they're just short of being 'the answer' - Kemp, Anderson, Woodburn, Sullay and Robson are theoretically good. Sullay on his day is stunning. Robson looks like he oozes class, Anderson is a box of tricks, Kemp is a willow-the wisp flickering shadow who can ghost into little gaps and so on. Yet, they're not seeming like these players consistently enough. Robson isn't showing a range of passing or vision. He looks like he should be able to thread a ball or have a go and every now and again he does, and it looks like it comes easy to him, but he doesn't do it often enough. Sullay can go past an entire defence without seeming to even notice he's trying to be tackled but he ends up just jogging up and down on the left looking a bit forlorn. Kemp runs like a nutcase but doesn't seem to get passed to and Anderson has his hands on his hips looking a bit grumpy as much as anything else.
We just haven't seemed to have clicked in midfield often enough. We've got Dougall and CJ who work perfectly well, Grant Ward who seems comfortable enough most games but maybe not really a central midfielder. Everyone (aside from CJ) seems to be waiting for someone else to make something happen. The most 2020 Blackpool thing ever, is a 20 pass move where loads of technically gifted players pass it about till eventually Ollie Turton lofts it over everyone's heads from the right hand side and we start again.
We've never quite got the midfield spot on. We do well against good sides where we can be tigerish and counter but when we have to make the running and make things happen, stuff never quite seems to fall into place.
I worry that possession is too important to us. I muse to myself about whether the coaching staff still need to learn that league one players aren't deadly. That we need to drill the midfield to take more risks above retaining the ball in order to create more chances. Yes, losing the ball is a risk, but equally, the lower down the leagues you go, the less adept sides are at punishing you for it. In the same vein, the lower down the league you go, the more chances your players need to score the same number of goals. For example I'm not sure Critch quite gets Bez. He's brilliant (no, he is!) and shit (sorry Bez) in the same player. Cos he's a lower league player and you can't expect a player like Bez to be a ten minute impact sub. He'll have five shots in a game, one will be unreal and he'll look like the greatest player on earth, the next one he'll fall over his own feet. A player like Bez will make as many chances as he misses but he doesn't fit into a possession based game cos he loses the ball, so we've barely seen him.
I don't watch much Premier League, but last time I watched City, they basically just fannied about for 60 minutes stroking the ball about, doing fuck all of any real purpose, then scored 3 times then switched off. That doesn't work in division 3 because no one is Aguero. We can keep the ball quite well, but then the next bit doesn't happen. The old Liverpool used to just bore the opposition to death, then Ian Rush would score twice. Again, no one is Ian Rush. No one at this level is that clinical and if they are, they're already a target of someone much bigger than us. How many Jamie Vardy's are there? Not many. We need to make more chances or find a needle in a haystack in the form of a striker who scores most chances he gets.
Up front, we're well short. Neither of them can play on their own and as a two, they're functional enough, but it's mad to rely on literally two strikers if you're going to start with a pair. Unless we're going to stumble on a big, mobile, pacy, clinical striker with vision and the ability to bring other into play as well, we're going to have to play with two.
The Goal Machine is as good as your going to get at what he does. A portion of his game is frankly above this league at times. Ok, he's not fast or deadly but he'll win the ball, bring it down, hold it up as well, if not better than players the league above us and he has vision. He is like a significantly better John Murphy and that's a massive compliment as I love big Murphs. What we lack is Brett or Scott Taylor (or for younger viewers, a DJ Campbell) who can really work off him. Someone who presents a real problem with searing pace and clever movement. Murphs got stick when he was here for being a big lump, but he had two great partnerships and that speaks of his worth as a player as much as the goals he got himself. I think Madine could be the making of someone else in the same way Murphs was (Brett and Taylor never scored as many again anywhere without Murphs). That someone is someone we don't yet have.
I feel as if I'm slagging of Yates when I write that, but Yates would benefit from playing with a mobile striker in a different way than Madine would. He comes deep, he wins the ball, he likes drifting wide and Madine isn't really the man to be linking with on the edge of he box. For all his qualities, running onto a through ball isn't the goal machine's strength and Yates playing with a mobile partner might bring him a lot more space, which he always seems to lack and on the rare occasions he finds it, seems to do pretty well with. He's actually quite clinical looking, he just doesn't seem to have many chances to actually shoot or head at goal. Perhaps with someone pacy pulling a defence about, he'd get more.
On top of all of the above is the lingering feeling the season won't end and none of this matters. I don't know what the right thing is. I'm just a shit rambling blogger who writes too long articles to stop himself thinking about other things. But it's odd. Strange that all the hours watching and debating, questioning, thinking, second guessing and hoping, cursing and celebrating will mean nothing. It's a strange, strange season. We've not even seen the whites of these players eyes*. Not sung their names. I don't think anyone in the squad has a song. We've never applauded them off the pitch or implored them to 'for fucks sake sort it!' I'd say we've never been so distant,but I suppose we have. The difference is, we're distant but invested yet not properly connected. These players are little more than sprites that run around that we summon up on a Saturday or Tuesday and dismiss with a closing of the laptop lid.
For all that we're watching a soulless stream, devoid of atmosphere and for all that perhaps we're a side that aren't going to fulfil our dreams just yet (they will, wizardry takes time to learn, look at Harry Potter as a cast iron high quality, deeply relevant, serious football example of the fact that magic is learned over a period of time) if the season ends, there'll be a yawning gap. A massive hole where something was and now it isn't.
Football is something in a big dark world of nothing and we're fucking tangerine. Win, lose, draw or game postponed (other), we're still tangerine.
*most of us haven't anyway...
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