Mails: Has Pogba been quietly the PL’s best?

Mails: Has Pogba been quietly the PL’s best?

If you have anything to add, you know what to do – mail us at theeditor@football365.com

Is Paul Pogba a vital jack of all trades?
Great mails past 24 hours on best players in the league. Ultimately you have to narrow it down, like most in form (just this season) or the full year. How do you rate a CB like Kosc who stops goals over a goal machine like Aguero?

Out of curiosity I went to WhoScored for their Premier League XI. I wasn’t going to write in but there was one big surprise. It came in central midfield.

Mid: Mané/De Bruyne/Pogba/Coutinho – Pogba?!

So general consensus is that Pogba hasn’t lived up to expectations. So how on earth then is he one of this season’s top performing midfielders statistically speaking? I dug into the stats, all the following are per game:

10 Appearance: 2 goals, 3 assists. Nothing particularly special

Pass Success: 81%, again, nothing special
Aerial Duels Won: 2.6 – pretty good for a midfielder
Man of the Match: 2 – quite high but only 10 games in
Tackles: 1.9, about average for a midfielder
Interception: 1.6 about average for a midfielder
Fouls: 2.4 – highest in the league
Clearance: 1 = pretty low

Key passes: 1.9 – 19th highest…
Dribbling: 2.7 – 12th so pretty high up
Shots: 3.3 -very high for a midfielder

So, essentially he is good at everything. That’s it. The only things he excels at is aerial duels and giving away fouls. Yet all of his attributes combined means he is a consistent Jack of all trades, master of none.

Can a player be considered one of the best if he is consistently a good all-round player? Have we set expectations for weekly thunderb*******s and been disappointed?

I don’t watch enough Man Utd games (for obvious reasons at the moment…) so I’m not sure. He might not be setting the world alight, but maybe he is the cog that is quietly keeping Man Utd ticking.
Rob A (everyone else as expected except maybe Heaton in goal) AFC

Stop judging on statistics
In the spirit of the US Presidential elections, I thought I’d pen a missive (possibly a rant) on dumbing down.

Basically, I would really like us (real fans, not like those ones on SHOUTsport or Sky Sports News twitter) to stop using goals and assists as a way to measure a player’s value or impact. Full stop. It’s ludicrously shallow. We all know it but it still continues, even on these hallowed pages. As a reminder, here are just four scenarios that make a mockery of it.

Player A scores 1 but miss 3 and sounds good on paper.
Player B creates 3 great chances but none of them become goals due to poor finishing.
Player C plays a simple pass to Player D who does all the work and is given an assist.
Player E does some great work setting up a tap in for Player F.

It’s the stupidest way to compare. Players A, C and F get credit for doing relatively little, while Player B gets nothing and E gets under appreciated (‘a lovely assist’ is given no extra points than Cs in the record books).

Look at Crouch’s record for England. Compare with that of Andrew Cole or Sturridge. No question of him being the same calibre as either of them, just fortunate to play against the likes of Jamaica.

So please, can we stop doing it? Think of the children (of the future, if there is one after tonight)!
Guy S

Why are people surprised by Firmino?
As a Liverpool fan I don’t quite understand all the ‘he’s come out of nowhere’ stuff about Firmino.

Anyone who watched him last year would have seen a quality player in his first season for a new club in a new league. In the league he made 31 appearances 24(7), and had 10 goals and 7 assists. This despite, as a website not a million miles from here pointed out, that he started many games at the right of midfield.

What makes that even more impressive is that he actually improved his figures from his final season in Hoffenheim (33 apps 7 goals 10 assists). What’s the point of this email? Is it to brag about the fact that I placed a cheeky each way bet on Firmino to be top scorer at 66/1? Perhaps.

It’s more to highlight the fact that most Liverpool fans recognised that we had a genuinely special player on our hands. And if anyone could improve him, it would be Klopp. Now if he could just stay injury-free, that would be great.
Joe LFC, Dublin
(Average age of our front six – Firmino, Coutinho, Mane, Henderson, Lallana, Wijnaldum is 25…exciting times)

The defender’s dive
Interesting mail about Toby Alderweireld only conceding nine fouls up till April last season – an impressive stat and he is definitely in the top three defenders in the league. However I think that fouls conceded would have been considerably higher had referees been calling for fouls when shirts were being pulled, as they should be.

Sure, he is not the only proponent of shirt-pulling and most defenders do it (Vertongen and Huth are the masters) but I think defending is a lot easier when you know you can just grab someone’s shirt, haul them to the ground without getting penalised.

Having said that, maybe we should be praising the shirt-pullers for realising that refs are too weak to call for fouls in those situations and exploiting it to their benefit. The diving of defending perhaps?

I’m not sure what this mail is about now apart from that it annoys me when defenders pull a striker’s shirt off in the box and get nothing given against them while a striker will be penalised for standing too close to a defender.
Adonis Stevenson, AFC

Finger in the Dijk
I look at Liverpool’s defence and I think Virgil Van Dijk is that just me? I actually get the same thought when I watch Man United too, other than Spurs I think everyone’s defence would be improved by having a little Dijk in their team.
Steven (plugging Dijks since 2014) AFCB

Backing Jose on Luke Shaw
I thought I’d add my twopence to the Jose Mourinho v Shaw debate. I agree with Mourinho on this occasion. Manchester United do not owe Luke Shaw a living. They paid him handsomely when he was out injured for a year and did everything possible to ensure he returned to full fitness. He now has to prove he is both fit and capable enough to perform in the manner which resulted in United splashing out over €30million for his services in the first place. On both counts this season Shaw has failed to do that. In the games he’s played since his return he has appeared sluggish and overweight.

Mourinho is not a psychiatrist. It is not his responsibility to ensure his squad is mentally content. His only remit is to ensure his squad is matchday ready and capable of winning matches for Manchester United. Just because Luke Shaw suffered a career-threatening injury does not mean he is immune from criticism. He needs to suck it up and prove Mourinho wrong. Leaking his dissatisfaction to the press certainly won’t help and only further confirms that Mourinho was correct in his assertion that Shaw is too weak-minded to be a Manchester United player.
Rob Melia

…I just wanted to reply to David McLean. If Luke Shaw is genuinely hurt why would he be embarrassed, and his teammates wouldn’t be let down.

If he were my employee firstly I’d ask for a doctor’s certificate to outline the nature of his illness/injury. If this illness created an ongoing issue where Luke couldn’t work, I would insist upon him seeing a company doctor to see if he was fit to fulfill his contractual duties towards the company. If he refused this I would take action towards terminating his employment. If Luke saw the company doctor and was passed medically fit to work, I would expect him to work. If he refused, I would take steps to terminate his employment for failing to fulfill his contractual duties.

Given that Luke Shaw is a pro footballer I can only assume he’s being treated by club doctors who had passed him fit to play. If he still felt unfit to do so despite the club doctors deeming him fit, then he could have spoken to his manager days before the game, rather than the morning of.

More pertinently Luke Shaw should lay off whatever it is giving him that gut as it doesn’t exactly give the impression of a footballer dedicated to being the best. He’s actually more overweight than Rooney which is quite an achievement.

Luke Shaw’s attitude is reflective of a wider malaise in culture at United. It can be seen in others, Darmian, Rojo, Romero, Depay, clearly happy enough to just collect a cheque. No commitment, no winners’ mentality, and no fight in a huge chunk of the squad. If Luke Shaw is embarrassed, then that’s unfortunate, but if club doctors pass him fit he’s fit. If Mourinho needs to get stuck into players publicly and cull a number of players, then so be it. It doesn’t need to be a drama every time he does so…and as for the embarrassment being called out publicly, maybe players, Shaw and his agent and family included, should stop leaking internal matters to the papers.
Donough, (wield that axe with brutality Jose!)

…I’m not a big fan of Jose Mourinho but I feel like I have to take his side after reading David Mclean’s mail this morning criticising his treatment of Luke Shaw.

At the end of the day Shaw is employed to play football for Manchester United. If he, and not the medical staff rules himself unavailable, for whatever reason, whilst still being paid in full of course, it’s bound to annoy any manager, especially one under pressure and criticism Mourinho has currently been facing.

I’m sure Klopp said something similar about Sturridge in relation to his comeback from injuries last season as well. I don’t want to get into another ‘overpaid, soft footballer’ debate but if these players were on ‘pay as you play’ type deals I don’t think they’d be quite so quick to rule themselves out of selection which is the point I feel Mourinho was trying to make with his comments.

The modern footballer is in such a position of privilege and even power now that they can seemingly rule themselves out of games as, and when they feel, are they the sort of players you want representing your club? I’m sure there are some who will have valid reasons but it points to yet another gulf in the world professional footballers inhabit, to the one us fans live in who have to turn up to work with illness, personal problems etc and try and do the best we can across the country every day.
Marc

…Just had a point to make by those who were appalled by Jose’s treatment of Shaw:

While this criticism (not of Shaw but of the squad overall) was better said behind closed doors, Jose does have a point. The point is not that players should be out there playing on crutches, but that this whole business of ruling themselves out is ridiculous. There is a medical team, numerous training sessions, sports science data etc. to assess a player’s match readiness. This whole bit about ‘not feeling it’ is also connected with the larger issue of a lack of fight particularly in big games. The back-patting and congratulations after the Chelsea defeat would never have gone on under Fergie. That will to win, to be hurt by a defeat, seems to have gone completely from this squad.

I, for one, am glad Jose is addressing this. If hating Jose makes the players fight harder and give a bit extra, then I am all for it. This team needs to be shaken out of its torpor.
Zubair Umar

The psyschological explanation of Leicester
I thought I might shed my own theory on the stark difference between Leicester of last year and this year and maybe shed some light on the mysterious and often predictable nature of the ‘narrative’ effect.

The power of the collective mind has been widely investigated since the Pyramids in Giza. The broad consensus is that collectively we have an innate ability to align subconsciously and collectively reach an outcome. The phenomenon is so powerful that it can even lead to physical manifestations on the body in cases of Mass Psychogenic Illness where a crowd believes they have all been exposed to something terrible such as meningitis and develop symptoms without any virus present.

Some other relevant concepts are Ideomotor phenomenon (made famous by Ouija Boards), collective consciousness and unconsciousness. I won’t throw journal articles and research at you but read into these effects and read about modern case studies. But let’s assume that collectively a group as large as 50,000 in the stadium, millions in the wider audience and millions more in the collective readership, media, participant pool, has the ability to subconsciously reach an outcome.

Now, forget about all that for a minute and think about Leicester. A bright start, some wonderful characters, lots of goodwill and some exciting football. Think also about the premier league in general, without Leicester last season would have been a snooze where another wealthy super club won by default – it had to be one of them.

Collectively I think there was a lot of people that believed Leicester would win it, which grew exponentially as the season progressed, almost like hysteria. No one wanted any other outcome past a certain point. We all wanted to witness this event, it could never happen again in our lifetime. We knew what narrative we wanted to read.

Now add back in all the psychological concepts above and you have somewhat of a perfect storm in terms of self fulfilling prophecy theory. A very clear and aligned conscious and subconscious desire for a specific outcome, large numbers of people collectively involved at all times and a clear script / fixture list for the prophecy to follow. Add to that also, the sub prophecy of record breaking goal runs, Lineker in his pants, etc.

We’re firmly in the grey area of psychology but there are hints of black and white that you can use to paint a picture of last season’s incredible outcome. So this season? Well the narrative was already decided last season wasn’t it? This was only ever a one off, a chance, next season they’d be back to normal…
Derren Brown (not really)

More Leicester-ish Leicester thoughts
Indeed, a superb mail from Ben (Really miss being in the winners section every week though), LCFC in the mailbox this morning. This encapsulates much of what I thought, and wanted to pen to F365, but couldn’t articulate quite as well as Ben did.

I still maintain that the biggest issue is the little N’Golo shaped hole in the middle of the pitch. Many fans on message boards and other platforms say we can get over his defection and try to dismiss his influence and argue that the club is bigger than the individual. Indeed it is, but sometimes systems have that vital player that makes the whole thing tick. Lose that player and suddenly the whole thing is built on sand. For other examples, see Liverpool the season(s) after Suarez left, despite the commensurate investment thanks to his sale (why hello net spend!!).

Don Claudio is using this half of the season to experiment with a new way of playing, but it just isn’t gelling at the moment. I suspect we will continue to struggle whilst we stick with a similar formation to last season without significant investment in the middle of the field (and a hopefully successful return of Mendy). The focus on solid defending (which still gives me the jitters nonetheless) is to the detriment of our ability to create chances at the other end of the field and leads to those weirdly poor and disconcerting performances, even whilst sweeping all before us (on paper at least) in the CL. I think we will get there – but ‘there’ being comfortable mid-table rather than pulling up any trees higher up from now on.
Rob (the losers section is our natural habitat), Leicester

Anti-intellectualism in English football is frightening
Mediawatch highlighting Paul Hayward’s claim that formations don’t matter has genuinely riled me. As a footballing nation, we are so backwards in our thinking. I know we laugh and joke at Redknapp and Sherwood for their “philosophies”, but when the chief sports writer at one of our country’s biggest national newspapers so brazenly dismisses a fairly fundamental aspect of tactics, it really highlights how deep the well of anti-intellectualism runs in football in this country.

My theory is that part of it is due to clinging on to the idea that the sport played at amateur level bares any resemblance to the one played at the top level. It’s seen a lot in the mailbox when people write in and compare their Sunday league exploits with the Premier League. By dismissing the high level of tactical and positional awareness needed to even compete at the top level, it brings the game within touching distance of the everyman. I get that part of the game’s allure is that anyone can go out and play the same sport as the pros – it is why people even think they can compare how they adjust their game depending on whether they are playing a 40-year-old lump in the centre of the park one week, to a 19-year-old nipper on the wing the next. But there has to be a point where it is accepted in this country that the tactical side of the game is absolutely essential to getting the best out of a group of players. No wonder top teams don’t hire English coaches. I know I have made a lot of assumptions, but, as I said, his claim riled me beyond belief.

On another note, please can Mediawatch cover goal.com’s top 50 players? In the first edition (50-41), they have Renato Sanches, of 79 senior club matches, is a better player than Champions League winner Ivan Rakitic, and one of the world’s best goalkeepers in David de Gea.
Martin, Brighton

Why shouldn’t F365 be biased?
Firstly, I don’t think F365 is biased. As I see it, everyone gets equal bashing and praise as befits their most recent performance. There’s plenty I don’t agree with and I think the writing can be quite kneejerk at times but I guess when you try and draw 16 conclusions from a single match then that the price you pay for our insatiable demand for free content. But biased? I don’t think so.

However, the real question is why do people think that F365 shouldn’t be biased? It’s an opinion based website and if anything I say more bias is needed, if I wanted neutral non offensive stories I’d look at the f***ing BBC website. In this vein some future articles could be: Daniel Storey – Why I hate Jamie Vardy and everything he stand for; Jonny Nic – Why northerners are intrinsically better than southerners; Matt Stead/Sarah Winterburn – Why everyone hates Chelsea etc. (sorry you two, Daniel and Jonny are much easier to caricature.)

How someone has the gall to say ‘I trust you guys can keep it professional’ makes me despair. In a world of the professionally offended it’s a joy to have a website that say it as they see it. So because F365 are far to gentlemanly (ooh sexist!) to say it, allow me, Z, Hibernating Blue, your mail made you look like an overly sensitive, entitled, pompous prick – then again so are most Chelsea fans I’ve ever met…and yes I’m biased.
Matt, AFC

A criticism of Football365
In keeping with recent criticism of your fine site I would like to add my own, and whilst you correctly defend your stance in the face of previous criticism, I think you should accept some fault here.

Having had yesterday off I was looking forward to two days worth of football based articles and opinion. As many of your readers do I copied and pasted the articles into Word to read at my discreet perusal, usually with a brew and bacon toastie. Due to the tiling system Word operates the last article copied is the first to be read, which today was Ronaldo’s ‘perfect night’. All was OK, if slightly saccharine, until I happened upon Sir Alex Ferguson telling Ronaldo ‘Listen, I want you now’.

That was 30 minutes ago, the brew has gone cold and the bacon butty sits limply with a single bite taken out of it as I mull over the ungodly images that refuse to leave my mind. Accusations of bias made to F365 are clearly utter bobbins, but when quoting players please remember your responsibility to your readers. A spoiler along the lines ‘What You Next Read Cannot Be Unread’ may suffice. International week is difficult enough without haunting images of Fergie Time to deal with.

Thank you for your consideration, keep up the good work.
Chris ITFC, Liverpool