No More Harry - Premier League 2020/21

[Gangster Octopus]

Quite.

[Satchmo Distel]

Desperation for TV money in the absence of fans?

The NL does give you games between teams of similar quality. This would be a good argument if fans were attending but is particularly pointless in empty stadia with players already facing fixture congestion at club level.

[Patrick Thistle]

Catching up on MOTD2 from last Sunday. Aston Villa looked very good against Arsenal

[MarkF]

ACLs can happen any time though, can't they? I can think of two (Sam Vokes and Tom Heaton) which were just a consequence of a bad turn and a slightly off-balance landing, respectively.

Are there more serious injuries these days and fewer "out for a couple of weeks" type? It feels like there are, but then again I think that the concept of a "pain-killing injection", generally expecting to be covered in bruises after a match and playing through pain via the judicious application of a half-time whisky have largely died out. Obviously better pitches and training will have helped, too.

What happened with Metatarsals? A few years ago you couldn't read a football story without a mention of someone having that injury, but now...?

[elguapo4]

I always thought that the profusion of metatarsals was due to football boot design, maybe the newer boots protect that area better.

[ursus arctos]

That is exactly it

[Satchmo Distel]

Liverpool have another 8pm Weds followed by 12.30pm Saturday schedule at the end of the month, but both are in England (Atalanta home, Brighton away).

[Sporting]

I only just found out that Liverpool are leaving Melwood.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

I'm still not getting the scramble for 5 subs when the clubs don't use the allotted number of subs they already have.

Well that liverpool man city game there at the weekend is a good explanation of why this idea of big clubs having one team on the pitch, and then another ready to come on like it was american football is a bit of a stretch. For a start we had 5 substitutes for the last nine games of last season, and I can't remember an instance where teams were desperately emptying the bench and throwing on players in an effort to win the game through crude economic might. Other than perhaps the odd game in the cups where teams were fielding a second string, and it wasn't going well.

But if you look at that game at the weekend, which was so shocking that it caused many journalists to come to the conclusion that physical condition is actually a factor in team performance, (yes you Garcia, and you jonathan wilson) you see that Liverpool only brought on two subs, and man city only brought on one, and I'm fairly sure that liverpool only made two because TAA just keeled over. Contrary to this idea that modern clubs have loads of players that they can just call on, Klopp and guardiola like to have relatively small squads and pick the same players over and over again, because their way of playing is dependent on players reliably executing a system that they know backwards, and are able to execute to a high level.

Both teams were missing a bunch of players, So Man city had a bench of four defenders, a goalie, and bernardo silva and foden. Bernardo silva came on for ferran torres, but in order to get foden on, he would have had either directly replace sterling or de bruyne, with a player that is not quite as good or likely to grab a goal, or had to completely reshuffle the front six. Meanwhile LIverpool were missing van dijk, fabinho,thiago, and oxlade chamberlain. This meant that they went from having three midfielders, to putting their main attacking sub (Jota) into the team, and going with a 4-2-3-1. So unsurprisingly they didn't really have an awful lot of options on the bench. They had super utility player james milner who came on for TAA, Xhaqiri came on for firmino. but beyond that you had adrian, Two youngsters who have barely played in phillips and jones, and two players who have barely kicked a ball in over a month in origi and naby keita, who is very much on the shit list after that Villa game. Keita or jones weren't going to be coming on for henderson or wijnaldum, without seriously impacting on the team.

Essentially in that game the gap between the players on the pitch and the players on the bench, in terms of ability or experience, or match sharpness was so acute that it limited their teams ability to put these players on, without substantially weakening the team on the pitch, beyond the effects of tiredness.

See because english football basically doesn't recognise player condition, or fitness, or even changes due to injuries as any reason for fluctuations in form or performance, there is kind of the expectation that you will pick the same XI of superheroes every week. The only biggish club that is doing anything approaching the sort of squad rotation you were seeing 10 years ago at the moment is man utd, not because they want to, but largely because the players often weren't able to handle the physical strain of two games a week. But if you actually do squad rotation, it seems that the main outcome is that newspapers and fans say you don't know who your best team is, and they frequently take a player being rested as a sign that the manager has given up on them and they are about to be sold, before becoming angry when that player is back in the team in the next game. And if you say change most of your team for a champions league game, and the resulting drop in cohesion and performance means you don't win, which is something that happened to Alex Ferguson on a semi regular basis, now they talk about you getting fired.

But Rafa Benitez would get the a lot of the same abuse for squad rotation. Claudio ranieri was called the tinkerman because he rotated a squad where half the players were the wrong side of 30, and Alex ferguson managed to avoid it because he kept winning stuff, and would single you out and call you a stupid cunt for writing such mindless pish in front of everyone, so by and large people accepted that grudgingly.

So essentially people who think that the introduction of five subs is going to allow big clubs just throw on players for tactical purposes, to enable them to win games through sheer wealth, aren't describing the world as it is. It's not a conspiracy. It's a health and safety measure that literally every other professional league in the world has adopted because it's obvious. Except in England, where the national mood is for doing your own thing, regardless of the consequences, even if it's illogical nonsense rooted in a misremembering of the past, and a fundamental misunderstanding of the present. . But that's not a mood that is limited to football. National exceptionalism is everywhere, and it's usually disastrously wrong.

[Sporting]

Great post.

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

If Liverpool win the title without Van Dijk, Gomez, TAA, Thiago, Fabinho and now Salah it will be the greatest footballing underdog triumph since Denmark won Euro '92.

[Tony C]

Excellent lost from TAB.

Rogin, your sense of self deprecating irony does you credit.

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

Excellent lost from TAB.

Rogin, your sense of self deprecating irony does you credit.

I try to please.

[Satchmo Distel]

If Liverpool win the title without Van Dijk, Gomez, TAA, Thiago, Fabinho and now Salah it will be the greatest footballing underdog triumph since Denmark won Euro '92.

Leicester had it easy by comparison to this underdog Liverpool squad, as did Greece in 2004. They're doing Cilla's ghost proud (I think I saw her floating around behind Rogin in the latest Thon).

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

If Liverpool win the title without Van Dijk, Gomez, TAA, Thiago, Fabinho and now Salah it will be the greatest footballing underdog triumph since Denmark won Euro '92.

You were on course to concede 65 goals this season when you had those three defenders available. I'm sure your first game after the international break will be a nice soft handy one. <checks fixture list>........ oh dear.

[Janik]

Further to TAB's post, you have to factor in mental tiredness as well, as that also leads directly to serious injuries. I heard Karen Carney explaining it on the radio recently in context of an injury she suffered, but it's not exactly at the forefront of sports science stuff more just common place and easily understood.

It works like this - when you are mentally fatigued your decision making accuracy and motor control is reduced. This is entirely well known and everyday observation. All of us will have experienced clumsiness or perplexing choices we have made that were down to being tired.
In Football terms, how this manifest itself is a player misjudging the timing in a tackle, misplacing a foot as they try and move, not reacting as swiftly or athletically as they ordinarily would to a contact situation that throws them off balance, etc. All of these kind of things can directly contribute to catastrophic injuries, such as ACL ruptures. As happened to Carney, who did exactly that at an England training session where she says she had earlier been telling teammates she felt worn down.
Asking players to play beyond their recovery capacity leads to two large categories of injury; wear-and-tear and catastrophic.

From the Sports Science on blood-oxygen and similar metrics, it is pretty clear that asking players to play two top level professional football matches per week, for months on end (indeed even weeks) is beyond the recovery capacity of the average hyper-fit athlete. The schedule imposed by the COVID-delayed start is too compressed. Something should have been removed this season, say all the domestic cups. But too many vested interests prevented that. 5 subs is a poor second to culling a competition or three, but it does at least somewhat address a real issue.

[Satchmo Distel]

They should have at least have allowed clubs in European competitions to skip the cups (and maybe the whole EPL skip the League Cup*), but those clubs can field their kids to avoid that problem. The real logjam is the European weeks being consecutive, which could have been avoided by switching to a straight knockout in place of the groups.

*For the European place, the League Cup winner would playoff against 7th in the EPL.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

I always thought that the profusion of metatarsals was due to football boot design, maybe the newer boots protect that area better.

Also when was the last time you saw a player kicking up into the sole of an opponent? It used to be really common, but if you go in that late, with your foot that high, that the other guy is kicking into your studs, then you're going to get a hard Orange, or even a red card nowadays. In the good old days, that fell under the "you've had your shot on goal, now take this boot to the knee" school of refereeing, but even that is starting to disappear.

[caja-dglh]

If Liverpool win the title without Van Dijk, Gomez, TAA, Thiago, Fabinho and now Salah it will be the greatest footballing underdog triumph since Denmark won Euro '92.

Has Salah died from COVID?

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Further to TAB's post, you have to factor in mental tiredness as well, as that also leads directly to serious injuries. I heard Karen Carney explaining it on the radio recently in context of an injury she suffered, but it's not exactly at the forefront of sports science stuff more just common place and easily understood.

It works like this - when you are mentally fatigued your decision making accuracy and motor control is reduced. This is entirely well known and everyday observation. All of us will have experienced clumsiness or perplexing choices we have made that were down to being tired.
In Football terms, how this manifest itself is a player misjudging the timing in a tackle, misplacing a foot as they try and move, not reacting as swiftly or athletically as they ordinarily would to a contact situation that throws them off balance, etc. All of these kind of things can directly contribute to catastrophic injuries, such as ACL ruptures. As happened to Carney, who did exactly that at an England training session where she says she had earlier been telling teammates she felt worn down.
Asking players to play beyond their recovery capacity leads to two large categories of injury; wear-and-tear and catastrophic.

From the Sports Science on blood-oxygen and similar metrics, it is pretty clear that asking players to play two top level professional football matches per week, for months on end (indeed even weeks) is beyond the recovery capacity of the average hyper-fit athlete. The schedule imposed by the COVID-delayed start is too compressed. Something should have been removed this season, say all the domestic cups. But too many vested interests prevented that. 5 subs is a poor second to culling a competition or three, but it does at least somewhat address a real issue.

The mental fatigue must be enormous. There's no recognition among most fans or the media circus that football now is essentially 9 dimensional chess crossed with that bamboo forest scene in crouching tiger. The amount of thought that players just put into looking around them, seeing where everyone is, looking back to where the ball is, letting their mental picture of where everyone is run on a bit, and then sliding a first touch pass through a gap that they expect to be there. And then people call them shit if it doesn't work out precisely the way it was intended. and if it does work people just shrug, and maybe at best call it instinct. The only player I've ever seen talking about this is Wayne Rooney. His contention was that spending 90 minutes going around trying to see five passes into the future is far more exhausting than the running around.

I don't know if the Cup competitions are the problem. Man Utd were in absolute rag order at the start of the season, due to the later end of the previous season, but the first two rounds of the league cup gave them a chance to give game time to a whole bunch of second string players, who were then able to go into a rotation, and not be lagging too far behind the first team players in terms of match fitness. and they essentially helped make up for only having one pre season friendly. The same is true more or less for any other team facing into the slog of european football. What they did with those games is up to them.

The early rounds of the league cup are actually quite useful, as long as you're not going to get sacked for not taking it seriously. There's a very strong argument that you should probably have five substitutes anyway. Three substitutes came in in 1995, and players run a lot further, a lot faster more often. It's kind of hard to make the case against allowing more substitutions on physical grounds, even without covid. This has only brought the pre-existing problems into very sharp focus. I think people are going to have to have a long hard think about squad management and player rotation. That's not just a matter for teams competing in europe, that's something for every club to consider.

[My Name Is Ian]

I'm not a doctor, but I can't believe that that vast amounts of travel that players now have to do doesn't impact upon it too, especially by air. That takes a toll on most people, so I wouldn't be surprised if taking off and jetting halfway across Europe a few times a year doesn't also impact upon players as well.

[Snake Plissken]

Premier League clubs name a squad of 25 players. For match days, they can name 18, of which they can use 14. So that is another 11 players available to the manager that he doesn't use.

The problems can be summarised as:

Keep playing the same 14 players and they are breaking down.

Have to face two matches a week plus European travel*

The starting 11 are too knackered after 70 minutes to complete the full 90 because of the tactical systems in play.

The solutions are all available to the manager and boil down to "Then don't fucking do it then".

I wonder what the reaction would be to the suggestion "football matches should be 70 minutes long".

*Which, by the way, gives you another 25 players to choose from

[beak]

Don't forget that under-21s don't count towards the registration rules, so whatever expensively assmebled youth that haven't been sent overwintering in Girona/Arnhem/etc. can also get a game.

[Snake Plissken]

I’ve got a great idea. This is all about player welfare, right?

How about 18 on the bench but you can have as many injury substitutes as you want? Keep the three subs for tactical reasons but if a player has to come off due to injury then it doesn’t count as one of the three.

Oh, and the injured player cannot start the next game before the second half.

Because it’s all about players welfare. Ease them back in after a knock and all that.

[Janik]

Player welfare means taking people off when they become extra susceptible to injury through tiredness. Not after they have got hurt, when it is already too late from a player welfare perspective. Apart from that, good point.