Good morning! I prefer outfield players but I find goalkeepers to be fascinating.

Kyle Boas Author of the Tactics Journal

In today’s email:

• What game situation is this actually recreating
• If WAR works for hockey, it can work in football
• The Modern Goalkeeper’s Distribution #6: The Timing of the Decision — When Waiting Is Already a Choice

TACTICALLY INTERESTING

Teams and games I am following.

• The Guardian: The Manchester City verdict and England run world champions close – Football Weekly
  Plus, to the fiasco in Hungary where the Republic of Ireland beat Israel on Sunday and your questions answered.

What game situation is this actually recreating

David Garcia:

One of the strangest things about football training is how many activities have become completely detached from the game situations they were originally designed to solve.

Take something like a 4v4+3, you can find thousands of versions online, coaches use it everywhere, it looks recognizably “football,” players are busy, there are decisions, pressure, passing, support, all the things we associate with a good activity, but ask a really basic question, what game situation is this actually recreating, and what problem are the players meant to become better at solving?, and quite often there isn’t a clear answer.

I don’t think that means the activity is bad, I think it means we’ve often started at the wrong end.

An activity gets created because a coach sees something happening repeatedly in a match, they want their players to experience that situation more often, so they build a training environment around it, but then the activity gets shared, copied, modified, put into session libraries, posted online, copied again, and eventually the original game problem disappears.

What remains is the exercise.

Crafting training sessions around the match seems like common sense.

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POLL

If WAR works for hockey, it can work in football

Marc Lamberts:

WAR initially caught my eye when looking at the NHL, before going back to the origins in baseball. The reason why we can look at this specific sport, is for the reason that the game comes closer to football than it comes to baseball. The dynamics of Ice Hockey is much more contineous, full of possession and more different actions.

The model in Ice Hockey is built on six different components to come to a more dynamic WAR that is fitting for this kind of sport:

EV Offense (EV=Even Strength) EV Defense (EV=Even Strength) PP Offense (PP=Power Play) PK Defense (PK=Penalty Kill) Penalties Shooting”

A hockey player’s numbers depend on the quality of his linemates, the opposition he faces and the situations in which he is deployed. Consequently, hockey analytics has developed methods designed to separate individual contribution from these contextual influences, while replacement level can also vary by position and situation. Football has the same problem, arguably in an even more extreme form.

I will continue to say that hockey is closer to football than any other sport in regards to the way players move in relation to the puck and their teammates. If WAR can work in hockey, it can work in football.

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The Modern Goalkeeper’s Distribution #6: The Timing of the Decision — When Waiting Is Already a Choice

UEFA goalkeeper coach, Antonio Ferraro translated from Italian:

In modern football, the problem is not only: “Where can I play?”

The question becomes: “When must I play?”

And it is a huge difference.

After more than twenty years on the pitch, I have become convinced that an important part of the goalkeeper’s evolution passes precisely through here. We cannot only teach him to recognize a solution. We must put him in a position to understand when that solution still exists.

The situation changes continuously. The teammate moves. The opponent closes down. A passing line opens and immediately afterwards closes. A central defender comes to meet. A midfielder gets free behind the first pressure. The goalkeeper can have two, three or four possibilities in front of him, but not all remain available for the same amount of time.

The modern goalkeeper must therefore learn to read not only the space, but the duration of the space.

This is where the timing of the decision comes into play.

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NEWS

• The Guardian: Scale of City’s punishment is the only story but Premier League must bear some responsibility
  Nothing is over, nothing is done.
• The Independent: The truth behind football’s much-maligned Financial Fair Play rules
  After the shock, the waves.
• The Guardian: Europe’s top-flight clubs to get share of £185m from Club World Cup
  Fifa and European Football Clubs (EFC) are close to an agreement that would bring a 50-50 split between sides in Europe and the rest of the world.

RECOMMENDED READING

Everything published yesterday by the writers I follow

• The Athletic: Tigst Assefa has Achilles surgery after ‘complex rupture’ during Berlin Marathon win
  The 29-year-old only missed the world record by 68 seconds on Sunday despite the injury.
• Jim Nielsen’s Notes: Fool’s Expertise
• Stories by Marc Lamberts on Medium: Building WAR for Football #2: Feedback on my initial model
  I have been thinking.
• Japan coach Hajime Moriyasu sends Valencia midfielder Ryunosuke Sato back to compete for his place
  Moriyasu said being seen by new Valencia coach Carlos Aguirre and earning minutes would benefit Sato's career, Valencia and Japan more than completing the camp.
• Manuel Moreale — Everything Feed: The life triangle
  Over the past few years, I spent way more time than I probably should have thinking about my life.

Contains information from OpenLigaDB, made available under the Open Database License (ODbL 1.0).