ReportWire

Tag: Europa League

  • Comedic misses, brilliant ‘keeping and 24 minutes of pure drama – the 34-kick penalty shootout

    Comedic misses, brilliant ‘keeping and 24 minutes of pure drama – the 34-kick penalty shootout

    [ad_1]

    Maybe we should have known right from the start that this was going to take a while.

    Panathinaikos’ Argentinian midfielder Daniel Mancini stepped up to take the first penalty of their shootout against Ajax, the Greek side having scored a late equaliser to force the Europa League qualifying tie on Thursday night to go to spot kicks.

    But while he did technically ‘take’ the penalty, he might as well have just blown on the ball for all the force he put behind it when he kicked the thing. A pathetic penalty that 40-year-old goalkeeper Remko Pasveer saved easily was the most appropriate way to start a shootout that featured slapstick, rank incompetence and occasional bursts of excellence.

    In total, there were 34 penalties. That, we probably don’t need to tell you, is a UEFA competition record. In all, 25 were scored, two missed the target entirely and seven were saved — five by Pasveer and two by Panathinaikos goalkeeper Bartlomiej Dragowski.

    Ajax, who went second in the shootout, had five ‘match points’ — penalties would have won the tie — and flubbed the first four before emerging victorious.

    Striker Brian Brobbey was brought off the Ajax bench during extra time, perhaps not explicitly to take a penalty (there were 10 minutes remaining when he came on) but certainly with a shootout in mind. He was one of the 12 players who had to take two penalties. He missed them both. What’s more, both of them were potential clinchers.

    Missing one penalty in a shootout will bring deep shame and embarrassment, but you’ll get over it. Missing two is the sort of thing that could haunt you for years. Missing two potential winners… well, at least his side won in the end.

    After that first (terrible) penalty from Mancini, the next eight were very smartly taken by, among others, Steven Bergwijn, Kenneth Taylor (both Ajax) and former Leicester City winger Tete (for Panathinaikos).

    Then it started to get weird. Brobbey stepped up, and there seemed to be an expectation that he would make short work of this: he isn’t a regular penalty taker, but had only missed one in his senior career and had a prolific conversion rate as an academy player. The home crowd chanted his name, he puffed out his cheeks, hit it with reasonable power to the ‘keeper’s right… and Dragowski saved it. The air left the stadium like it had suddenly become a spaceship’s airlock.

    Is it possible to ‘morally’ miss a penalty that you actually score? If so, that’s what the Greek side’s next taker, Dutch midfielder Tonny Vilhena, did. He is a Feyenoord youth product and spent eight seasons in their first team… which is another way of saying the Ajax crowd hated him.

    He struck a low kick to Pasveer’s right, and the goalkeeper got down well to get more than a hand (an arm, perhaps?) to it…

    … but the ball squirted from underneath him, briefly looked like it might stay out  — to the point that the Ajax fans started to celebrate  — but eventually span across the goalmouth and trickled into the opposite corner.

    Vilhena, having heard the thoughts of the home crowd, decided to give a bit back by shushing the terraces. Would this come back to haunt him later on in the shootout? Surely not.

    Next up for Ajax was Jordan Henderson, perhaps as much to remind everyone that he still plays for them. Henderson and penalties are not especially good friends: it’s easy to forget because England won, but he missed in their shootout victory at the 2018 World Cup against Colombia, and has since only taken one competitive penalty in regular time for club or country… which he also missed for England in a pre-Euro 2020 friendly against Romania. Happily, he didn’t have any problems here, side-footing straight down the middle and into the net.

    go-deeper

    GO DEEPER

    Jordan Henderson – the serial winner who is now just an idea for fans to hate

    Then, another miss: Nemanja Maksimovic erred for Panathinaikos, saved brilliantly by Pasveer. But again Ajax couldn’t take their chance, with Bertrand Traore skewing his effort both high and wide, which is quite difficult to do from 12 yards. It was after this penalty that a squabble broke out in the centre circle, both teams getting tetchy at this extended shootout, and referee Chris Kavanagh booked a player from each side.

    The next penalty was Panathinaikos’ Sverrir Ingason, who went low but too close to Pasveer, who bagged his third save. At this stage, he and opposite number Dragowski hugged and started laughing: yes, it was getting quite silly now. And it got even sillier when Ajax passed up yet another chance to win it, as Dragowski saved from Ajax defender Youri Baas.

    This was the penalty shootout that nobody seemed especially keen to win. On the touchline, the look on the face of Ajax coach Francesco Farioli suggested he was watching himself undergo open heart surgery. His opposite number, Diego Alonso, looked similar.

    However, the next 14 penalties were all excellent, with the goalkeepers barely having a chance. They took kicks themselves and scored with minimum fuss, only ramping up the tension. After all, 14 penalties is a full normal shootout and a half. The Panathinaikos substitutes and coaches, arms locked on the touchline, were told off for encroaching onto the pitch. At some point, Farioli retreated from the touchline and sat alone on the bench, his aorta pulsing about two feet in front of him.

    But then, another chance to win it for Ajax: Panathinaikos centre-back Filip Mladenovic tried to go for power, but it was too close to Pasveer who saved to his left.

    Redemption presented itself. Just as he had earlier in the shootout, Brobbey strode forwards knowing that if he scored, Ajax would be through. He stepped up, puffed out those cheeks again, resolved not to make the same mistake again — this time, he wasn’t going to let Dragowski get anywhere near it.

    And he didn’t — the trouble was that the only people who did get anywhere near it were in the back rows of the Johan Cruyff Arena. Brobbey launched an absolute Chris Waddle of a penalty high into the stands…

    … and then proceeded to crumble to the turf…

    … face down, unable to believe what he had just done…

    … providing a classic ‘you can see the exact moment his heart breaks in two’ moment…

    But wait. Here comes Vilhena. You’ll remember from earlier that the former Feyenoord man had shushed the Ajax fans after (just about) scoring his first penalty, which you can understand: he was getting abuse, he scored, and his work was done for the night because there’s no way he would have to take another penalty, right?

    Ah. Alas for him, he was facing the extraordinary Pasveer again. The 40-year-old isn’t Ajax’s first-choice goalkeeper, but he took his chance to make an impression here: Vilhena tried the same penalty as his first but this time, Pasveer got more of his body behind it and kept it out for his fifth save.

    “Five is quite a lot, yes,” he deadpanned after the game, also saying that he was laughing with former Ajax midfielder Wesley Sneijder, on the touchline working for Dutch TV, during the shootout. “I save a penalty now and then, but I don’t think you often experience something as crazy as this.”

    Pasveer last saved a regulation-time competitive penalty in 2021, in the Eredivisie while playing for Vitesse against Heerenveen. The last shootout he was involved in was again for Vitesse, against AVV Swift in the KNVB Cup (Dutch Cup) in 2017. He didn’t save any that night.


    Ajax goalkeeper Pasveer celebrates during the shootout (Nikos Oikonomou/Anadolu via Getty Images)

    “Remko asked why there was never a picture of a goalkeeper who has kept a clean sheet,” Farioli told AFP, referencing the many photos of Ajax greats that adorn the stadium’s walls. “I told him he should maybe play a bit better. But now I think we should quickly hang up a picture of him.”

    Once more, Ajax had one kick to win it. This time they did something interesting: whereas the other players who had taken a second penalty had done so in the same order as the first round, Ajax mixed things up by sending winger Anton Gaaei up for their 17th penalty, in place of Henderson. He went low into the bottom corner, Dragowski went the wrong way and finally, finally, finally, it was over.

    From the moment Mancini took the first penalty to Gaaei’s winner hitting the back of the net, 24 minutes and two seconds had elapsed. Ajax won 13-12 and progressed to the play-off round. If they beat Polish side Jagiellonia Bialystok they will qualify for the Europa League league phase.

    This wasn’t the longest penalty shootout of all time. That title still belongs to SC Dimona and Shimshon Tel Aviv, who took 56 penalties in the Israeli third-tier play-off semi-final earlier this year.

    But from Pasveer’s saves to Brobbey’s brace of misses and Farioli’s utter despair, there was more than enough drama to go around here.

    Ajax face NAC Breda in their second Eredivisie game of the season this weekend. You suspect a nice, quiet, boring 1-0 win will do them nicely.

    (Top photo: Nikos Oikonomou/Anadolu via Getty Images)

    [ad_2]

    The New York Times

    Source link

  • How do you know if a football manager is actually good at their job?

    How do you know if a football manager is actually good at their job?

    [ad_1]

    An important thing to remember about Andre Villas-Boas is that he had ridiculously good hair.

    You don’t spend a record-shattering €15 million (£12.9; $16.3m) fee to sign a rookie manager away from Porto unless you’re pretty sure you know what you’re getting, and one thing Chelsea knew for certain, back in the heady days of 2011, was that the man with a swirling, fox-red side-parting looked impossibly cool getting tossed in the air during trophy celebrations.


    Villas-Boas at Porto in 2010 (Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP via Getty Images)

    Hair like that had sexy new ideas — a philosophy, perhaps. It had the sort of rakish sweep that could command a press conference, smouldering volcanically above the jagged peaks of an unbuttoned collar. But when the 33-year-old prodigy conducted his first interview as the world’s most expensive manager, all of the glamour quickly drained away.

    “Don’t expect something,” Villas-Boas warned gently, “from one man.”

    True to his word, he was sacked by March.

    Villas-Boas to Chelsea might have gone down as a historic blunder if not for all the other managers teams have squandered transfer fees on in the last few years alone: Marco Rose to Borussia Dortmund (€5 million up front for one lacklustre season); Adi Hutter to Borussia Monchengladbach (€7.5 million, ditto); Julian Nagelsmann to Bayern Munich (€25 million for 19 months); Graham Potter to Chelsea (let’s not talk about it). These were the cream of the crop, the head coaches clubs couldn’t afford to wait around for, yet in their new jobs they had the shelf life of a bunch of bruised bananas.

    How do we know if a manager is good? The question sounds almost too obvious to ask — anyone down the pub will be happy to explain it to you loudly over a pint — but professional organisations with millions at stake whiff on it every year. Apparently the answer isn’t great hair. It can’t be trophies, either, since those are pretty much only available to managers already at top clubs. If the study of up-and-coming coaches can be called a science, it remains a largely theoretical one.

    “We’ve done work with football clubs and leagues, actually, around what predicts head coach success and it’s very, very hard,” says Omar Chaudhuri of the sports consultancy 21st Group. “There are very few strong predictors.”

    Everyone loves a winner, so it makes sense that employers would start by looking for coaching talent toward the top of the table. But we also know that in the grossly unequal world of European football, wage bills are destiny for most teams, no matter who’s in the technical area. The managers we admire most are the ones who find a way to punch above their weight.

    To pick out those overachievers, we can start by modelling the relationship between squad strength and success using crowdsourced “market values” from Transfermarkt, which are a decent proxy for player quality when you don’t have wages handy. We’ll average this season’s values with last season’s, where available, to give coaches some credit for player development, then weight the values by minutes played to account for absences.

    For the performance side, we’ll use a 70/30 blend of non-penalty expected goal difference and actual goal difference, which captures team strength pretty well and puts more emphasis on the parts of the game coaches are likely to have some influence over (creating and denying chances) than the parts they probably don’t (finishing, saving shots, successfully lobbying for penalties by doing the VAR rectangle thing with their fingers).

    The results are striking. Over the last seven seasons across Europe’s top leagues, our simple player quality model can explain around 80 per cent of teams’ success.

    But what about the remaining 20 per cent — who should get credit for that?

    When we look at the outliers on the chart above, it seems fair to say that Gian Piero Gasperini’s freewheeling style helped elevate Atalanta’s mid-budget squad into a Champions League contender a few years back, and the whole platoon of head coaches and interim guys who oversaw Schalke’s disastrous 2020-21 campaign probably weren’t so hot at their job. Maybe performance over squad value is a fair measure of what a manager brings to the table.

    Reassuringly, this season’s list of top teams for adjusted goal difference over expected is a veritable who’s who of coaching legends and the game’s hottest up-and-coming managers.

    Xabi Alonso has turned down overtures from Bayern Munich and Liverpool to stay at German champs-in-waiting Bayer Leverkusen, while Brighton’s Roberto De Zerbi, whom no less an authority than Pep Guardiola called “one of the most influential managers of the last 20 years,” remains a strong contender for both jobs.

    In Catalonia, Barcelona have been making eyes at Girona’s Michel. Sebastian Hoeness, Paulo Fonseca, Thiago Motta and Will Still have flocks of admirers, and maybe we should all be paying more attention to whatever Eric Roy’s got cooking at Brest.

    So is that it — have we cracked the not-so-secret formula to finding Europe’s next top manager?

    Well, hang on a second.

    One important trait for a good sports stat is stability, or how much it varies from season to season. If last year’s performance can’t predict next year’s because the number is too sensitive to context, you probably don’t want to make it the sole basis for any expensive hiring decisions.

    By that standard, our manager metric is a bust. For head coaches who change jobs, there’s no correlation whatsoever between the previous year’s performance above or below expectations at their old club and their first season at their new club. Even though goal difference added seemed pretty good at identifying this season’s hottest managers, it has zero predictive value for new hires.

    When Chelsea spent £21.5 million to sign Graham Potter, he was coming off one of the best runs by any head coach in the last seven years: in 2020-21 and 2021-22, Brighton finished 22 and 13 adjusted goals better than expected. His seven months in London went, er, not quite as well.

    Brighton, meanwhile, signed Roberto De Zerbi even though his final season at Sassuolo had been about average compared to their squad value. He’d had a pretty good season the year before that, and a respectable stint outside the top five leagues at Shakhtar Donetsk in between, but nothing that might have hinted that his first season at Brighton would be the fourth-best out of hundreds in our dataset.

    What can explain the difference between these two very different hiring stories? Maybe there’s a clue in how Brighton’s famously analytical owner Tony Bloom explained his process. “I am confident,” he said of the De Zerbi hire, “his style and tactical approach will suit our existing squad superbly.”


    De Zerbi (facing camera) and Potter in 2022 (Bryn Lennon/Getty Images)

    Smart clubs don’t just hire successful managers in hopes that they possess some innate knowledge of how to win. They’re careful to match a coach’s tactics to the players they already have, knowing that changing styles will cost them money and time.

    “I don’t want to have to replace 15 players or something like that over two years,” says one veteran analytics consultant, who requested anonymity to protect client relationships. “Because then it becomes a project of just kind of cycling through players and hoping things work out.”

    Not every club is as careful about this step as Brighton. Chaudhuri explains that searches often start with a “performance piece” to determine whether managers are making the most of their current squad, but “then you have a playing style piece, which clubs generally tend to be quite vague on how they want to play. They say, ‘We want games to be attractive and exciting,’ whatever that means. And then you go, ‘Okay, tell us what you think that looks like.’”

    The other consultant agrees. “I had this meeting yesterday, I gave five candidates, like, ‘What do you think of these five?’” he says. “And he was like, ‘Well, I like these four.’ But I said, ‘One of these four is actually not the style you said you want.’”

    Figuring out which managers have exceeded expectations is the easy part. You can watch their players flinging them into the air at a trophy celebration and envision your club doing the same next season. But success, on its own, is fickle. It also tends to be expensive. The right question isn’t “How do we know if a manager is good?” but “How do we know if a manager will be good for this group of players?”

    The secret ingredient in hiring the right coach is style — and not just the kind that comes with really good hair.

    (Header photo: Lars Baron/Getty Images)

    The Athletic recently profiled six of European football’s most innovative up-and-coming managers.

    [ad_2]

    The New York Times

    Source link

  • FC Barcelona Are A Europa League Team Without Lionel Messi, Whose Return From PSG Is Now ‘Improbable’

    FC Barcelona Are A Europa League Team Without Lionel Messi, Whose Return From PSG Is Now ‘Improbable’

    [ad_1]

    FC Barcelona have once again shown that without their greatest player of all time Lionel Messi, they are a Europa League team at best.

    Though it is still mathematically possible for the Blaugrana to advance to the Champions League knockout phase, the club and their fans have pretty much accepted that last night’s 3-3 draw with Inter Milan has sentenced them to the Europa League for the second year running.

    In a phenomenon that never happened once on Messi’s watch since progressing to the first team as a teenager in 2004, Barca will fail to make it out of the group in back-to-back seasons and it is no coincidence that this has only happened since Messi joined Paris Saint Germain on a free transfer in the summer of 2021.

    “Barcelona without Messi is a Europa League level team. We’re here because in two consecutive seasons, we couldn’t beat Benfica, Inter or Bayern Munich on our own merit,” accepted Mundo Deportivo writer Xavier Bosch on Thursday morning.

    To add further insult to injury, SPORT now report that Messi’s potential return to Camp Nou in July 2023, when his €30mn ($29mn) two-term deal expires at the Parc des Princes, is ‘improbable’.

    The Catalan daily newspaper writes that Messi has been “bothered” by his name constantly being discussed by Barca’s higher-ups, including president Joan Laporta, in the media regarding the potential coup.

    “Today it is more likely that he will not return than a possible return [happening]. The circumstances do not exist,” SPORT says.

    “There has been no rapprochement or contact between the parties. None. It is clear that Joan Laporta would like it, but there is very, very little chance that Messi will return to Barcelona as a player.”

    Coupled with the disappointment of not advancing to the Champions League last 16, Laporta’s image would be further damaged by Messi also not donning the club’s colors once more in 2023/2024.

    Laporta promised that Messi would be renewed in 2021 when he was elected that year, which proved to be a fallacy. And should the Argentine renew his terms with PSG, he will also not get the chance to say goodbye to Culers that both parties deserve.

    [ad_2]

    Tom Sanderson, Contributor

    Source link