Arsenal’s French scout Gilles Grimandi said something interesting in L’Equipe this week about football’s trend towards stats, data analysis, passing percentage points and all the rest of it. “Statistics,” Grimandi declared, “Give people the chance to exist who have little knowledge.”
This isn’t exactly news in itself but Grimandi’s beef is more than the standard curmudgeonly dismissal. Players, he said, are well aware of the way clubs use data, and how careers can rise and fall on such numbers. As a result they will often take fewer risks now, refuse to engage in “a duel” they might lose, tread a comfortable line in passing, and literally play a percentage game.
The suggestion here is that the way we look at football is changing the way it is played, a footballing variation on the observer principle coined off-hand by a retired French defensive midfielder that is surely the most interesting thing anybody has said about football this week.
And which would certainly have been the central theme of this column were it not for the fact the year’s end also brought such a vast gushing spume of stats, numbers and top 10 lists that Grimandi’s First Law Of Uncertainty was immediately buried by the need to absorb the fact Nemanja Matic is statistically the best dribbler at Chelsea, Kolo Touré made more fruitless arm-waggling sprints than any other player in Europe, and that Mathieu Flamini expended more energy waving his arms in 2014 than he did moving his legs to the extent that had Flamini played every match standing on his hands he would have run an extra 1.7km per game and Arsenal would have won the league by five points.
The only part of the new year stat explosion that carried any real weight was the list of 2014’s top Premier League goalscorers, which was topped, jointly by Sergio Agüero and Wilfried Bony. This seems significant in itself as Bony has already loomed large among the first knockings of the transfer window, with Manchester City reportedly willing to pay up to £30m. Some have questioned the price tag but it isn’t hard to see why City would be interested in a player who offers a highly specific, indissolubly vital skill that cuts across even the numerical vagaries of Grimandi’s Law.
Look at a reel of Bony’s goals on YouTube and there he is each time, never quite marked, occupying always that portable little pocket of Bony-space. For all his alluring brawn, Bony is no raging bull but a connoisseur of angles and timing and the most controlled and insistent of finishers. This is the reason his price is so high. Bony may not be from the very top rank but he is undoubtedly a finisher, expert in the one part of football that for all the more numerically obscure methods of attempting to win a match remains pretty much unchanged from the very start of things.
There is an interesting point of clarity here. As space has become more compressed on the pitch, margins shrunk, the details by which victory is decided ever more minute, football’s most basic skill seems increasingly decisive. The world’s No1 player in 2014, Cristiano Ronaldo, has evolved precisely this way, paring his game back, moving less rather than more and becoming above all a finisher, a razor edge, a single point of light.
With this in mind it seems odd finishing has often been treated as something “instinctive”, an afterthought, a private matter between striker and goalkeeper. I once interviewed a Premier League striker turned manager who five minutes in gave up talking about the FA Cup third round to describe in passionate detail his dream of creating an elite finishing academy to travel the land spreading the gospel, his horror at the fact the most important part of football has no real technical vernacular, and describing a whole range of component parts, from goalkeeper-awareness to far-post percentages, that should be routinely coached as a frontline skill.
For all that English football has always produced good finishers. My theory is this happens because, like goalkeeping, finishing happens everywhere. No matter what your methods, how direct your football, the basic skill of finishing remains a feature of every blood and thunder long ball duel, every park level kids’ match played out on a giant scale mud-pit. So English football has provided the languid close range brilliance of Jimmy Greaves, the street-magician craft of Robbie Fowler and the dead-eye incision of Gary Lineker, who often seemed to have drifted in from some other more civilised place, like a neighbour popped in for a New Year’s drink lurking tactfully in the kitchen being polite and refilling the crisp bowls while everybody else trashes the living room carpets and vomits over the bannisters.
Of the current English lot Daniel Sturridge is an expertly supple and varied finisher, while Danny Welbeck looks at times like an anti-finisher, a player whose brilliantly athletic, incisive approach work so often ends with a spasm of panic. And really in Welbeck the basic superpower of the genuine finisher becomes a little clearer. It is the same ability a great batsman or a great tennis player has to pause time for a frame or two, to find a moment of stillness in the most complex of split-second mechanical movements.
There are one or two outstanding specialists in the Premier League. Wayne Rooney has become a high-grade finisher, right down to his recent habit of angling his body, like a penalty-taker, to send a goalkeeper the wrong way. Best of all is surely Agüero, who seems to have that stillness with him always, and who even while scoring that last-ditch title-winning goal against QPR appears to pause for millisecond to perfect his stride, adjust his angle to the ball, gilding the moment, making it perfect.
Grimandi may be right. The blizzard of peripheral numbers may or may not be changing the way football is played, lassoing it with a restrictive self-awareness, but there is a heartening note of constancy in the enduring fascination with football’s endnote, its oldest, most indivisible basic skill.
