Transcript of the 7amkickoff segment on the Arsecast extra

One thing that I would like to see more of are transcripts for all podcasts. For me this is an accessibility issue for the hearing impaired but it also makes podcasts searchable and for sighted folks who maybe don’t have time to listen to an hour long podcast, it makes them easier to digest. In an effort to provide a transcript for my segment on last week’s Arsecast I used two services and neither one worked as well as I would like. There were a lot of problems with the names and in general with figuring out who was even speaking!

That lead me to the conclusion that perhaps the technology wasn’t quite ready for the sportscast format. And then in stepped my friend Josh Glover (@jmglov on twitter) who often indulges me my technology requests even if I rarely follow through with them in an adult way.

Josh ran my conversation with Andrew through the Amazon Transcription service and then personally cleaned things up a bit. The result is really good. However, he spent 50 minutes cleaning this up, which is pretty hefty for a 20 minute segment and would be a lot of work for a podcast that regularly drops 2 times a week (for over an hour each) like some of the Arsenal podcasts do.

Regardless, it’s a worthy endeavor and any time I appear on a podcast I will try to provide readers with a transcript.

I know some of you are eagerly awaiting my Ozil article on Arseblog but it’s going to have to wait a bit more. Last night I was helping my daughter with her math(s) homework. It seems she saves it all up for when she’s at my house so we worked on three sections over 3 hours.

00:00

Arseblog: OK, with me to take a look at Arsenal’s new signing Pablo Marí, and also our potential new signing Cédric Soares from a statistical point of view—making the assumption that Arsenal are doing deals having looked at what these players can produce and not just because the guy who is our Head of Football knows their agents and is doing the deals that way—there’s some thought and process gone into this recruitment for sure. From 7amkickoff, it’s Tim. Hello, Tim.

7amkickoff: Hello.

Arseblog: Hello. Let’s talk first about Pablo Marí, a central defender who has come from Flamengo, and he’s come to Arsenal in a very unconventional route, it would be said. He went to England; he went to Manchester City. He didn’t play for them, but he spent a season at Girona in the second division in Spain; a season with… in the Eredivisie, in the first division in Holland; and then another season in the second division in Spain with Deportivo La Coruna. He then went to Flamengo. He seems to have come into himself—if that’s not an unusual phrase—but seems to have taken a step forward in Brazil in terms of how he’s performed and they seem to be very happy with what he’s done there. What is it in him do you think, that Arsenal have looked at and said, yes, this is a guy that we want to bring in to help us for the rest of the season?

01:20

7amkickoff: Well, the first thing that stood out was that he won 71% of his tackles. So now obviously, they’re different divisions, different leagues, different speeds, and different ways that the games are played. But having a center back who wins, you know, over 70% of the tackles is a huge improvement over some of the things that we’ve had here at Arsenal. And I’m not—I don’t hate Mustafi as a human being—but this season he’s definitely way down in terms of his… it feels like in terms of his overall attitude, he seems really low. And that shows up in the stats. He’s only won 29% of his tackles. Now, that is one count. There’s a whole bunch of different counts. I’m using the one from StatsBomb. So he’s only won 29% of his tackles there. And he’s being dribbled past over one time per game. So compared to Marí—is it “MAH-ri” or “Ma-REE”?

Arseblog: Well, he’s got the accent is on the end. It’s on the “i”. So it would lead you to believe it’s Pablo “Ma-REE”.

7amkickoff: OK, “Ma-REE”. Marí has only been dribbled about 0.4 times per 90 and Mustafi about 1.3 times per 90.

Arseblog: 1.3… so I mean, what is this… I mean, is there an average or do you know that off the top of your head when it comes to a central defender?

7amkickoff: I don’t know that off the top of my head, but I know that that’s too many for us.

Arseblog: Yes. I think we can all see that with our eyes, yeah.

02:53

7amkickoff: Yeah. So yeah, that’s the first thing. The second thing is is he’s really good with his passes. Now of course, Flamengo play possession-type football, but that’s what we’re gonna play. And he’s a 93% passer, regular passer. So he actually looks a lot like David Luiz in that: 50% long bombs, 93% regular passes. Both of them are excellent tacklers. They both win possession about the same amount of times—about 0.8 times per 90—for each of their tackles. That’s really good. And they both intercept about the same rate. So it’s… overall he looks almost… he looks a lot like a carbon copy of David Luiz.

Arseblog: Right. What about his aerial ability? Given that he is 6’3″ and, you know, he would add some height to the center of our defense? I mean, we’ve had a—it feels to me anyway—like we’ve had a succession of kind of 6-foot center halves. Which is not a bad height to be, but sometimes you need the guy who’s 6’3″, 6’4″, you know, or 6’6″, 6’7″, the BFG guy, who can just add that something at the center of your defense to to deal with aerial bombardment. What do we know about Marí in terms of his aerial game?

04:15

7amkickoff: Well, it’s not… they don’t they don’t have a lot. I mean, he isn’t called to do it a lot. So he’s only 69%. That sounds low, but actually, David Luiz is 55%. Chambers—who you would think, big Englishman—is 53%. And Sokratis is 68%, so he’s right there in that range of our… he would be one of our better aerial duelists, if you will. But one of the things I found was odd was when Mertesacker made the jump from the Bundesliga to the English Premier League, he lost a few points off of his ariel dual percentage. But also, he wasn’t challenged as much in aerial duels. And it wasn’t that he wasn’t trying, but what you find is when you have a big player like that—as you know, you played center half—they, teams will try to play around you. They won’t—they’re not gonna play it—they’re not gonna try to get you into an aerial duel with a guy who’s 6’3″.

So, that would also explain some of his lower numbers, but yeah, he won 2.5 out of 3.6. So, that’s comparable to Sokratis, who won 3 out of 4.4; David Luiz—who is taller than Sokratis—won 1.6 out of 2.9. So he’s up there in that… again, the Brasileiro—I probably murdered that—is different than the Premier League for sure. So he’s gonna have a challenge there, and I’m sure that teams are gonna come after him to start, but we’ll see how he holds his own. That’s an interesting thing to look at as he goes along.

05:49

Arseblog: Yeah, I think what Tim wrote in the profile is that Flamengo are a very dominant team. So he’s in a team which are—not that they’re not tested—but who tend to dominate games, and that’s not been the case with Arsenal, it’s fair to say for this season.

7amkickoff: Not yet.

Arseblog: Not yet; things are changing, but you know we’ll come to that, don’t worry. So from a statistical point of view, we’re looking at a guy who is a good passer, he’s good distributor, has got good long ball distribution as well. A good tackler, decent in the air. It’s a matter really of adaptation and seeing whether or not he can make it in, you know, make the step up in terms of energy to Premier League. Statistically, from what we’ve seen of him, he ranks highly against what we’ve got.

06:41

7amkickoff: Yes, I would put him up there. I think he’s going to give some competition for… well, you and I had a little discussion about this already. I think he’s going to give some competition to Sokratis. He’s… I have to say I’m excited. I’m excited for this guy. He seems like the kind of defender that we’ve wanted for a long while. He’s left-footed, which we don’t have very often, I think, was Koscielny our last one?

Arseblog: No, he wasn’t left-footed. Vermaelen was our last one.

7amkickoff: So there you go. And it’s difficult to find those guys, and when you can find them, if they can distribute, it’s a great benefit to the team. I looked at the stats for the Liverpool game, the cup final.

Arseblog: Oh yeah.

07:29

7amkickoff: The Club World Cup final. I’ll just read some of those off to you. He was 3/4 in the tackle, so that’s good. He made a tackle successfully in the 18 yard box. He… I think he led their team in clearances with 7. So he cleared the ball quite a bit. He played extremely left, was unusually far left, almost in the left back position. And I think Tim wrote about that in his column that Filipe Luís… it allowed Filipe Luís to go forward quite a bit. So actually, you see, Marí’s passing numbers were really low in this game. Obviously you’ve got Liverpool adding a lot of pressure, which they do. I say low; they’re 81%. You have Liverpool adding a lot of pressure, and then also he’s playing in a much more forward left role than I would expect from a center half. So all of those things—I mean—I think overall he had a really good game. Didn’t make any mistakes and made that one important tackle in the fourth minute of that game.

Arseblog: Yeah, I suppose a good marker as well, considering who he was playing against. Liverpool are, as we can all see, a really brilliant team at the moment in Salah, Mané, and Firmino, they’ve got such threat going forward, so to do well and to match up against what they’ve got to offer is very interesting. So we’ll wait and see.

7amkickoff: Oh, I wanted to add one last thing.

Arseblog: Sure.

7amkickoff: So one of the things that’s odd about David Luiz is that he has incredibly good entry passes into the final third. He averages 3.6 final third passes and then almost a half of a pass into the penalty area per 90; that’s really great for a centre half. So I looked at that Liverpool game, and with Marí playing really high up the pitch, he had 7 passes in the final third. So that averages out to about 5 or so per 90. So, it looks like he can do the business of getting the ball forward, which is something that I think Arteta is trying to do with the center backs.

09:39

Arseblog: Certainly when you look at the way we’re… we’ve got this left sided bias now in terms of attack over the last number of weeks, you know, with Saka, the way that Xhaka is slotting back into that sort of auxiliary left back position to distribute the ball down the left hand side. And also, it gives you somebody who can switch play as well. You know, if you bring everybody with you then you bang a long ball with your left foot to the other side of the pitch, it’s an interesting tactic. So it will be interesting to see, you know, how he fits in, where he fits in. If he’s gonna make it into the first team alongside David Luiz or be a backup for him, we’ll wait and see.

So let’s talk Soares. Southampton right back, 28 years of age, Portuguese international, almost out of contract. It’s a bit of a surprise, you know, considering we have Hector and we have Ainsley Maitland Niles. But it does obviously feel as if Mikel Arteta has wanted—what’s the word I’m gonna look for?—an established right back to provide competition for or understudy Hector Bellerin. You know, as well as Maitland Niles has done, he has said he doesn’t really want to play there or he doesn’t fancy it there so, you know, he’s got Kolasinac and Tierney on the left—when they’re fit—in the meantime, Saka’s doing a great job. But on the right hand side, he does only have Hector Bellerin as an established right back, regardless of how well Maitland Nile has done.

So what is it about Soares that has made us go, this is the guy? Do you think it’s how he has performed statistically? Or is it the case that he’s got only a couple of months left on his contract? We could do a relatively cut price deal on him if we decide to go that way. It’s expedience, it’s availability. Is that what’s driving this one more than performance?

11:29

7amkickoff: Yeah, I’m actually at a little bit of a loss with this player. He’s only played 31 total full 90s for Southampton the last two years. So that’s not a lot of data. I mean, it’s an OK amount of data, but the numbers I see for him are not outstanding in any way. You know, 68% tackler. He’s just a poor, poor dribbler. He doesn’t even try—this season in particular—doesn’t even try to dribble. He does win the ball quite a bit, but it’s a very odd signing. I’ll just quickly, some of his stats are that are really good are… oops, wrong think. I always click on the wrong thing.

Arseblog: Tell me about it!

[laughter]

7amkickoff: So, he is a 70% tackler this season. OK, so that’s good again. A lot like Marí. Bellerin is also having a very poor game tackling this season: only 33%. And I can’t quite figure out why, because his interceptions numbers are back to his regular.

Arseblog: I would say that’s the injury, and I’d say it’s about trusting his knee and being sure that when he goes into a tackle, I think that’s one of the things players have to get over is this psychological fear of going into tackles. I think probably the dataset with Bellerin is quite small as well, isn’t it?

7amkickoff: It is.

Arseblog: This season, he’s only played eight or 10 games at the most.

13:05

7amkickoff: It is, yeah. But the thing I’m thinking is, if we’re not gonna play Ainsley Maitland Niles, then what are they looking for in bringing Soares in? And I think the first thing is his tackle numbers are very good. Bellerin has been dribbled 2.6 times per 90. So it’s not just bad, it’s real bad. So bringing in somebody like Soares who can beef up the defense, I think that’s got to be the point of this signing.

That said, he has some kind of unusual numbers all around. His passes into the final third are 0.8, whereas Bellerin are 0.51 this season—again—that’s this season, where he’s still recovering from injury. And Soares’s crosses into the penalty area are almost half a cross per game, whereas Bellerin’s 0.26, and Ainsley Maitland Niles is 0.1. So it’s not even comparable. I mean, so if Soares can get forward, he is—seems to me like, according to the data—a pretty good crosser of the ball. So we might be looking for something like that.

14:13

Arseblog: I’m sorry to cut across. I just wonder is that—when it comes to Bellerin, when it comes to Maitland Niles and their crosses and what have you—I wonder is that in some ways a consequence of the way that we’re playing? You know, with Arteta in particular, I think the right back doesn’t overlap anywhere near as much as the left back. I know you’re working on data across a whole season, so that could be just a pie-eyed theory that I came up with without thinking it through fully enough. But it does feel like the left back has got a bit more license to get forward, which seemed to be the case last season as well with Kolasinac. A lot of what we did was down the left.

7amkickoff: Yeah. No, no, those are both… I think I agree with you in terms of my eye test as well. What I’ve seen from Maitland Niles is that I think Arteta is either holding him back, or he’s not able to make those kinds of connections with Pépé the way that Saka and the forwards on the left have made, and especially Martinelli, that’s obviously a good combination there. So yeah, I think you’re right that Maitland Niles has been held back a little bit. Which does then, again, if you go out and get a really good tackler or somebody who’s really solid in defense, that does make a lot of sense. If you’re not trying to get forward on the right hand side then having a solid defender who can back up Bellerin I think is a pretty decent call.

15:43

Arseblog: All right, well, look again, we’ll wait and see how he does. And we’re making the assumption at the time of recording that he is going to sign, so hopefully we haven’t put the mockers on this one. Let’s just talk very quickly, a couple of little things about Mikel Arteta and how he’s stacking up compared to what came before him. What are, what is maybe the one statistical thing that stands out of Mikel Arteta’s very short—we have to say—reign so far—it’s only been six weeks or whatever it is, maybe not even that—in comparison to what Unai Emery was producing? What has Arteta done that stands out in the stats?

7amkickoff: Well, it’s definitely the defense. I mean, the number of shots that we’ve conceded per game is down from 16.1 this season under Arteta to around 11 under Emery. I mean, excuse me. Excuse me.

Arseblog: The other way around.

16:45

7amkickoff: Flip those around! God! I’ll have to do some penance for that. Emery’s Arsenal allowed 16 shots a game. Arteta’s Arsenal is around 11. So, I think that’s a huge improvement. We haven’t seen quite the improvement in the offense yet, but I think that that’s coming. I don’t know when, but we hope to see a little bit more control of the games—well actually, we’re seeing a lot more control of the games—which is why the shots numbers are down. The defensive midfielders are holding position a lot better, which is helping to cover the defense. And then what we need to do now is try to figure out a way to get the ball forward a little bit better. And so I think that that’s coming. I watch every interview for Mikel Arteta and I believe that he’s moving this incrementally in that direction.

Arseblog: Yeah, I think that’s the thing. I don’t think you can be a good, effective attacking team unless you have some kind of a defensive platform or some idea what you’re doing defensively. It just… it’s just not possible. Not possible to produce—not consistent numbers from an attacking point of view—unless you’ve got a platform from which to attack. Otherwise, you see what happened to us at Watford, for example. Just, you just get turned around and the opposition gets a record number of shots on goal and you know, everyone’s going crazy. So yeah, well look, that is gonna be the next thing that we look for in the stats, obviously, and hopefully the amount of shots we take can increase; the amount of shots we allow can decrease a little bit further, but, you know, to take nearly 50% off what we were conceding in a very short period of time is a big improvement, isn’t it?

18:35

7amkickoff: Yeah, and to do it without just packing the defense in and playing, you know, eight at the back or whatever. That’s actually—doing it that way, packing the defense in like that—is actually counterintuitive to a lot of people—but that actually would… it’s the reason why Emery’s team allowed so many shots, because they were so timid, that they just sat back. And that’s never good for a team.

The one other thing I’d like to look for with… and I don’t have the data yet. So I’m waiting for about 10 games in before I start to start to say anything about this. But one of a couple of other things is that Emery’s Arsenal was super passive in terms of defensive duels. So in terms of attacking the ball without—when they were out of possession—tackles, interceptions, all those things, it was a very passive team. So for a team that was allowing that many shots, they were also passive, which was doubly bad. So what I’d like to see is whether there’s an increase in those numbers as well, in terms from Arteta. And I think there will; I’ve already seen some slight increase in the numbers of tackles from some of the forwards, so all those things are really good indicators that we are defending from the front all the way to the back.

19:48

Arseblog: All right, well, things to keep an eye on, and no doubt you’ll keep us up to date with those. Maybe we’re overdue a column on Arseblog News, and of course everyone can read your own stuff on your site: 7amkickoff. Tim, thanks very much.

7amkickoff: Yup, thank you.

Qq