Take two teams. Put on the shirt of one of the teams, walk to the centre circle and blindfold yourself. Tell the teams to walk out onto a pitch and stand around. Take a bag of balls and start kicking them around. Half would go to your own players and half to the opposition. So long as you didn’t kick balls hard enough to go into touch, you would achieve a 50% pass success rate. On Saturday, against Stoke City, the Aston Villa defender Chris Herd achieved a pass accuracy of 38%. He was, in other words, significantly less effective in possession than a blindfolded man kicking balls randomly.
The comparison isn’t entirely fair, of course, because many of Herd’s attempted passes will have been speculatively lumped in the direction of one man surrounded by multiple markers, but still, that figure gives some sense of the lack of control about Villa’s plane. Herd wasn’t alone. Ciaran Clark and goalkeeper Brad Guzan were also at under 50%. It should be said three Stoke players also completed fewer than half their passes which, given that only four other outfielders to start in the Premier League at the weekend - Moxey and Delaney of Crystal Palace and Taylor and Theophile-Catherine of Cardiff – had a pass success rate of under 50%, suggests quite how poor Saturday’s game at the Britannia was.
Of course the type of pass being attempted makes a huge difference: it’s easy to achieve an ostensibly impressive pass completion rate with short sideways balls that go nowhere. Villa are a very direct side. They play an average of 58 long balls per game, second only to Southampton (61.8). While Southampton also play 425 short passes, though, Villa play just 296 per game, fewer than anybody else in the division apart from Crystal Palace. 16.4% of all Villa’s passes are long, 16% of Palace’s are and just 12.7% of Southampton’s. Arsenal, who play the lowest proportion of long passes, by contrast are at just 8.3%.
There is no one right way to play, of course, and those who would criticise Villa’s direct approach should take note of the fact that on the opening day, when they were deserving 3-1 winners at Arsenal and looked like a side that should finish comfortably in the top half of the table, 19.6% of their passes were long, more than their season’s average. They only completed 70% of their passes against a season’s average of 73.9%, but what’s significant is that on Saturday, at Stoke, Villa completed just 61% of their passes, 21.6% of which were long.
That’s not to say there is some optimal value, that 19% is good and 22% bad, but it does suggest that Villa look too long too often. No statistic in football means anything without context, and here that is in part provided by the opponent. Arsenal are a side that like to dominate possession and who, certainly back in August, had a defence that was widely perceived as ponderous with uncertain protection in front of it. It made sense then for Villa to get the ball forward quickly, to sacrifice accuracy for speed, trying to get Fabian Delph and Gabriel Agbonlahor running at Per Mertesacker.
Arsenal actually only lie ninth in the possession charts, one place above Stoke but that doesn’t tell the full story: they have had 54.7% possession and Stoke just 47.9% (essentially there are nine teams who like to keep the ball; eleven who are less bothered). There is no sense that Stoke are a team particularly vulnerable to rapid transitions and little sense of purpose about the long balls; against Arsenal no outfielder had a worse pass completion rate than Christian Benteke, who completed 57% of his passes.
What was strategy against Arsenal is now the result of panic. Confidence is draining and, although Paul Lambert turned around a seemingly desperate situation last season, Villa are beginning to sink. They have lost three games in a row and, while a six-point gap to the relegation zone seems healthy, more worse than random hoofing like Saturday’s could soon see them in trouble.
Will Aston Villa steer clear of a relegation battle this season? Let us know in the comments below
Spuds is right. Paul Lambert is clearly the problem at Villa but had the good fortune to follow Alex McLeish. Despite lambert's increasingly desperate sounding excuses the football played by the Villa is on a par if not worse than that 'enjoyed' during the McLeish interlude. There has been zero progress and an large element of good fortune has masked what would have been a disastrous start to the season and might yet turn out to be calamitous end.
When a team loses, you'd at least like to see an overall pattern of play, a game plan that, on another day, could have got a result. The recent Villa, in contrast, look like a team with an identity crisis. When they are on form, their attacking trident can be lethal--the big scalps they have taken prove as much. The problem is that when you take away the clinical finishing--& none of Villa's front 3 have impressed this season--the team begins to look clueless. This becomes excruciatingly clear when you see them at Villa Park, where the attacking onus is their prerogative. Consequently, Lambert has a very tricky puzzle on his hands: Does he attempt to integrate more short passes & possession-based attacking, or remain exclusively counter-attacking? With limited means, my sense is he should go for a regista who can make all of those long passes count for something. That sort of player could, in turn, spur Benteke back into one of the league's best strikers.
think they'll be ok but passing stats certainly don't bode well. Starting to think the problem might actually be Lambert?