SB Nation User Blog: Graham

Langerhans Returns

Graham — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 16:44:59 -0000

Langerhans Returns

Yay! (Jeff's note: looks like I was wrong. Hooray being wrong! Still not sure how Langerhans fits here but I know better than to try to predict this FO.)

Mariners sign Pedro Okuda

Graham — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 17:39:11 -0000

Mariners sign Pedro Okuda

Is he Japanese? Is he Brazilian? I have no idea. He's a 19 year old LH hitting shortstop though, so that's nice I guess. Don't expect too much though.

Rule 5

Graham — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 14:43:17 -0000

The Mariners have taken right handed pitcher Kanekoa Texeira (Yankees, AA) in the MLB portion of the Rule 5 draft, with no losses. Texeira, 23, is a guy who gets by without electric stuff, but he's tended to get the job done with plenty of strikeouts and ground balls. You may recall him for his involvement in the Nick Swisher trade - he was drafted by the White Sox in 2006 and sent to the Yankees with Swisher for a bunch of total crap last year. In 2009 the Yankees experimented with him as a starter at Trenton, and he more or less replicated his relief numbers in that role, albeit in a tiny sample size. He throws a slider and a sinker, both of which do what they're supposed to do, and he's pretty durable. It's unlikely that anyone would see him as much more than an emergency starter due to his total lack of a changeup, so there's that. He might stick in long relief if Carlos Silva doesn't get there first, or he could provide cover in the case of injuries to the pen at the start of the year.

In the minor league portion we lost Marshall Hubbard, which is to say nobody, and piked up RHP Terrence Engles from the Nationals, who we will likely never hear from again.

In other news, Josh Wilson returns to the Mariner organisation on a minor league deal. Hurray. Maybe he and Corey Patterson can be friends.

Figgins Official

Graham — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 21:48:00 -0000

Yay.

Combination Play: Leo and Zakuani

Graham — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 03:42:32 -0000

Bossing the Flanks

So let's start with a quick run down on the interplay between wide midfielder and full-back in modern soccer. The wide areas of the pitch are far less dangerous than the centre, so wing play comes down to exploiting space in those wide areas to provide some mechanism to deliver the ball into the penalty area. Since the wings are less important to a defensive team, there's a lot more space to play with, hence seeing creative, fast players rather than the big battlers we so often see crashing the centre (our closest analogue to the latter archetype is Nate Jaqua). Beat a man wide and yard upon yard open up to explode into; beat a man in the box and some other defender is right on top of you and liable to kick the ball off your feet.

On defence, this area is covered by the full-backs, who are typically faster defenders in order to close down both the ball and any possible passing lanes. Wide midfielders occasionally track back to provide support, but it's rare to see even world class wingers who are capable of doing more fouling the opposition - they're there for their abilities on the attack rather than their defensive game. This leads to attacking full-backs being very useful in overloading a flank. Get a local 2 vs. 1 situation and you're suddenly giving the opposition considerable problems, assuming one's capable of doing something with possession wide. Teams will often cede the wide areas in front of the box to the other team's attack if they're confident that they can shut down attacks that emerge from such locations (an excellent example of this is the recent Premier League match between Chelsea and Arsenal), which isn't as hard as one might think: there are essentially only two attacks that are possible with the ball outside. Play one is to drive down the touchline and cross, and play two is to cut inside with the ball towards more dangerous areas in the hopes of playing short passes or shooting.

The first option is more suited to the full-back, the second the winger. Why?

Strengths and Weaknesses

The answer to both lies in the skill and pace of the wide midfielders. When given the choice between pressing a winger or preventing passes a fullback, there's no real option for a defender: they must close down the more dangerous attacker, because consistently allowing the winger a free run into the box would be a very good way to get demoted to half-time orange slicer. This means that an overlapping run by a fullback when a wide midfielder is on the ball in an advanced position will be relatively unopposed, and plenty of space towards the corner will be open. Involving the fullback in the attack almost inevitably leads the ball towards crossing position, and a team looking to exploit the ability to overload a flank should see this happen routinely. The second option, the push into central positions, is of necessity the winger's because they are, on the whole, much more capable shots and passers than their defensive compatriots. In essence, the dynamics of the modern game means that full-backs cross and wingers push the ball into the danger areas. This is, of course, a generalisation: wingers have to have the option of crossing if their backs cannot support them fast enough (this happens when the winger is very, very, fast - think Aaron Lennon), and you'll sometimes see full-backs take potshots from the wing, although they're usually quite bad at them.

The Antithesis of The Standard: Seattle's Left Wing

This norm then raises an important question of the Sounders attack. Why are crosses from Leo Gonzalez so rare and those from Steve Zakuani so frequent? Does anybody remember Leo crossing the ball last season? I assume he must have done, but such occurrences were so few and far between that I literally have no idea how good he is at delivering the ball into the box. Similarly, Zakuani pushed outside so often that by the end of the year his marker was cheating him, playing half turned to their right in anticipation of where he'd push the ball (this decision invariably proved to be correct).

When your left midfielder is providing all of the service down that flank when you have a left back of the calibre of Leo Gonzalez, your team has a problem. When said left midfielder's crosses are as dicey as those provided by Steve Zakuani, it's a double issue. Don't get me wrong: I think Zakuani's one of our best players, but crossing the ball is not his strong suit. Something strange is going on down that wing, and it likely contributed to the Sounders punching well below their weight offensively. Why don't we see the usual full-back/winger combination play down our left side? I have two hypotheses.

1) Leo is simply not fast enough to keep up with Zakuani in order to provide the requisite support.

2) Zakuani's tendency to move the ball outside when confronted with a defender cuts off the space Leo would be crossing from, forcing him to play deeper.

I don't think it actually matters which one of these is true. They're both resolved by Steve Zakuani adding a new weapon to his arsenal this offseason.

Drive For Goal

Zakuani is a converted striker, and although it's clear that he loves space, he may have forgotten the advice of a legend (not that he's alone in that company):

"When forwards attack from wide to inside, they are far more dangerous. It's funny when I see centre-forwards starting off in the middle against their markers and then going away from goal. Strikers going inside are far more dangerous, I think. When [Thierry] Henry played as a striker, and sometimes when Wayne [Rooney] does, they try to escape and create space by drifting from the centre to wide positions, when that actually makes them less dangerous."

-Sir Alex Ferguson, Manchester United manager

If option one above is correct, Zakuani is, for all intents and purposes, a striker who happens to start with the ball fairly wide. On fast breaks, where support from one's team's deeper-lying players is more of a luxury than an expectation, the player on the ball must act like a forward. Standard rules of attack (cross, cross, cross, repeat) rather go out of the window when a team can find themselves two on two and bearing down on goal. It is in this very situation that Zakuani should shine, and yet he's ineffective here precisely because he lets himself get pushed wider and wider until he's forced to cross (and on fast breaks there're not many targets to hit on a cross anyway). Cutting inside the defender presents a much bigger problem for the opposing side, especially as Zakuani's speed should result in most defenders getting left behind. So, option one means that Zakuani should probably driving for goal more often than he does.

Option two is that he's simply not giving Leo the space to make an overlapping run, and that's even more clear-cut than what's just been discussed above. You can't expect players to function effectively when two of them are put in the same place on the field, and there's no reason to expect good results when Zakuani is moving into space where Gonzalez should have ownership. Cutting inside with the ball and laying it off to an on-rushing full-back gives more space and time for a cross to be delivered.

Either way, I think it's clear that Zakuani's signature stepover and push left trick isn't going to cut it. Having the ability to bring the ball inside will open up whole new avenues for the team's attack on the left side, which seem to have been sorely neglected over the past season. Having Zakuani scaring the opposing defence by running towards the goal instead of away from it while Leo Gonzalez provides the crosses? Yes please. The best part is that as a 21 year old, Steve Zakuani still has plenty of learning to do, and once he does, that side of our attack will go from ho-hum to a fairly devastating offensive weapon.

On Formations and Fullbacks

Graham — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 04:03:42 -0000

Or: Why James Riley Was Left Unprotected

You'll probably need some understanding of the formation aspect of soccer strategy before reading. Wikipedia is a good resource, and if you've watched many Sounders games you'll have picked up quite a lot of information as well. Sorry in advance for the English spelling.

Four at the back, one or two at the front. While there exist a huge variety of midfield combinations a Major League Soccer team can run with, the formations are typically bracketed by these five or six players. I imagine at this point several of you are already readying the comments that say I've completely ignored 3-5-2, which indeed I have. Before getting to the heart of the post, let me explain why.

The Dangers of 3-5-2

3-5-2 is a formation which takes the two wide defenders in a four-man back line (the full-backs) and pushes them into midfield, which reinforcing the defence with an additional central defender (centre-back). This has the effect of providing an additional defender to cover the two central strikers in the standard 4-4-2 whilst simultaneously overloading the midfield, allowing advantages in two key areas of the field. The formation came about as a direct response to 4-4-2 pulling the old-style wingers down the field and slightly inside. Why ignore a system designed to combat the most common formation on the planet, then? The answer is simple. Modern teams are perfectly capable of making changes to their shape, and within the 3-5-2 lie the seeds of its own demise. Withdrawing one forward from 4-4-2 into the central midfield turns the formation into a 4-5-1, leaving one of 3-5-2's central defenders standing around essentially doing nothing, almost turning the game into 11 vs. 10. So while we accept the possibility of a 3-5-2 appearing, its shortcomings mean that we don't expect it to encounter it too often. This is a formation whose heyday seems to have already passed, although we may see a form of it arise with one centre-back and two wing-backs, which would be functionally completely different (and defensively suicidal, one would only see this against teams playing something like 4-6-0, which nobody does. Yet).

Why Not Three Up Front?

4-3-3 is a formation you'll also see talked about which seems to turn my first sentence on its head (perhaps I should have written a more accurate first sentence!), but in most cases the attackers are staggered in a way which means that the two side players of the three in the front are only slightly advanced from the outside midfielders in 4-4-2, with a centre forward withdrawn in favour of a play-making central midfielder. It's rare that the outside forwards lie so far upfield that they could be considered bona-fide strikers, and there are no three players in MLS capable of providing the service that such a formation requires. Spain can pull it off fairly effectively against weaker teams, but they can field Fabregas, Iniesta, and Xavi, which might be the best set of midfielders who've ever lived, and it's still not that useful against their elite opponents. So let's also neglect the possibility of seeing three 'real' strikers running rampant.

I hope at this point I've convinced you of the merits of my first sentence. If not, feel free to ignore the rest of the post!

The Full-back/Centre-back Divide

Defenders are not all cut from the same cloth, mainly because there are normally only one or two true forwards to deal with. Centre-backs are typically tall and strong in order to deal with the aerial threat posed by opposing centre-forwards. Extremely good pace is a plus but not an explicit requirement, and good distribution is also overlooked in favour of hoofing the ball out of dangerous areas of the field as hard and fast as humanly possible. So although a centre-back has to be a good player in his own right, they tend to be stronger than fast, good in the air, and uncompromising in tackles and clearances.

Full-backs (when they are deployed a little further upfield they become wing-backs, but for our purposes the two designations are interchangeable) are a different story. Their main opponents are not the central strikers of the world. Rather than forwards, they deal with the outside midfielders, whose main goal in life tends to be cutting inside and shooting or cutting outside and crossing to the strikers. These players - I'm going to refer to them as wingers, but this isn't technically true as wingers are the outside forwards in 4-2-4 - need to be fast, clever, and have good deliveries. Defending against them requires different skills. Aerial prowess isn't as critical as it is in the centre-backs, although it's useful for defending crosses coming in from the opposite flank. Decent speed suddenly becomes vital as wingers are very often the fastest players on the pitch. Clearing the ball may not be as important as sensibly distributing it to one's midfielders.

Most of all, though, the difference between the outside and inside defenders lies in their attacking responsibilities.

Attacking From Defence

Centre-backs are utlised as attacking options fairly frequently, but this generally is due to their heading ability being useful in set-pieces such as corners. Other than very specific situations, we do not expect to see the central defenders in the opposing half. Full-backs, on the other hand, have become very attacking in recent years. Why?

Imagine 4-4-2 vs. 4-4-2. Who are the only players with space directly in front of them, with no immediate opponent? The full-backs. If you are having trouble, the picture below might help.

Figure 1: 4-4-2 vs. 4-4-2. The outside defenders are the only players with unoccupied space immediately in front of them.

In the past fifteen years, the full-back position has possibly undergone the most drastic tactical shift in the sport. Full-back is no longer a static position, waiting for wingers to make their move and counteracting their attacks. Modern full-backs are expected to fully contribute to the attack, providing overlapping runs when a winger cuts inside and opens space at the touchline and crossing when in advanced positions. While it's rare to see these players with a knack for goal, they are so common in the immediate build up to goals that it's totally unremarkable that they record assists. Many have said that the wing-back is the most important position in attack, and I'm not particularly inclined to disagree with them. Having a wing-back who cannot go forward is the equivalent of shooting yourself in the foot.

But James Riley is a good attacking player, and I promised that I'd try to shed some light on why he was left unprotected. So what gives?

On One Dimensional Full-Backs

Although I question that Riley really deserves 'good' attached to his attacking performances, that's a subject that will have to be revisited once I get my teeth into more advanced metrics. My belief (unvalidated as of yet) is that he gives the ball away far too often in midfield, which leads to dangerous fast counterattacks by the opposing team, but many intelligent observers think he's more than adequate as an offensive threat, so I'll leave it at that for the time being and instead focus on defensive frailties, which is something more or less everyone has noticed about his game.

Simply put, James Riley is an attacking player playing defence. He's more or less totally incapable of shutting down wing play on his side, and has his central defenders and goalkeeper to thank for covering up his mistakes. Riley does not close players down - not because he doesn't know that pressuring the opposition is a good idea, but because he's not really very good at tackling, and letting a winger run straight by you is probably a worse plan than keeping them in front of you. I don't think anyone will argue that Riley's strength lies in going forward, while his defensive play is a weakness, and by leaving him off the protected list, the Sounders seem to agree with me.

In the previous sections, I have described why a full-back who cannot attack is a liability in soccer, which seems to explain the absence of Zach Scott far better than it answers any questions about Riley. The key here lies in how teams counter good attacking full-backs, which is something Fabio Capello demonstrated in Zagreb last year. Jonathan Wilson, whose wonderful book Inverting the Pyramid is the source of much of my knowledge on formations and tactics, explains it far better than I could:

England's 4-1 victory in Croatia... can be seen as a tale of winger and full-back. [Left-back] Danijel Pranjic had looked excellent in the [2008 European Championship], his overlapping runs allowing Ivan Rakitic to drift infield off the left flank on to his favoured right foot. Faced with the pace of Theo Walcott, though, he never had the confidence to abandon his man and surge forward, which had the effect both of stymieing Croatia as an attacking force, and of exposing his own defensive shortcomings. That Walcott scored a hat-trick underlined the point, but came almost a bonus alongside his primary role of disrupting Croatia's left flank. [Article]

As an attacking threat, Riley is completely neutered by a good left winger. He then becomes a pure defender, forced backwards by both the skill of his opposition and his own defensive ineptitude. Without the requisite defensive talents, he is essentially unable to break out of his own territory, because he's forced to sit much tighter on his direct opponent. And not even that works very well, due to his habit of dropping away whenever they get the ball. So while a non-attacking full-back is a liability against any team, a good team can push Riley completely out of the game simply by calling his defensive game into question more often.

One imagines the Sounders know this, and that they are prepared to lose him to the Union in the draft. A more well-rounded player at right-back would improve the team (and I'm not touching the disciplinary issues here either). At the end of the day, James Riley is a shiny piece who can be a critical part of the Sounder attack on good days. But on bad days, his liabilities collapse the team's attacking outlet from the right side. And playoff games? They're probably going to be bad days for Riley. I wouldn't be too concerned if he ends up in Philadelphia.

They're Getting Smarter

Graham — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 19:09:00 -0000

2009 AL Cy Young: Zack Greinke

(Felix came second with two first place votes)

J.J. Hardy to the Twins

Graham — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:08:17 -0000

Carlos Gomez is the return. More later.

[Source]

Later: Hardy is a guy that we'd all been hoping that the Mariners would make a play on this offseason to address the shortstop position, so it's a bit of a shame that he's been taken off the table so early and for what appears to be a fairly low price - one we doubtless could have paid. Gomez is a slightly below average centrefielder for league minimum, and the Brewers had top prospect Alcides Escobar waiting in the wings and a hole in CF with the departure of Mike Cameron, but I have a hard time thinking we couldn't have beaten that price.

In terms of money/talent, the deal makes a good amount of sense for both sides. The Twins get a big upgrade at shortstop, the Brewers deal from depth to cover a weak position (albeit not that well) for free, and have some more money to play with in free agency. As the return for a guy like Hardy, Gomez the talent is rather underwhelming, but the financial flexibility he provides is useful. Could/should the Brewers have gotten more for him? Yes. But they didn't, which is where this deal becomes weird from the Milwaukee side. They had an asset which had less value to them than to the rest of the league, but they sold him for his value to them rather than anyone else's, which is not the best trading strategy in the world.

On the Teahen --> White Sox Deal

Graham — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 01:46:17 -0000

Since this doesn't involve our team or division, let's be fairly brief:

The winner: Mark Teahen

The losers: Josh Fields (the other one), Chris Getz

Overview: Kenny Williams was so disappointed with Fields and Getz being unable to live up to their minor league numbers that he couldn't just non-tender the pair. Instead he paid $5 million to banish them to Kansas City. Harsh.

Moral: Do not disappoint Kenny Williams.

Beating a Dead Horse

Graham — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 15:18:31 -0000

Ridiculous calls from yesterday's game:

Swisher called safe when picked off at second in the top of the 4th, one out, Yankees up by three.
Swisher incorrectly called out for leaving the bag early on a sacrifice fly to end the 4th, Yankees up by three.
Robinson Cano called safe when out at third on a hilarious Swisher 1-2 DP, Yankees up by five.

It all evens out, you say? Well, using the THT Win Probability tool, we end up with the following changes in win expectancy due to bad calls from the umpires (Angels win ex is positive):

-4%
+10%
-1%

All in all, the umpires skewed game four of the ALCS in favour of the Angels by a non-insignificant amount - in fact, 5% WPA is almost as much as Albert Pujols contributed per game for the Cardinals (this is a silly comparison but it illustrates the point quite well).

The playoffs deserve better than this.