02 Jul 2019 22:31:38
Ed001 not saints related but, I was reading through the Utd page and saw your views on Maguire and have read your opinions on other cbs notably Ben mee.
My view on Maguire from watching him in the league and for England is that even in today's silly money and premium for British players, he is a 30million pound defender at best. For me he's not a HUGE amount better than vestergaard is for us! Lol why is it that utd feel he is worth 70mill and pretty much hoping that he "van dijks" there defence up the table, when there are players like Ben mee whom you've mentioned and praised quite a lot that must be a 1/ 4 of the price? . is it just media hype around players like "slabhead" and clubs like Utd jumping on the bandwagon?

Similar with arsenal and zaha. yeah ok he's a good player, temperament is pretty poor. but surely they shouldn't even be looking at him with their budget and the fact they need to sort out their defence etc with some solid reliable players? .

{Ed001's Note - the answer lies in poor scouting, in my opinion. These days teams are more interested in how a defender can pass the ball than how good a defender he actually is. Stats are taken out of context and mishandled badly to shape recruitment policy. That is the issue. They look at Mee and give all the credit to his partner at the back, when his partner then gets sold for a large amount and struggles badly, while Mee carries on with a new partner defending just as well, they then decide it is the new man who is good! No one seems to actually understand defensive positioning any more.

As for Arsenal, they are a mess, they recruited a manager known for being ineffective at organising a defence then wondered why the team can't defend!

Southampton's black box was so good because it got the context pretty much right when it was examining stats. Most other teams are introducing stats analysis but have their context wrong. It is a tricky field because it depends on opinion so much due to the lack of information to work with. You really want to judge players over thousands of performances to iron out anomalies such as luck and really gauge their level. Because they are only playing a maximum of 60 or so games a season, you can't do that, so you are having to work a fair bit on opinion. You then have the opinion of which stats are more important. For a long time it was all about pass completion stats as possession was all important. Now teams are beginning to realise that possession is only a part of a whole, but some teams are behind the curve. United have been overhauling their recruitment, but they still have a long way to go and need someone to take charge, a DoF or similar, and make those decisions on which stats are more important for which position, so that scouts can check out the right players.

I am so sorry, I was getting a bit carried away then. It is a subject I feel passionately against. I get so fed up with stats banded about without anyone actually taking the time to figure out the context to place them in. No one looks at the context when it is the most important thing of all. Man Utd are suffering from that now, which is why they bought Pogba, without understanding how to get the most from him or how he would fit in their side. It is why they jumped in for Sanchez and Fred and now Maguire.}

1.) 03 Jul 2019
03 Jul 2019 08:00:58
Great insight ed. Cheers.

{Ed001's Note - very welcome, sorry I got a bit carried away! I slipped into the why use one word when a thousand will do camp for a bit.}

2.) 03 Jul 2019
03 Jul 2019 14:17:46
No worries. I was in no rush to get to work on time this morning anyway lol.

{Ed001's Note - next time I will stretch it out a bit for you then...}