Arsenal and Chelsea (and everyone should watch men's tennis!)

This weekend I was never home and my sporting viewing experience suffered somewhat because of it.
Some things that could have been watched on tv had to be watched online and some things that was watched online could have been watched in better quality!
Oh well it wasn't that bad but a nice reminder of why as a devoted sports addict I should always try and stay at home even moreso than I do already!

Between lots of football, Usain Bolt's insane running and a relative unknown Korean besting Tiger Woods one on one in a major golf championship, what I enjoyed the most this weekend was probably the tennis from the Montreal Masters.
Various players are just playing great tennis at an exceptional high level right now and watching them battle throughout this whole week was great.
Murray, Tsonga, Roddick and Del Potro were all awesome and Federer, Nadal, Djokovic, Wawrinka and Verdasco not far behind.
It was just one great match after another and that it set a very deserved crowd record for this particular tournament is a good sign I think.
Men's tennis is where it's at right now and if people can stay injury free, the U.S Open should be spectacular.

On to the football and once again Ancelotti and Chelsea in what was somewhat of a deja vu, even if the opponent Hull, was far from the quality of their Charity Shield one.
Again things started of slow with too much short passing going through Mikel resulting in nothing positive except for Hull that is.
I do think Mikel is a good player who when the first few times I saw him thought would become an excellent one. Of that I'm not so sure anymore. But he is very strong and can do the simple things and play an effective holding midfielder role.
What he just isn't though is any kind of effective distributor in what is clearly meant to be an attacking possession game. He won't make that very good pass to people making runs in front of him and won't make a quick first touch pass to a Bosingwa coming forward. Or be part of a nice one-two or triangle with his colleagues in the diamond.

That was his role however so he did look to do those things but the result was turnovers and/or momentum for Hull. He was never comfortable and either took too long on the ball, lost it or both.
Resulting in 1-0 for Hull and Mikel getting substituted at halftime.

Following that Chelsea then naturally improved forward. Like in the Charity Shield game play became more direct and while Drogba was beasting upfront the likes of Malouda, Lampard and Anelka were making effective runs around him.
But overall it's kinda hard to be positive about this because the chances that Hull in the first half was getting because of poor Chelsea possession they were now getting because Chelsea's team defending wasn't very effective. While the diamond now certainly was able to attack well it wasn't able to defend very good and like in the Charity Shield game it looks vulnerable to width and there is just a general imbalance to the Chelsea defending. Something that's been rare for many years now with this team build by Mourinho.

So will Ancelotti next week just scrap the "Mikel "playmaker" experiment" and settle for the powerful direct attack that the diamond at least including Ballack can produce. Even with its defensive vulnerabilities or does he skip this raw diamond altogether and try something more Chelsea proven?

Based on his comments focusing quite a lot on complimenting the 2nd half direct play, I'm guessing the first one and that will be enough to beat a lot of teams. Actually, potentially all teams. That's how good these players are but over time unless the balance improves I don't see this team reaching the level it did playing basically optimal under Hiddink and again, like I wrote last week, it could mean a great opportunity for a league title lost.

And it's still very early days of course. Lots of things can happen and I'm sure they will.

For Arsenal however everything pretty much did happen. And all of it positive. Slaughtering a normaly very solid Everton team away is a great result.
Tactically the big news has been that Arsene Wenger is dumping the 4-4-2 in favour of a more flexible 4-3-3.
In retrospect this should probably already have happened a season ago but afterall the 4-4-2 has brought him and the club a lot of success and at least in theory should be a system where the not so good defensive Arsenal players will have a better chance of handling themselves.

"No other formation is as efficient in covering space" is one of Wenger's quotes but with the right players of course any non 4-4-2 system can be turned into one when defending.
Does Arsenal have the players to do this consistently right now?
I would say no but they definitely have a lot of players a lot better in 4-3-3 like systems than in a 4-4-2.
Their young talented central midfielders, Denilson, Song, Diaby or for that matter, world class for years now, Fabregas haven't really been able to handle themselves well enough defensively in a 4-4-2 central midfield. And on the wings neither have players like Nasri, Walcott, Van Persie, Arsharvin or Rosicky. They're just not good enough physically.
Not good enough without the ball. At least not when you're considering at least 3 rivals to the title are among the very strongest teams in the world.
The biggest counter against that without the ball weakness has of course been to keep the ball an overwhelming majority of the time. With Fabregas they have one of only a handfull of uniquely taltented players who can take a possession game to a high enough level to consistently win against tough competition.

Especially with Adebayor now gone there just isn't much justification left to try and achieve that in a 4-4-2.
All the versatile wide players would be better in three-forward lines and all the central type of midfielders much more effective with two players with them instead of just one.
One main strenght genereally of all the Arsenal players right now is also great movement.
Moving a lot both attacking-wise and defensively.
Not being solid defensive strongholds battling their zone in a 4-4-2, but they should at least be able to cover ground and perhaps, and I'm guessing this is Wenger's secret hope, be able to emulate the ball pressure that Barcelona does in their similar system immediatly after possession is over.
Not always winning the ball. That's a bonus! But at least doing enough to prevent an effective counter attack from the opponent.
Something Barcelona was very vulnerable to in Rijkaard's final season yet amazingly largely eliminated under Guardiola.
So while Arsenal's team defending still likely won't be great there is at least hope for improvement. More than in a 4-4-2 arguably,
And some successfull ball pressure and one or two of the wide forwards consistently making it back to defend a wing, could do wonders.

One of those wide forwards looks like it will be everyone's favorite player (to hate!) Nicklas Bendtner!
Even if I'm possibly one of the least patriotic people in the world I could be accused of being biased as a dane when it comes to definitely not hating Bendtner.
Instead it's quite the opposite and I think he is an extremely talented player who has that size/ability combination that can be of such great value to a team.
I'm not saying that particular combination is on the Zlatan Ibrahimovic scale but for a big strong guy Bendtner does have good technique and does have good movement.
If he didn't he could never try and play this position we're seein him in now in the first place.
Certainly a great coach like Wenger would never put him there.
Still common sense would suggest it should be the other way around between Van Persie, playing center forward and Bendtner a right-forward role.
From watching the game it wasn't even my impression that they switched around all that much.
Something I had expected when first hearing about this.

One factor is that Van Persie has improved as a striker. He has started to do these striker kind of things like more actively seeking the run in between the defenders.
And while I think that Bendtner arguably is more effective in the box itself, Van Persie certainly is still better complementing a Fabregas or Asharvin coming from behind.
He is also needless to say more reliable when it comes to the actual business of putting good scoring chances away.
It's pretty banal but has a nice logic to it: It's better for Van Persie to get most of the final touches on the very good chances our great attack creates than it is Bendtner.

But make no mistake about it. This is about Bendtner's strenghts too. While he moves well enough with the ball to not exactly be an easy matchup for most fullbacks, his strenght and size advantage over I would think almost all of them, makes him a really tough matchup and it definitely created a lot of trouble for Everton dealing with it.
Playing the deeper higher ball to somewhere with a mismatch to their advantage was a very nice addition to the Arsenal arsenal and the results were great.
In the beginning he quite easily won headers resulting in dangerous situations and when Everton consequently later felt forced to foul him, the dead ball and huge defensive fail, resulted in goals.

Of the Liverpool-Tottenham and United-Birmingham games I really only watched parts and in less than desired quality but I may post some about them later.

I did watch all of Manchester City-Blackburn but forgot to write anything about it! Mainly thoughts on City.

So actually I'm pretty sure I'll do somekind of other football entry in one of the next few days so stay tuned.

More EURO 2008 thoughts

So much has happened since my last entry that I'm not sure where to start even.

Well as I predicted in my last entry Russia beat Holland, and then what I unfortunately didn't make an entry about, but which I also predicted, Spain then beat Russia.
Both of these games were really good examples of how it's not only in boxing but very often in football as well, that styles make fights. A great example of it and one of my favorite figths right there^^

But I already went through in detail why I thought Holland didn't match up well with Russia and as far as the Spain-Russia match was concerned it's even more simple.
Russia and Spain basically share the same major strenghts but Spain just does everyone of those a little better and in such cases where you have no unique strenght, like for an example a great defensive organizaion, to counter the opponent's strenghts, you just share strongpoints but the opponent's are even stronger, things can very easily turn one sided.
Russia at this point just does not have the defensive quality or experience for that matter to resist a team with as much quality possession as Spain.
One thing Holland did do well against Russia was actually suprisingly keeping the majority of possession against them and by doing that in many ways delayed the inevitable but as they did so they sacrificed their normal high tempo resulting in not really troubling the normaly vulnerable Russian defence to the extent it was needed, except for on set pieces.
A lot of the time, unlike with Spain, the dutch possession wasn't high quality but really more geared towards somewhat spoiling the Russian high quality. Slowing them down.

Spain tonight of course was the exact opposite and when the deadly duo upfront was dissolved because of a David Villa injury, what replaced it when Fabregas entered was a midfield probably more capable than any other of very high quality possession.
I must admit the prospects of seeing Fabregas, Iniesta and Xavi work their passing magic together had me drooling and no they did not disappoint.
The only negative would have been if they had gone stale and settled for just passing the ball around but both Silva and especially Iniesta stepped up their game and provided plenty of deep runs forward to support Torres. Xavi of course had already done so with the goal.
Fabregas was everywhere and behind them, in front of a solid defence, Marcus Senna had yet another virtually perfect game.
There was just no way that Russia would resist this kind of quality.
In many ways their own fluid passing medicine shoved right down their collective throat.
And they couldn't. Just like in the first game, easy win for Spain.

But credit to Russia for a great tournament.
The Holland match was great drama and the football throughout a joy to watch.
Ukranian Lobanovsky who fathered the Soviet total football would have been proud.
This team was right in his spirit.



Then there is the other half of the draw. By the way I'm saving an entry on the Italian failure against Spain and Marcello Lippi returning as the coach for later.
But what can you even say about Turkey?
It seems forever ago that I wrote that they just could not keep escaping jail, yet this was exactly what they did against Croatia only to ironically have Germany pull a similar trick on them in what was yet another crazy drama filled match.
Not made any better by the tv signal going out everywhere.

Now I don't know if the German team had a blackout in this game but they really did suck in many ways.
The pressure 4-4-2 was once again dropped and it seemed the balance was nowhere to be found.
Ballack played sort of a free role behind Klose and in front of the two central midfielders but when he does that you sort of only get half of what he is so good at.
You take a lot of the steel out and you take a lot of the hard work out.
One thing was for sure. Even with a well populated midfield Germany was still getting run over the majority of the game. Definitely not something you've seen a lot in recent years.
Credit to Turkey who probably played their best game by far in the tournament and I thought especially Aurelio, Turkey's Senna, and the right sided fullback Sabri played great.
Sabri was just dynamite throughout, a cannonball, and actually outplayed probably the best leftback in the world Philipp Lahm, for most of the game.
Then Lahm, after being thoroughly owned when Turkey equalized, bouncing right back and in spectacular fashion scoring the winner was quite simply the stuff of legends.


Hopefully I won't be too lazy to write a finals preview where I think I'll salute the missing in action German 4-4-2, its Italian connections and why I have feeling it will be desperately needed in a final that before the tournament and following the Portugal game, I thought they would win, but now I'm not so sure of.

EURO 2008: Holland march on!

The tournament is just flying by and recapping everyday, while actually watching the games and while doing other things, is not something I've been quite able to do, so instead here and I think in the next few entries as well, are general thoughts on what has happened so far.

First of all we just watched Holland take France apart. That's seven goals now in two matches against the two best defensive national teams of the last 10 years or so.
It's hard not to like their chances!
Some people will still point to a largely unproven defence or unproven defensive midfielders, like Engeelar, but when they manage to pull ahead and can bring in the likes of Robben and Van Persie who are absolutely deadly counter attack players, then that's in some ways the best defense there is but more on that later.

Wesley Sneijder is also playing like the best midfielder in the world right now.
He is a good passer. Quick Short passes or the direct long. Has good ballcontrol and makes great decisions.
Works hard offensively or defensively and is obviously capable of creating magic whenever he kicks the ball.
It being a shot on goal or from a set-piece where no one right now, probably, is more value.


Van Der Vaart is someone who at this point has been surpassed by Sneijder which in itself seemed unlikely years ago. but he is still a world class player who like Sneijder has no real weaknesses.
He can do it all and his short passing is probably even better than that of Sneijder's.
Those two and De Jong, another very complete player, makes for the most allround sound midfield in the competition.
They're so versatile that it's so far has made for a near perfect balance between going forward and holding their own defensively.

Spain have some midfielders who are even better technically but then the dutch midfielders are better in other areas.
France have physically stronger midfielders but the dutch like we just saw are much more dynamic and with their quality passing able to control the game a lot better.
Like the german midfielders they're also really good at creating pressure.
There is just nothing not to like here!

Well except perhaps:

MO MONEY MO PROBLEMS for Van Basten!

Because I see some serious luxury problems on the horizon for this guy!


Dirk Kuyt who never seems to get much love from fans of either Liverpool or Holland had a great game against Italy and today he even scored the first goal.
He works so hard. Is their best player with the head, but rarely for Liverpool or for Holland plays a defined striker role.
He is asked to do so many other things, simply because he can, which leads to less goals which leads to him getting the fans on his back.

I think he is so much value that Van Basten has to play him and he has throughout his tenure as well, but now you have Robben and Van Persie back from injuries playing their very best.
Especially Robben can reach levels very few are able to and it's almost impossible to see how it can be justified keeping him, one of the best attacking players in the world, out of the lineup.
Van Persie I think should be used from the bench, also because his health is still a major issue, and he is probably not able to play 90 minutes anyway.

I see two options if you want to bring Robben in.
Replacing either Van Nistelroy or the main defensive, least versatile midfielder of the bunch, Engelaar.

Now playing without a clear defensive midfielder is what I slammed Croatia for doing against Austria. That almost cost them the game.
They thankfully made up for that against Germany by adding an extra midielder and with that and help from a very hard working forward, did what few teams have done in recent years, resisted the german immense pressure 4-4-2
Very well done!

But Holland like I said have so much more to offer in their midfield.
They're so versatile. So flexible. Sneijder, De Jong and Van Der Vaart, they're just true complete players and if any team can overcome not having a defined defensive midfielder, it's exactly those players.
Add to those what will be a very hard working Kuyt.
And with this team so far, the old "attack is the best form of defence" cliche has rarely rung more true.
Adding a Robben in full flow to that mix should only add value in my opinon.
Shifting the balance towards their main strenghts even further.

But if the defensive midfielder is untouchable, and no matter how much sense it makes, it's still a drastic step against probably everything Van Basten has been taught in Italy,
then yes rather than dumping for an example Kuyt, I would like to see Van Nistelroy dropped instead and just further strenghten the best most versatile and flexible midfield in the whole competition.
The obvious worry there being a potential lack of goals but with what those midfielders have done so far, against usually very strong defensive teams, I don't think it's really a realistic downgrade.

Thoughts on other teams coming up!