Worked well enough against limited League One opposition. At Championship level it can not compensate for the level of player ability. Championship players have the skill and awareness to pass around us, making our committed players look like eager schoolboys. It can not compensate for lack of quality in the squad, which costs. Football is not baseball.
This sounds quite glib but there’s some significant truth in this. I’m a huge fan of baseball, and watch an awful lot - the modelling that the Moneyball guys did, whilst sophisticated for its time, was measured pretty much solely on tangible statistics - batting averages, on base percentages, slugging, and for pitchers stuff like ERA and WHIP. Stats based. Football has much more in the way of intangibles, even accounting for the increased stats that a service like OPTA churns out. I do think it’s much harder to model and measure what makes a quality footballer - for some positions in particular you can’t just simply measure the outputs like you can in baseball.
It's ok if you take advantage of the disarray it can cause and be a few goals to the good before the oppositions settles in. Unfortunately for us we can't hit a cows arse with a banjo most of the time, so the opponents ride it out then come out and score.
I didn’t think it’d work this season because teams have more quality & pace & it only takes one good ball over the top to beat it & we’ve seen that against Leeds & Brentford. Which makes the decision to sell Moore & not replace him even more baffling
It was successful a number of times today, our players were unable to exploit it though. I can tell you if we just play 2 banks of four we’ll still lose with this team imho.
Exactly, if the players we have can't operate the style which we are told they were specifically recruited because they were appropriate for, then they're even less likely to be able to play anything else. And it did work up to the point where Chaplin should have made it 2-0 and then they went up the other end and scored from the resultant corner. I don't see how any different system would stop a decent right winger taking advantage of an AWOL out of his depth inexperienced right back playing left back and two rookie centre halves leaving the only person they had to mark completely free in acres of space to nod home identical goals. I doubt that Pep Guardiola would get better results from these players.
That's true - it worked until Brentford worked out the way to counter it after which we were out of the game. In order to allow us to be competitive it needs to work all the time but our players aren't up to it and the opposition in this league is too skilful to be contained by it. This system was the premise on which Daniel Stendel was hired. I agree though that there isn't any other system that would make these players competitive in this division. It simply requires more quality and experience.
Exactly. Baseball is mainly based on a series of discrete interactions between pitcher and batter. Each at bat is broadly comparable to any other at bat involving any other pitcher/batter. This makes it far easier to analyse on paper than a fluid team game like football.
Don't understand the comment regarding baseball? I'm not sure what Billy Beane's official role is, but he isn't even listed as a director or board member is he? But obviously we know he's involved. This strategy of ours was devised before the consortium came along to buy the club. I also don't think, but someone like @Tyketical Masterstroke might know more, that the Oakland A's had an age barrier on signings. Feels like a cheap, misguided dig at a time where it isn't needed. The stats based approach is used by all teams now. Not all teams operate a no loans and no over 26's strategy.
You're right, there was no age cap - in fact quite the opposite, they actually traded in some very experienced players who were considered "past it" by the other teams and consequently they believed that they were value for money in comparison to the wages required. The motivation was different though - in the case of the A's, they were interested primarily in what those players could contribute to the team relative to their cost, whereas my understanding of the current and previous regimes is that the main driver is the profit that can be driven through sell-on value - so I guess that's mainly why you'd take a different route to the "Moneyball" one.
