Latest news with #TheBlizzard
The Guardian
21-05-2025
- Sport
- The Guardian
Field Notes: The birth of the playoffs, English football's biggest weekend
With the Guardian's unstoppable rise to global dominance** we at Guardian US thought we'd run a series of articles for fans wishing to improve their knowledge of the sport's history and storylines, hopefully in a way that doesn't patronise you to within an inch of your life. A warning: If you're the kind of person that finds The Blizzard too populist this may not be the series for you. ** Actual dominance may not be global. Or dominant The English Football League play-offs were introduced at the start of the 1986-87 season. So, having established that fact, let's park the idea completely, and go a further century back, all the way to Victorian times, and the birth of the Football League itself. The Football League was launched in 1888, and while its round-robin system of home and away games seems so glaringly obvious now – so watertight, so perfect – it's easy to forget that at some point in time it didn't exist, and some poor guy had to come up with the idea in the first place. Getting there took a bit of feeling around in the dark, accompanied by some abject failure. For example, a rival competition was set up by clubs not part of the nascent Football League. The Combination involved 20 clubs, but nobody put much thought into what any of them were combining with or for. Each would play eight matches against eight other sides in the division, and, er, that's it. Clubs were told to make their own arrangements, and with no central planning or subsequent guidance, this exercise in cat herding descended into high farce and was dissolved before the first season could be completed. A tough break for Newton Heath, who were looking good as the form team at the point of annulment; whatever happened to them? A total fiasco and an affront to sporting integrity, then, albeit one which bears worrying similarities to the new Swiss-style Champions League. Oh the humanity. Will we ever learn? While the Combination was floundering, at least the Football League had their house in order. Even so, when it kicked off, it was thought that the titular table would be ordered by number of wins alone, until someone came up with the bright idea of two points for a win and one for a draw two months later. There wasn't even a trophy for Preston North End to lift when they secured the title in January 1889. Everyone was making it all up while flying by the seat of their pants. So when a second tier of the Football League came along in 1892, what to do? Again, it would seem obvious to the modern eye that automatically relegating the worst x number of teams in the First Division and replacing them with a similar number of the best teams from the Second Division was the logical way forward. But that wasn't sufficiently complex for the hiveminds of the time. Instead, the Test Matches were born. The first promotion-relegation play-off system in English football history! The bottom three clubs in 1892-93's First Division played the top three of the all-new Second Division, with a place in the top division the prize for the winners of each Test. Better luck for Newton Heath this time round, as despite finishing bottom of the First, they won their Test with Second Division champions Small Heath (whatever happened to them, part II) after a rematch, 5-2, and retained their status. Darwen, third in the Second Division, beat Notts County, who went down a division, while Second Division runners-up Sheffield United beat Accrington, who resigned from the league then went out of business altogether. You'll notice we didn't say that Sheffield United and Darwen went up, because they didn't. At least, not immediately, not technically, not automatically, as they then had to be elected to the First Division through the committee. To be clear, they were subsequently given the green flag and granted promotion – any black-balling would have rendered the whole thing an entire waste of time – but what a pompous hoo-hah. At least the concept of the winner-takes-all Tests were fair and easy enough to understand. So of course the Football League soon set about tweaking the format, and after three years, the Tests morphed into a mini-league of four teams, the bottom two from the First and the top two from the Second. That's all good and well if it were it a round-robin like the League itself, but it wasn't, not quite. Instead, each team faced the two clubs from the other division, playing twice, but didn't get the chance to play the club from their own division at all. Debacle incoming! Sign up to Soccer with Jonathan Wilson Jonathan Wilson brings expert analysis on the biggest stories from European soccer after newsletter promotion The problem inherent in this scheme revealed itself during the 1898 Tests, and in some style. The play-off mini-league saw First Division failures Blackburn Rovers and Stoke take on the upwardly mobile Second Division pair of Burnley and Newcastle United. The first Tests panned out in such a manner that when Burnley and Stoke met in their final fixture, they knew that a draw would promote Burnley while also maintaining Stoke's first-tier status. And there wouldn't a single thing Blackburn or Newcastle could do about it. Goalless pact ahoy! The 0-0 draw that followed wasn't just predictable; it was brazen. There were no shots on goal. Players repeatedly hoofed the ball into touch, occasionally launching 'passes' or 'shots' out of the ground altogether. From their cynical viewpoint, this carry-on ensured everyone in the ground would be going home happy. But times were hard, the crowd had spent cash money to be entertained, and both sets of fans wanted a proper contest. And so, incensed, and by way of protest, they began fetching and returning all of the balls ballooned into touch; at one point, five were pinging around the field of play. And so football beat pinball to the multiball system by a good 58 years. (Bally's 1956 game Balls-a-Poppin was the first to do this, since you're asking.) 'These Test games have proved an utter farce!' hollered an editorial in the Manchester Guardian. 'A change of some kind is absolutely necessary if the contests are in future to be regarded with any seriousness.' To this end, after a month of controversy-fuelled to-ing and fro-ing, Football League bosses decided to expand the First Division, apologetically offering Newcastle and Blackburn sympathy promotions. The Tests were abolished, and a simple system of two up, two down, automatically decided by the final league placings, was introduced. You have to wonder why they didn't just go with this in the first place. The concept of play-offs didn't come around again until 1985, when the threat of a breakaway Super League (some things never change) was staved off by a compromise deal which gave more money and voting rights to the bigger clubs (those immutable things, again) and tweaked the Football League's structure. Play-offs, designed to rejig the size of each division, and to generate a little more dollar with the game struggling pretty much across the board, were the headline-grabber, to be implemented at the start of the 1987-88 season for two years. 'I hope it becomes a permanent feature in all divisions,' said Gordon Taylor, the head of the players union. 'It gives the end of the season more spice.' Business-end spice quickly became the order of the day. The format for the first two years of the new play-offs was particularly delicious, each divisional battle involving the team that had finished one place above the automatic relegation spots in the First Division and the three teams below the automatic promotion places in the Second Division. Two-legged semis were followed by a two-legged final. Replays if necessary. Cue a smorgasbord of stories that sizzled with dramatic heat. In 1987, sleeping giant Leeds United (immutable etc.) were seven minutes from promotion to the First Division in their final replay until Peter Shirtliff scored twice in four minutes to retain Charlton Athletic's status. A shock – not least because Shirtliff was a jobbing centre-back who, outside those four minutes, scored 13 goals in a 518-match career. But that was nothing compared to the seismic suffering of Sunderland, who were relegated to the Third Division for the very first time in their history after losing their semi-final with Gillingham 6-6 on away goals. The campaign cost Lawrie McMenemy a reputation hard won at Southampton. Not so great, man. Meanwhile in the battle for a place in the Third, Aldershot won promotion having conquered the Wanderers of both Bolton and Wolverhampton, a couple of David v Goliath slingshots of a magnitude scarcely believable now. A year later, Chelsea were surprisingly condemned to the Second Division by Middlesbrough at Stamford Bridge, at which point the on-pitch throwing of hands commenced between home fans and police. But overall, the play-offs had been an unqualified success, and Gordon Taylor got his wish. The Football League voted for more end-of-season spice, keeping the play-offs albeit tweaking them into a fully promotion-facing affair. The teams finishing one place above the automatic relegation spots could breathe again, with the demise of Chelsea and Sunderland having spooked some bigger clubs into dialling down some of that scary jeopardy. In the end, the play-offs didn't hold off the advent of a Super League for too long, with the Premier League coming into being in 1992. Nevertheless, the 90s also established the play-offs in the national consciousness, thanks to some of the most absurd and memorable rollercoaster rides in English football history: Swindon holding off a three-goal Leicester fightback in 1993; Steve Claridge volleying Leicester's winner 11 seconds from time against Crystal Palace in 1996; the eight goals shared between Charlton and Sunderland in 1998, Clive Mendonca's hat-trick, Michael Gray's chunked penalty, all that. 'I'm gutted,' sighed Charlton's match-winner Mendonca. 'I'm the biggest Sunderland fan in the world. But I'm also a professional footballer and I work for Charlton.' This paper added that it was 'the best game played at Wembley in 30 years,' right up there with the 1966 World Cup final and the 1953 Matthews match. It took a few twists and turns, and no small amount of tweaking and tinkering. But the Football League got there in the end.
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
Field Notes: The birth of the playoffs, English football's biggest weekend
With the Guardian's unstoppable rise to global dominance** we at Guardian US thought we'd run a series of articles for fans wishing to improve their knowledge of the sport's history and storylines, hopefully in a way that doesn't patronise you to within an inch of your life. A warning: If you're the kind of person that finds The Blizzard too populist this may not be the series for you. ** Actual dominance may not be global. Or dominant Advertisement The English Football League play-offs were introduced at the start of the 1986-87 season. So, having established that fact, let's park the idea completely, and go a further century back, all the way to Victorian times, and the birth of the Football League itself. The Football League was launched in 1888, and while its round-robin system of home and away games seems so glaringly obvious now – so watertight, so perfect – it's easy to forget that at some point in time it didn't exist, and some poor guy had to come up with the idea in the first place. Getting there took a bit of feeling around in the dark, accompanied by some abject failure. For example, a rival competition was set up by clubs not part of the nascent Football League. The Combination involved 20 clubs, but nobody put much thought into what any of them were combining with or for. Each would play eight matches against eight other sides in the division, and, er, that's it. Clubs were told to make their own arrangements, and with no central planning or subsequent guidance, this exercise in cat herding descended into high farce and was dissolved before the first season could be completed. A tough break for Newton Heath, who were looking good as the form team at the point of annulment; whatever happened to them? A total fiasco and an affront to sporting integrity, then, albeit one which bears worrying similarities to the new Swiss-style Champions League. Oh the humanity. Will we ever learn? Advertisement Related: Wrexham's success shows that content is now truly king in football While the Combination was floundering, at least the Football League had their house in order. Even so, when it kicked off, it was thought that the titular table would be ordered by number of wins alone, until someone came up with the bright idea of two points for a win and one for a draw two months later. There wasn't even a trophy for Preston North End to lift when they secured the title in January 1889. Everyone was making it all up while flying by the seat of their pants. So when a second tier of the Football League came along in 1892, what to do? Again, it would seem obvious to the modern eye that automatically relegating the worst x number of teams in the First Division and replacing them with a similar number of the best teams from the Second Division was the logical way forward. But that wasn't sufficiently complex for the hiveminds of the time. Instead, the Test Matches were born. The first promotion-relegation play-off system in English football history! The bottom three clubs in 1892-93's First Division played the top three of the all-new Second Division, with a place in the top division the prize for the winners of each Test. Better luck for Newton Heath this time round, as despite finishing bottom of the First, they won their Test with Second Division champions Small Heath (whatever happened to them, part II) after a rematch, 5-2, and retained their status. Darwen, third in the Second Division, beat Notts County, who went down a division, while Second Division runners-up Sheffield United beat Accrington, who resigned from the league then went out of business altogether. Advertisement You'll notice we didn't say that Sheffield United and Darwen went up, because they didn't. At least, not immediately, not technically, not automatically, as they then had to be elected to the First Division through the committee. To be clear, they were subsequently given the green flag and granted promotion – any black-balling would have rendered the whole thing an entire waste of time – but what a pompous hoo-hah. At least the concept of the winner-takes-all Tests were fair and easy enough to understand. So of course the Football League soon set about tweaking the format, and after three years, the Tests morphed into a mini-league of four teams, the bottom two from the First and the top two from the Second. That's all good and well if it were it a round-robin like the League itself, but it wasn't, not quite. Instead, each team faced the two clubs from the other division, playing twice, but didn't get the chance to play the club from their own division at all. Debacle incoming! Related: Soccer still has the power to leave us in tears. I should know The problem inherent in this scheme revealed itself during the 1898 Tests, and in some style. The play-off mini-league saw First Division failures Blackburn Rovers and Stoke take on the upwardly mobile Second Division pair of Burnley and Newcastle United. The first Tests panned out in such a manner that when Burnley and Stoke met in their final fixture, they knew that a draw would promote Burnley while also maintaining Stoke's first-tier status. And there wouldn't a single thing Blackburn or Newcastle could do about it. Goalless pact ahoy! Advertisement The 0-0 draw that followed wasn't just predictable; it was brazen. There were no shots on goal. Players repeatedly hoofed the ball into touch, occasionally launching 'passes' or 'shots' out of the ground altogether. From their cynical viewpoint, this carry-on ensured everyone in the ground would be going home happy. But times were hard, the crowd had spent cash money to be entertained, and both sets of fans wanted a proper contest. And so, incensed, and by way of protest, they began fetching and returning all of the balls ballooned into touch; at one point, five were pinging around the field of play. And so football beat pinball to the multiball system by a good 58 years. (Bally's 1956 game Balls-a-Poppin was the first to do this, since you're asking.) 'These Test games have proved an utter farce!' hollered an editorial in the Manchester Guardian. 'A change of some kind is absolutely necessary if the contests are in future to be regarded with any seriousness.' To this end, after a month of controversy-fuelled to-ing and fro-ing, Football League bosses decided to expand the First Division, apologetically offering Newcastle and Blackburn sympathy promotions. The Tests were abolished, and a simple system of two up, two down, automatically decided by the final league placings, was introduced. You have to wonder why they didn't just go with this in the first place. The concept of play-offs didn't come around again until 1985, when the threat of a breakaway Super League (some things never change) was staved off by a compromise deal which gave more money and voting rights to the bigger clubs (those immutable things, again) and tweaked the Football League's structure. Play-offs, designed to rejig the size of each division, and to generate a little more dollar with the game struggling pretty much across the board, were the headline-grabber, to be implemented at the start of the 1987-88 season for two years. 'I hope it becomes a permanent feature in all divisions,' said Gordon Taylor, the head of the players union. 'It gives the end of the season more spice.' Business-end spice quickly became the order of the day. The format for the first two years of the new play-offs was particularly delicious, each divisional battle involving the team that had finished one place above the automatic relegation spots in the First Division and the three teams below the automatic promotion places in the Second Division. Two-legged semis were followed by a two-legged final. Replays if necessary. Cue a smorgasbord of stories that sizzled with dramatic heat. Advertisement In 1987, sleeping giant Leeds United (immutable etc.) were seven minutes from promotion to the First Division in their final replay until Peter Shirtliff scored twice in four minutes to retain Charlton Athletic's status. A shock – not least because Shirtliff was a jobbing centre-back who, outside those four minutes, scored 13 goals in a 518-match career. But that was nothing compared to the seismic suffering of Sunderland, who were relegated to the Third Division for the very first time in their history after losing their semi-final with Gillingham 6-6 on away goals. The campaign cost Lawrie McMenemy a reputation hard won at Southampton. Not so great, man. Meanwhile in the battle for a place in the Third, Aldershot won promotion having conquered the Wanderers of both Bolton and Wolverhampton, a couple of David v Goliath slingshots of a magnitude scarcely believable now. Related: New Reading owner Rob Couhig: 'There is a real market for the EFL in the US' A year later, Chelsea were surprisingly condemned to the Second Division by Middlesbrough at Stamford Bridge, at which point the on-pitch throwing of hands commenced between home fans and police. But overall, the play-offs had been an unqualified success, and Gordon Taylor got his wish. The Football League voted for more end-of-season spice, keeping the play-offs albeit tweaking them into a fully promotion-facing affair. The teams finishing one place above the automatic relegation spots could breathe again, with the demise of Chelsea and Sunderland having spooked some bigger clubs into dialling down some of that scary jeopardy. In the end, the play-offs didn't hold off the advent of a Super League for too long, with the Premier League coming into being in 1992. Nevertheless, the 90s also established the play-offs in the national consciousness, thanks to some of the most absurd and memorable rollercoaster rides in English football history: Swindon holding off a three-goal Leicester fightback in 1993; Steve Claridge volleying Leicester's winner 11 seconds from time against Crystal Palace in 1996; the eight goals shared between Charlton and Sunderland in 1998, Clive Mendonca's hat-trick, Michael Gray's chunked penalty, all that. 'I'm gutted,' sighed Charlton's match-winner Mendonca. 'I'm the biggest Sunderland fan in the world. But I'm also a professional footballer and I work for Charlton.' This paper added that it was 'the best game played at Wembley in 30 years,' right up there with the 1966 World Cup final and the 1953 Matthews match. It took a few twists and turns, and no small amount of tweaking and tinkering. But the Football League got there in the end.
Yahoo
24-03-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
Are we entering the era of the quarterback goalkeeper?
As we enter a tactical reaction period to structured pressing; do you think we'll see the development of the 'Quarterback Keeper?' Will the Pep Guardiolas of the world have midfielders breaking from the back running post patterns while fullbacks run a curl? – David I've no idea what those terms mean but I assume they're from American football? If so, I wouldn't fixate on them; while it's certainly possible for sports to draw inspiration from each other, they very rarely map precisely on to each other. Will players start moving in different patterns to now? Possibly, but football is 150 years old; there is very little new under the sun. I think what we are seeing now, though, is more structured patterns, automations, practised and practised so they can be deployed in games when an appropriate situation occurs. That's particularly true of counter-attacks; Jogi Löw's Germany were masters of that. On the one hand, if everybody knows where everybody is about to run, moves can be made quicker, gaining vital fractions of seconds on a defence. But there are other coaches, such as José Mourinho, who believe football is too fluid and chaotic for automations to be more than intermittently effective; they prefer to instil a mindset so players instinctively make the right decisions in any given circumstance. And as for goalkeepers effectively becoming playmakers, that's been in the game for decades. Ederson, perhaps, has taken it further than anybody else, but look at Stanley Menzo at Ajax in the 80s, or René Higuita with Colombia and Atlético Nacional. When Higuita was dispossessed to allow Roger Milla his second for Cameroon in the last 16 of the 1990 World Cup, the general sense, in the UK at least, was that a 'crazy' keeper had got his comeuppance. Look back on it, though, and with modern eyes it's apparent that Higuita has come out to deal with a long ball, and is looking to draw a Cameroon player out of position to give his outfielders a numerical advantage. The problem comes when Luis Carlos Perea plays a terrible pass back to him, allowing Milla to steal in. 'We quickly realised that we had something special: an extra outfield player,' Francisco Matura, his coach both at club and national level, explained in an interview with The Blizzard. Within our gameplan we had a structure with five lines and every line was separated by 10 metres. That meant we had 11 players instead of 10 able to generate play. It wasn't us insisting that he should get out of his area and play but the system that encouraged it.' Sometimes when I attend games at West Brom, as a goalkeeper prepares to take a goal kick, all 20 outfield players will congregate in a small area to one side of the pitch around the halfway line. The goal kick is contested by the players and then normal play resumes. I am completely baffled as to 1) why this happens, and 2) why the kicking team never leaves a player in the wide open space on the other side of the pitch to take full advantage of an open path to goal. Perhaps you could offer an explanation for this bizarre tactic? – Robert This is a related issue to the first question. In the 1980s this was common; almost nobody played out from the back, keepers always kicked long and, either because of the way they naturally kicked (eg, a right-footer will usually kick with a slight right-to-left drift) or because of where the best headers tended to play, those kicks would be directed to one side or the other. With both sides pushing up to catch the opposition offside from the second ball, the effect was that 20 outfielders would end up in a small box around halfway, slightly pushed into the half being attacked by the team taking the goal kick. As to why one player doesn't break off into space; he wouldn't be in space for long because a marker would follow him. Football used to be a more a game of territory than possession. The logic was that if you could get the ball into the opposition half, they were under pressure. One mistake could lead to a shooting chance. The mentality has changed over the past two decades, largely because of improvements in pitch technology. Now, with far fewer bobbles, the first touch can be taken almost for granted, so the game becomes far less about winning the ball back after a poor touch than about manipulating the shape of the game and creating overloads. Possession matters more than position. As pressing structures have improved, though, it's become increasingly risky to play out from the back – and the problem if a side goes long with full-backs dropping to receive a short pass is that it effectively takes offside out of the equation. And so the result is the hoof into a tight knot of players near halfway and a scramble to win the second ball. I find it interesting that no one has picked up the fact that Arsenal might be struggling because of Declan Rice's current position (left-sided No 8). Arteta still hasn't fixed the gap that Granit Xhaka left. Rice plays better, and so do Arsenal, when he plays in his natural position. Thoughts? – Nelson I think this has been widely recognised as a problem for both Arsenal and England. Rice is occasionally portrayed as a defensive midfielder, but he is not. He is a box-to-box player who is very good at making forward surges from deep. He does not, though, have the tactical brain to operate as an effective deep-lying midfielder, which he is often asked to do. Granit Xhaka, as you say, fulfilled that role last season, and although Thomas Partey has done so this season, the Ghanaian has been less convincing. Martin Ødegaard's slight downturn in form this season can probably in part be attributed to Xhaka's departure. What Arsenal could really do with is a peak-era Jorginho. The present version, at 33, has managed just 544 league minutes this season. This is an extract from Soccer with Jonathan Wilson, a weekly look from the Guardian US at the game in Europe and beyond. Have a question for Jonathan? Email soccerwithjw@ and he'll answer the best in a future edition
The Guardian
24-03-2025
- Sport
- The Guardian
Are we entering the era of the quarterback goalkeeper?
As we enter a tactical reaction period to structured pressing; do you think we'll see the development of the 'Quarterback Keeper?' Will the Pep Guardiolas of the world have midfielders breaking from the back running post patterns while fullbacks run a curl? – David I've no idea what those terms mean but I assume they're from American football? If so, I wouldn't fixate on them; while it's certainly possible for sports to draw inspiration from each other, they very rarely map precisely on to each other. Will players start moving in different patterns to now? Possibly, but football is 150 years old; there is very little new under the sun. I think what we are seeing now, though, is more structured patterns, automations, practised and practised so they can be deployed in games when an appropriate situation occurs. That's particularly true of counter-attacks; Jogi Löw's Germany were masters of that. On the one hand, if everybody knows where everybody is about to run, moves can be made quicker, gaining vital fractions of seconds on a defence. But there are other coaches, such as José Mourinho, who believe football is too fluid and chaotic for automations to be more than intermittently effective; they prefer to instil a mindset so players instinctively make the right decisions in any given circumstance. And as for goalkeepers effectively becoming playmakers, that's been in the game for decades. Ederson, perhaps, has taken it further than anybody else, but look at Stanley Menzo at Ajax in the 80s, or René Higuita with Colombia and Atlético Nacional. When Higuita was dispossessed to allow Roger Milla his second for Cameroon in the last 16 of the 1990 World Cup, the general sense, in the UK at least, was that a 'crazy' keeper had got his comeuppance. Look back on it, though, and with modern eyes it's apparent that Higuita has come out to deal with a long ball, and is looking to draw a Cameroon player out of position to give his outfielders a numerical advantage. The problem comes when Luis Carlos Perea plays a terrible pass back to him, allowing Milla to steal in. 'We quickly realised that we had something special: an extra outfield player,' Francisco Matura, his coach both at club and national level, explained in an interview with The Blizzard. Within our gameplan we had a structure with five lines and every line was separated by 10 metres. That meant we had 11 players instead of 10 able to generate play. It wasn't us insisting that he should get out of his area and play but the system that encouraged it.' Sometimes when I attend games at West Brom, as a goalkeeper prepares to take a goal kick, all 20 outfield players will congregate in a small area to one side of the pitch around the halfway line. The goal kick is contested by the players and then normal play resumes. I am completely baffled as to 1) why this happens, and 2) why the kicking team never leaves a player in the wide open space on the other side of the pitch to take full advantage of an open path to goal. Perhaps you could offer an explanation for this bizarre tactic? – Robert This is a related issue to the first question. In the 1980s this was common; almost nobody played out from the back, keepers always kicked long and, either because of the way they naturally kicked (eg, a right-footer will usually kick with a slight right-to-left drift) or because of where the best headers tended to play, those kicks would be directed to one side or the other. With both sides pushing up to catch the opposition offside from the second ball, the effect was that 20 outfielders would end up in a small box around halfway, slightly pushed into the half being attacked by the team taking the goal kick. As to why one player doesn't break off into space; he wouldn't be in space for long because a marker would follow him. Football used to be a more a game of territory than possession. The logic was that if you could get the ball into the opposition half, they were under pressure. One mistake could lead to a shooting chance. The mentality has changed over the past two decades, largely because of improvements in pitch technology. Now, with far fewer bobbles, the first touch can be taken almost for granted, so the game becomes far less about winning the ball back after a poor touch than about manipulating the shape of the game and creating overloads. Possession matters more than position. As pressing structures have improved, though, it's become increasingly risky to play out from the back – and the problem if a side goes long with full-backs dropping to receive a short pass is that it effectively takes offside out of the equation. And so the result is the hoof into a tight knot of players near halfway and a scramble to win the second ball. I find it interesting that no one has picked up the fact that Arsenal might be struggling because of Declan Rice's current position (left-sided No 8). Arteta still hasn't fixed the gap that Granit Xhaka left. Rice plays better, and so do Arsenal, when he plays in his natural position. Thoughts? – Nelson I think this has been widely recognised as a problem for both Arsenal and England. Rice is occasionally portrayed as a defensive midfielder, but he is not. He is a box-to-box player who is very good at making forward surges from deep. He does not, though, have the tactical brain to operate as an effective deep-lying midfielder, which he is often asked to do. Granit Xhaka, as you say, fulfilled that role last season, and although Thomas Partey has done so this season, the Ghanaian has been less convincing. Martin Ødegaard's slight downturn in form this season can probably in part be attributed to Xhaka's departure. What Arsenal could really do with is a peak-era Jorginho. The present version, at 33, has managed just 544 league minutes this season. This is an extract from Soccer with Jonathan Wilson, a weekly look from the Guardian US at the game in Europe and beyond. Subscribe for free here. Have a question for Jonathan? Email soccerwithjw@ and he'll answer the best in a future edition
