Hello, and welcome to The Double Pivot, the world's most agreeable soccer analytics podcast. I am Michael Kelly, and I just want to talk for one second about something that you, a fan of soccer, should go out and look at. There is a player named Jacqueline Ovaya, and she scored a goal. And it's the best goal I've ever seen.
I don't want to spoil it if you haven't gone and searched it out, but I also think that if I describe it, you won't understand what I'm talking about because it makes no sense. She scores a reverse-spinning, blind scorpion kick lob of the keeper off of a cross. Go find it. I'll put a link in the description.
I'm doing my best. This goal was so good that when I woke up this morning, which on European time was the tail end of everybody in America seeing this goal last night on social media, I showed it to my wife. I showed it to my older daughter. I probably got yelled at for my wife because I was getting my older daughter late for school.
And, like, both of them appreciated this goal. Like, and neither of them are like, could tell you five goals they've seen in their lives. But it is just the most phenomenal athletic feat while also being utterly physics-breaking that you will see. And, like, there's no way to oversell this goal.
There just isn't. Anyway, so that's very exciting. But one problem that we have here is that we've got Champions League week. We talked a lot about Champions League, but you can go back.
If you subscribe to patreon.com.doublepivot, you can find our previews of the games. And so I figured I'd go into the mailbag channel from our Discord, find some stuff to talk about. And I'd like to share a couple of posts from the mailbag channel. Chris Dudley.
Eddie Curry. Aaron Gray. Michael Olokande. Does Frederick Weiss count?
Hmm. It appears that the mailbag channel became a channel for remembering NBA stiffs. I've got to get in there and post Eric Montross, and I forgot. Oh, that's a good stiff.
That's a really good stiff. Yeah, that happens occasionally in the Discord. But there was one good question that we are going to get to a little bit later in the pod. But what we want to start off with was the big game this weekend, which was Napoli against Inter, a draw, which keeps the Serie A title race rolling along.
And, yeah, we've got, like, a real title race in Italy, so I want to talk about it briefly. I'm not doing an intro. I think this is a podcast that is supposed to have an intro. I'm not doing an intro.
I said Patreon. Yeah, we talked about Discord already. You know. It's a little bit of a weird moment in Serie A, because what had been happening where there were several very, very good teams.
And at the top of that list were Napoli and Inter, who played each other. And both of them have come pretty dramatically back to earth over the past month, both in results and to a certain degree performances. Inter, it's explicable. They have a pretty big injury crisis, as seemingly does everybody.
And Napoli sold Clark Karstia, and then his replacement, they didn't replace him, and the guy who was going to replace him internally got hurt. And they've now, like, don't have a win in, like, five Serie A matches. They just had one in the last five Serie A matches. You think I looked up basic statistics like this before we started recording, but be that as it may.
So this was a matchup between the top two teams in Serie A at a moment when both of them are sort of stuck. Yo, Inter go ahead early on a really spectacular free-kick goal by DeMarco. And Inter hadn't done much up to that point. A very Serie A match broke out, with both teams setting up to deny the other team what they wanted to do more than to create on their own.
Inter were attempting to play their version of five guys. They were really only sending at most one center back to overlap while keeping all of the midfielders deep. And so it's a very weird five guys, but they really had a lot of bodies back to make it very, very hard for Napoli to counter them. While, you know, Napoli were just playing Conte ball and denying Inter.
And Inter have a really big problem right now that Markus Thuram is clearly not fit. He's been struggling with injuries. And so the outball over the top that is meant to stretch the pitch when Napoli constrict it just wasn't available at all. They had to run Dumfries from wingback and then later from wing when they switched formation in order to get that outball, which then screwed up their ability to maintain their defensive possession structure and eventually allowed Napoli to get more and more of the ball.
But it was two teams sort of circling around each other trying to figure out how to throw punches that eventually just turned into Napoli throwing a bunch of punches. Yeah, I mean, that all seems correct to me. I mean, one thing that I think is true is that Antonio Conte is one of the best managers in the world. So when everybody is not quite at their best, he finds ways to get it done in a way that Simone Inzaghi doesn't.
Simone Inzaghi has instituted like this really weird and great system at Inter, but they play the system. And it is like kind of a problem right now because they're out of wingbacks, basically. And you're going to see them play, I think for the next couple of weeks, Dumfries on the left and Kvar on the right, because those are the two bodies that they have fit and they don't have any other bodies. And the other option is sort of switching to a back four.
But they were very bad when they did that against Napoli, as you just said. That was sort of the moment when Napoli really stepped up and were able to consistently apply pressure. So in another in another role, I would say all of this opens the door for Atalanta, who are only three points back at the top of the table. But Atalanta are also scuffling at the moment.
Yeah. Atalanta are this weird place where for the most part, they are scuffling because ball is not going goal. Ball didn't go goal in some of the most comical and tragical and Atalanta-esque ways against Club Brugge. And that's been happening in the league as well.
But they're also having this bizarre problem where their best player and their coach are fighting and their coach doesn't want to stay around for the season, which, like, it makes it worrisome to bet on Atalanta simply playing at the level that they're playing at, which would make them solid title contenders as well. Yeah. And meanwhile, like quietly, the team that's playing best in Italy in terms of results, Juventus have won five in a row, something like that. But they've also managed to get eliminated from the Coppa Italia by Napoli during that time and also get eliminated from the Champions League during that time.
And all of their fans hate their manager. Yeah, it was a good week for them. They won while Atalanta also drew in a game that they dominated the XG against Venezia. And Inter and Napoli drew.
So Juventus are now one more really good week from being in the title race. And we might be talking about them. But the worry you have with Juventus trying to be in the title race is, despite five wins in a row, it's just not a team built to get three points at scale. No, it is not.
Although, like, is Napoli? Right. Napoli is now... Napoli were running very hot early in the season, both in terms of shot conversion and in terms of conversion of the goals that they had into points.
And now they've got five straight league matches without a win. And that is probably the sort of thing that happens when you barely have an attack. Yeah, I mean, look, Juventus made all the headlines of the wrong thing. We talked about what a damn pervert Tiago Motta was as a manager and should not be at all interested in attacking and scoring goals.
At this point of the season, they have 45 goals and Napoli have 43. And Napoli have conceded 22 and Juventus have conceded 21. So just sort of like, in terms of, like... I think what I'm getting at here is that I am very skeptical of Napoli's ability to stay in the title race over the last third of the season.
Yeah. The way that it could happen, which is what we saw in the intermatch, is that they get lots of shots. So they're playing Raspaadore as a second striker, more or less. And he got a bunch of shots.
He screwed up a couple of chances, but he did get into dangerous positions. And then McTominay and his substitute... Well, Billing didn't actually substitute for him. They actually did have McTominay and Billing on the pitch at the same time.
Which is wild what they were doing at that midfield, let me tell you. And Antonio Conte is just running out, though. Why does not Scott McTominay, the largest midfielder, simply eat the other ones? And listen, guys like Scott McTominay and Billing going to Italy and playing on good Serie A teams is like exactly what theory would suggest would happen to guys like Scott McTominay and Phil Billing as the Premier League hoovered up more and more and more talent.
Exactly. And there's room in a very good team for one midfielder who provides very little in possession, but provides all of that other stuff. And at the best teams in England, there is increasingly no room for that player. Right.
Everybody in the midfield in England does lots and lots of stuff in sort of every department. And their Champions League. And they really think that they can win the Champions League. That has been the constant refrain from Inter's press briefings, front office.
Like, their belief is that they can win the Champions League, and they want to win the Champions League. And they think that this unit will probably have to go undergo a pretty big rebuild this summer. And the team claims to be fairly clear-eyed about that. And the thing that should end, you know, it's a bit of an Italian translation.
This cycle for Inter is the Champions League. And they are not looking to... I mean, they rotate a lot, right? That's part of how they keep the old guys healthy, where they have until all these injuries.
And now they can't as much. But they're not... They're, like, looking to get their best XI on the field in the Champions League. It is not a squad that is built to be in the midst of a three or four team title race and the Champions League at the same time.
Right. And that is where they find themselves, and they find themselves there now with precisely one healthy wingback. Right. So we did actually have a question in the mailbag channel.
It was not simply remembering guys. It was... This is from Honeybaked Sam. Shares a post by Scott Willis and says, time for a Crystal Palace pod?
And is specifically in this post by Scott Willis, over the last 10 games, Crystal Palace have the best combined goal and expected goals difference in the entire league. Yeah, so Palace. We talked about it a while back. We talked about how they were playing quite poorly and also were going to recover quite a bit from their points total over the first five, six, seven matches of the season.
So we predicted this, right? I don't think we predicted it playing this well. I'm a little torn on a micro versus macro explanation for Crystal Palace. Because on the macro side, you can just kind of say, hey, look, we thought Palace were going to be pretty good over the course of this season.
There's nothing about thinking that and about looking at the numbers in Fixed.fm that says it can't be weirdly distributed into a period of time where you were very bad and a period of time where you were very good and you throw it all in the average and you get what you get. And what you get at the end of the day here is Crystal Palace are pretty good. And that's what we thought they would be originally. That's a very easy macro story to tell.
At the same time, I do think there's a micro tactics story here, right? I do think they have played somewhat differently over the last couple of months. That's, as will always happen when you have weird sort of extreme events, that is buttressed by the fact that this has been a fairly easy chunk of their schedule right now. And I think that that matters.
It's buttressed by the fact that Edmorton comes back from injury and he is, you know, when they played really well down the stretch last year, it was after Edmorton shows up in January and after the manager changes, all this stuff, right? But they're playing more like they played last year when they were good than earlier this season when they were not good. That's a thing that to me, it seems has happened. And oftentimes, it takes a managerial change to change how a team is playing.
And it is not unheard of by any means, but relatively rarer to find a manager looking at something that isn't working and managing to keep everybody onside and then changing and changing back. And I think that that's, like, I think that's the story of Palace. It's, they have been playing a 3-4-3 all season. It's been more or less the same personnel in that 3-4-3 all season.
And, but it has very much changed what kind of 3-4-3 it is. Five of Palace's top eight matches this season in passes completed came in the first eight weeks of the season. Their highest pass completion percentages were mostly in the first six to eight weeks of the season. Again, that is six of their top 10 were in the first eight weeks of the season.
So Palace opened the season playing quite poorly and doing a lot more safe possession passing. And this was just pretty clearly a bad fit for their talent. I think we said this at the time when we were looking at their numbers that they really were playing relatively poor football, but we had Palace picked as like, this may be the team that can make a run at top eight this season, which may be open. That take was like half right.
There were some teams that really did make a run at top eight this season. And I kind of think looking at this that Palace just could have been one if Glasner hadn't tried to get them to keep the ball for a couple months. It's also a little weird because I also kind of want to say that even had they had this season, had they run better, they could have had the points to be one of these teams. They weren't so bad.
Like, they weren't immediately worse than Brighton early on. And Brighton is on the fringe of it. Now, that said, had they run better at the earlier part of the season, I don't know that they would have given up all the possession like they did and thus became a better team here at the second half of the season. So it's a little complicated.
Yep. And the way that this works is that their front three fit together really beautifully. Eze and Mateta and Saar are all averaging about 0.5 XG per 90. And part of what did happen is that Saar won the starting job.
Yes. And so they stopped trying to mess around with like a quasi like front two plus Eze, which they were doing the beginning part of the year. And Saar's a good transition winger. Like that's, when you say they all fit well together, Saar is a good transition winger.
He's not Michael Owen. Like, he's not a superstar. He's an average Premier League team talent. But he is exactly the kind of average Premier League team talent that that front three needed.
And Mateta is a extremely straightforward big man center forward who's fast enough to run at back lines, good enough with his feet to hold up play with his feet sometimes, and good with his head. He doesn't give you a lot else than that, but you don't need more than that unless you're trying to play a form of game that doesn't really fit the talent. And Eze, Eze's running a little cold this season. He's only got two and six.
He could have quite a few more goals than that. But he's having the kind of season that is really, really good for this Crystal Palace team because Saar should not be on the ball that much and Mateta should not be on the ball that much. So you want to have him get on the ball and create, but it's much better if he's getting on the ball and creating in transition. And it's much better if he's getting on the ball and creating in transition in part because despite only having two goals, he just looks for his own shot a lot.
And if you've got like four guys up there trying to slowly work a chance against a set defense, your playmaker can't be looking for a shot as much as Eze wants to look for a shot. If you've got three guys running and really probably just two because one of them was defending a bit, you need the guy on the ball to be looking for a shot. Like that's where he fits. And it's really good in this system, but it continues to look to me like, like he's in the Zaha zone.
He's in the continues to re-sign with Palace and is a really good player with Palace zone. Yeah, he's, he's very much a guy who doesn't translate as a role player. You're not going to get as much out of Eze as a role player as you will if he is the guy. You know, there are a handful of people like this in the Premier League.
I think Alexander Hobie is another really good example of this kind of a thing. They're really good players on the ball, but they're not quite good enough to be the guy on the ball on a really good team, right? And they need to find their, and it'll be, he did it at Everton and now has a full on. You know, when you put them in a position where they can succeed, they can succeed, but they are not attractive targets for the best teams in the world because they are not good enough to be the guy and they need to be the guy to get the most out of their skill set.
The other thing that I want to say with Crystal Palace is when they were playing possession, they had a real problem progressing the ball up the field. And part of what happened was that previous iterations of Palace got a lot of ball production from their center backs. And this team is not constructed to do that. And then Adam Warden gets hurt as well, who is the guy in midfield who they want to be the guy in midfield.
Now Warden, Warden comes back and they play a more transitional game. And in a more transitional game, Warden takes on a lot more of the ball production work and is good at it. And so you have another piece that fits better when you were trying to keep the ball. Yeah, Warden looking so good as an aggressive transitional central midfielder is a big part of this recent run.
He's averaging an incredible number of progressive passes for a team that has so little of the ball. And he's very good at stopping the ball the other way. And it's interesting, like, again, this is like he's 20. So this is great.
Another thing is he's 20 and he fits a very classic profile for a six. It is the stop the ball and play the transition pass. And this is the thing that like great If he constructed their team, they're going to be able to run it back next year. And you just play this way all year and run a little bit better, and there's no reason they can't put a run on a European spot.
Yeah, especially if they can avoid having someone come in with a stupid amount of money for Wharton. And I think they will be able to for another season, I think. That's my guess. Who the heck knows?
But it's not an obvious landing spot for him, I don't think, right now. I mean, I say it's not an obvious landing spot, obviously Manchester United should probably buy him. This is one of the reasons why I think it's less likely to happen, is that if he has a certain set of skills that he has not demonstrated playing in this Crystal Palace team, he's an obvious target for basically anyone. And teams that might want to take that risk, even if they don't know that they're there, like obviously United.
I think that Tottenham would also be a team that it would make sense to take a risk on a player who might have midfield skills, who you know can progress the ball and carry a lot of defensive weight. And if he actually has those back-to-goal possession skills, literally everyone should be trying to sign this guy. The Tottenham move would be one of the grace. The Grace Robertson doesn't even have to move home transfer.
Yeah, it would make a lot of sense. I suspect Crystal Palace are going to do that thing where they renegotiate his contract with the understanding he gets one more year. I think he's been sufficiently good this year that you can do that and then he'll put you get one more good year out of him and then big money. That would be my guess.
It's an interesting question, because Adam Wharton not being a big money player is also a very possible outcome of another year of Adam Wharton. Right, a hundred percent. I think that if you're Crystal Palace, you look at Wharton and you think, I want him on the Declan Rice career path. Not in terms of skill development, necessarily.
You can develop it in a different way to Declan Rice, but in terms of career development, right? We get the first chapter out of him. He takes the scissor club accomplishments and then everybody is very happy with his time here and we sell him off for big money. Exactly.
And if he fails to be Declan Rice and instead he's a Crystal Palace lifer, we also win. That's the great thing about the amount of money that these teams are making. They don't need a guy to become a hundred million pound transfer for their business strategy to keep functioning. So that's Crystal Palace.
They're good. It is an interesting mix of not surprising and surprising. But let me put it this way. Right now, you take Crystal Palace and Nottingham Forest and you put them on a neutral field.
Who are you taking? Yeah, I'm taking Palace, baby. Me too. It's too bad.
Could have been them. Anyway, so that's our podcast. We've got, obviously, a whole bunch more Champions League coming up. We are going to be revisiting a very famous player who is having a very public contract dispute with his club and a few other things on the subscription side.
You can go to patreon.com slash TotalPivot. That's also where you can get to join the Moosa and remember some guys with us in the channel where you're supposed to ask us questions. All right. Cheers, y'all.
Cheers.