Gotham v. Courage and Cudjoe v. Goals Added
/Thank you to: Arielle Dror, Lydia Vandenbergh Jackson, Kieran Doyle, Jay Carter and the many NWSL aficionados within ASA for letting me bounce ideas off of them for this biweekly series.
With the Challenge Cup kicking off two weeks ago, this is the first of a series of biweekly articles on American Soccer Analysis analyzing interesting tidbits across the season - both at a team and individual level. As the season continues to heat up, these articles will come at all angles of the game: tactical information, fascinating data quirks, and as well just basic match reports. The NWSL, as is the case with American soccer across the board is a wild ride - hopefully this series will provide everyone with things to keep an eye on throughout the year!
How Do You Analyze Chaos?
We are currently entering matchday four of the NWSL Challenge Cup, and already we’ve seen a number of storylines developing: Is Kansas City fixable? Is Ashlyn Harris the penalty saving god foretold to us in the ancient scriptures? And, how good is Trinity Rodman?! There have been a number of fantastic matches thus far, but certainly the one which caught the eye most was the NJ/NY Gotham v. Courage match on April 20th. And rightly so: It was one of the most maddening matches (in a good way) you’re ever likely to see - even if you just watched the first half! However, putting on my analyst’s hat (I promise I won’t kill the mood) if you were to try and scout that match - how would you? On paper, there were no discernible patterns of play, so how does one try and break down chaos?
The full game highlights are worth a watch to fully appreciate the insanity.
As a starting point, the first 15 to 20 minutes of a match are essential for providing a “baseline” of how two teams want to play: how they build up play, how they transition (to attack and defense), and how they defend in longer periods. The later you go into matches, the more things are conditioned by game state (how much a team is winning or losing by). Thanks to the xG race chart shown below, we see that the first 30 minutes were essentially a track meet. How does one help determine patterns when there are none? The simple answer is that it’s really hard! But of course, you can watch for more minute and simple cues or intentions to garner insights into the match.
Image courtesy of Arielle Dror. She usually tweets them out a day or two after each game, so you should probably just follow her.
To start: how did the two teams build up? The Courage showed early an intention to to split their center backs and progress the ball up the field, while Gotham were a bit more pragmatic from the goalkeeper. Because of the nature of the match, where the outcomes of these build-up patterns were largely unsuccessful, the final phases of play are not as important. Of course, these intentions on the ball never happen in a vacuum, and one of the reasons the match was so chaotic was down to the intense pressure they put on each other, helping us to delineate and discover the defensive systems!
Sky Blue have one of the best ball-winners in the league in Jennifer Cudjoe (more on her later), so when the Courage looked to build they pressed in such a way that forced them inside towards more congested areas of the pitch. That, combined with the narrowness of Lynn Williams and Jessica McDonald up front, as well as the tendencies of Debinha to drift centrally, made it hard for North Carolina to get on the ball. On the flip side, the early pressure from the Courage in similar areas (pressing wide to force them inside) made most of these longer balls go to the head of Carli Lloyd, not allowing them to utilize the connections that could occur between Midge Purce and Paige Monaghan. The passing networks and data from the match illustrate this: connections between Gotham’s defenders were few and far between, but the early balls forward led to congested areas and passing between the forwards.
Passing networks courtesy of StatsBomB
Another way to look at a match which seems impossible to dissect, is of course, the goals. I broadly try to not look at the outcomes and reasons for goals when breaking down teams - they are isolated incidents and don’t (for the most part) show what a team is trying to do in their game model. However, in this instance, it helps give you a good idea of key players, weaknesses in a team, and how you might be able to score goals against them (which is of course, the whole objective.)
To use this game as an example: If we press them and win the ball, where is the space? The Courage’s second goal came from regaining possession in the midfield and transitioning quickly to score. Gotham’s second also came from a counter attack, and the way the defenders reacted (or didn’t as the case may be) to movement in the box helps uncover little tendencies in a player or a team’s game which can be utilized in your analysis framework. Other goals, like the opener for example, you just have to ignore for analysis purposes as one of the little beautiful things about soccer - good players do good things, and opponents sometimes mess up.
The essential take away from this match of the Challenge Cup is that while on the surface it’s impossible to build narratives from games which have no real discernible flow, there are always little takeaways you can use in conjunction with more “sustainable” phases of play that you can use - either for professional work or for your basic hobbyist who likes to watch the game with a keen eye (and since you’re on ASA right now, I assume you fall into one or both categories!).
Regardless of outcome in possession, what is the team’s first intention with the ball?
How were the opposition successful in breaking down their attacking moves (i.e. by pressing or not pressing) and how can we improve upon that ourselves or copy it against them?
In terms of individual players, who “made the game” and who “broke the game” are good questions to ask. When things went well and poorly, who were the root causes?
Cudjoe & The Goals Added Dilemma
Another story line to add to the early season narrative is Goals Added’s (g+) seemingly personal vendetta against certain players. During the game Jennifer’s Cudjoe was excellent at breaking up play and providing energy to Gotham’s attack - this is reflected within her g+ score in terms of interrupting, currently sitting at 0.18. However, g+ takes a look at her contribution in terms of passing value and is incredibly antipathetic. At the time of writing, she has a rating of -0.15 for passing - a huge disconnect between what she does immediately following her impressive ball winning ability.
An example of how g+ broadly values passing values to positions.
My question is why? What does she do with the ball which the metric thinks is such a drain on NJ/NY Gotham? Much has been written about the issues/permutations that exist with g+, such as pass location and team strength, among others. For the specifics of this question with Cudjoe, I’m going to take a look into a few things which would be beneficial for a deeper dive: A) the various roles that exist within positions, and B) the benefits of securing possession (i.e. in times of distress or chaos) with a negative pass.
At it’s very basic level, Goals Added (click here for the introductory articles from the ASA team) looks at every player’s contributions on the pitch and judges if they increased their team’s chances of conceding or scoring every two possessions.
As a defensive midfielder, Jennifer Cudjoe’s role within the system Gotham and coach Freeya Coombe employ is very much one of a ball-winner: destroy off the ball and keep it simple to find more progressive or creative teammates (whether that changes with Allie Long now coming on, who knows). G+ at it’s very core (see above) weights positional groups differently for the value they add with passes, which is something stolen from an earlier American Soccer Analysis metric, xPass.
However, within all those various positional categories, there are roles which *drastically* differ at a more minute level. Caroline Weir of Manchester City plays in very much the same areas of the pitch but her passing ability is heralded - can we really say that a defensive midfielder like her doesn’t add somewhat different types of value with her passing? As the image above shows, defensive midfielders are, broadly speaking, hovering around +0.1 positive value for each pass value allocation - much of this is linked between positions on the pitch (i.e. deeper) and the remaining passes in a sequence required to actually score the goal g+ so craves. I’m not going to lie and say Cudjoe is an incredibly progressive passer, but her role within the team doesn’t necessarily allow her or need her to - does a lack of access or demand to a type of pass mean what she DOES do is invaluable? I’m not so sure.
This radar chart shows two very different profiles from a defensive midfielder - one who is tasked with creating play and the other with destroying it. (Images courtesy of StatsBomb)
The second question mentioned previously, which is of course linked to her role within the team, is the sheer way in which g+ judges backwards passes: quite simply, it views them negatively. While cross checking the g+ actions from the Courage match with video, there were some things which flagged my attention.
One example of a backwards pass which caught my attention comes in the two still images above. Carli Lloyd, helping Gotham win the ball back plays a pass to Cudjoe who is facing forward - in an ideal scenario, she would keep the momentum of the move going forward in transition, but with almost no options forward she elects to turn back and help secure the ball at the back. In my eyes, this was a positive gain in terms of scoring! Passing the ball back to an area of numerical superiority rather than forcing something increases the chances of building an attack (although of course, not immediately).
The next example was a pass forward which was weighted positively. In this example, Cudjoe is defending deep on her own box right before the end of the match, and under pressure clears to Carli Lloyd: the ball is bouncing, and her teammate has to wriggle out of pressure before eventually launching a ball forward to no one. The pass was forward, Carli Lloyd had to do a lot of work to secure possession and the eventual outcome was a negative (something which g+ utilizes, of course - the sequence of events.) Did it get them closer to goal? Yes. Did it increase the team’s chances of scoring? I don’t think so. This dilemma of course relates back to the attribution of credit between passer and receiver, but is also just a question of the final “x and y coordinate” of the pass. If this were American football, which harshly penalizes negative yardage this would make sense, but soccer is very fluid and sometimes to go forwards you need to go backwards.
G+ is obviously in its relatively young stages as a metric, and no metric (complete or incomplete) is perfect, but I thought the Jennifer Cudjoe issue was something that would garner a lot of debate between the American Soccer Analysis writers and the overall community! My questions will obviously not be solved in the scope of this article, but going forward it’ll be fun to look at! Thanks for reading my first bi-weekly article this season and hopefully there will be more storylines and interesting matches to follow!