Pardew’s first 50 Premiership games – What have we learned?
Posted on March 18th, 2012 | 24 Comments |
The Silver Supremo’s first game, a 3-1 victory against Liverpool, was certainly a good start, as was his eleven game unbeaten run at the beginning of this season. Despite this, he still has his detractors, as well as those on the opposite side. Let’s take a look at the long term picture of what he has achieved in terms of results, and also touch on some of what we have learned about his style of play.
Statistics
I suppose that the best place to start would be to take a look at the statistics of those first 50 games to give us some kind of reference, so here goes!
| Pardew’s first 50 Premiership games. | |||||||
| P | W | D | L | Points | PPG | PPS | Win % |
| 50 | 18 | 17 | 15 | 71(150) | 1.42 | 53.96 | 36.00% |
“PPG” = Average points per game, “PPS” = Average points per season (Average points per game multiplied by 38). Finally, the figure in brackets of is maximum point achievable.
Altogether, this has been ok for a team of Newcastle United’s calbre, though not spectacular. In terms of monetary value, Newcastle United’s squad is the eighth moost valuable in the Premiership according to Transfermarkt, with a first team squad valued at around £120 million, and with an average player value of around £4.3 million. This puts us roughly on a par with teams such as Everton and Aston Villa, but still way below the huge chasm which exists between that group and the top six giants beginning with Liverpool. Now I wouldn’t set too much store by such figures, but they do tend to correlate roughly with Pardew’s overall performance on the pitch. 53/54 points is the kind of total which should give us a finishing position of somewhere around 7th or 8th last season, and 9th the season before that. So, we have neither overachieved or underachived using that metric.
Pardew’s win percentage is possibly slightly low, though he has drawn slightly more than the norm too. Perhaps this is somewhat indictative of his “defence first” style, though more on that in the next section.
Pardew’s direct style of play
It has been noticable that more than few Magpies fans, usually those who aren’t really au fait with the technical and strategic aspects of the game, and also unfamiliar with his previous teams in any depth, have been deluding themselves somewhat over what the Pardew’s style of play actually is, often writing on ‘blogs and forums that he is bringing more of an “entertaining,” short passing style to the Toon than his predecessor, Chris Hughton, or even that he will, but that he doesn’t have the players with the skillset yet to implement these kind of tactics. If anything though, the opposite has been the case in reality, with Newcastle relying on more long, hopeful passing than they did before. Also, on the other point, he now has a better squad of players than he has had at any stage in his career so far, with the two exceptions of Carlos Tevez and Javier Mascherano in their brief spells at Pardew’s West Ham before he was sacked.
For better or worse, Pardew is a child of the English game of the ‘eighties. Where Pep Guardiola had Johan Cruyff to learn his trade from, Alan Pardew had Barnet and Reading’s Terry Bullivant. He feel uncomfortable straying from a 4-4-2 formation with a big emphasis on defence and a high workrate from all of his players.
Devensively, everyone is expected to muck in, including forwards, who are often used to try and nip oppsition attacks in the bud, wingers are expected to track back and help out the full backs, overlapping fairly often, so wingers are expected to have a defensive, tackling side to their game as well as baniging in crosses for the forwards. This is something which has caused problems for wingers such as Hatem Ben Arfa, who Pardew once said he didn’t see as a winger at all.
In terms of attack, his emphasis is on getting the ball to the forwards as quickly as possible using long passes / crosses, with the midfield bombing on in their wake to provide support. However, he does have some very good technical players at his disposal at NUFC, so if the strategy works, they can indeed show another side to their game when they have possession in their opponent’s half, sometimes more sophisticated and entertaining passing play. On the other hand though, when the opposition is succesful in choking service to the forwards, there seldom seems to be much in terms of a “Plan B.” Adaptability is not one of Pardew’s strongest suits.
In conclusion
Well, according to Mike Ashley, Pardew was brought in for his “experience.” Experience can, of course, be a very good thing. However it can also be a more negative thing too in some circumstances. Sometimes people can become “hidebound” and resitant, or even unable to change and develop.
On the positive side, Pardew certainly hasn’t done a bad job at all bearing in mind the club’s position in terms of development when he took over, which was only half a season after it was promoted from the Championship. On the other hand, bearing in mind the resources at his disposal, he hasn’t done an amazing one either, and the truth probably lies somewhere inbetween. Of course some, even many, will disagree with my brief assessment, but although the club is currently in a decent enough position under Pardew’s stewardship, the potential for development into a sophisticated side which can seriously challenge for the highest honours under the Silver Supremo seems to be fairly limited in my view. What you see is what you get. It can be hard to teach an old dog new tricks when it’s set in it’s ways and I feel that whilst we will be a solid side who will have our moments, win a few, lose a few, and be comfortable in mid / upper mid table with constant aspirations of reaching the Europa League, we will never quite scale the highest heights once we get there, nor reach the higher European competiton, the Champion’s League. Time will tell though and I hope I’m wrong.
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NUFCBlog Author: workyticket
workyticket has written 1095 articles on this blog.
Sorry but your sentence ” usually those who aren’t really au fait with the technical and strategic aspects of the game” really shows you as a first class knob. Do you really know better than the rest of us. Where do you think keegan or robson learnt their trade?