Which Newcastle United manager had the longest balls?

Posted on February 21st, 2013 | 7 Comments |

The stats contained in the table below go back to the start of the 2008-9 relegation season. Hence, the managers I have included are Kevin Keegan, Joe Kinnear, Alan Shearer, Chris Hughton (x3) and Alan Pardew.

Admittedly, some of the managerial spells are ridiculously short, and one would prefer at least a whole season for each manager, where every other team in the division was played with their varying tactics pitted against Newcastle United’s would have been the ideal. However, in the crazy world of Newcastle United since the blundering Mike Ashley took over, the longest continuous run of Premiership matches for any manager apart from the current one has been Joe Kinnear’s nineteen. Although Chris Hughton at least had a full season in the Championship, his spells as caretaker apart, he only had sixteen games in the Premiership before being sacked. Anyway, the point of this is more to take a look at Newcastle United’s long ball style as a whole in recent years, rather than just focusing on one particular manager. This brings me to my final point in this section, why I haven’t included that Championship season. This was for two reasons: Firstly, because I do not have the same stats for that season (I only have Premiership stats from “OPTA”). Secondly, it is also (literally) a different league, a different paradigm where different standards apply.

In terms of providing some context to these figures, there is of course the question of how they compare with those of other Premiership clubs / Managers. This is why I have also included similar figures from two very longstanding managers who are at either end of the route one scale, the first being Arsene Wenger, whose Arsenal team have consistently been the shortest passing team on average over the period since the start of the 2008-9 season. At the other extreme, unsurprisingly, we have Stoke City’s Tony Pulis, whose team have usually been the worst of the worst long ball offenders. However, even Pulis and other long ball kings such as Sam Allardyce have recently moderated their previous route one ways a little this season, and have even been eclipsed by our very own Alan “hoof it!” Pardew as well as his Reading protege, the promoted Brian “long balls” McDermott, with the pair consistently holding the two top places in the long ball league. Indeed, Pardew’s average long ball percentage reached over 18% at one stage this season, though it has since come down to 16.4%. Though better, this is still 0.4% higher than Pulis, as the reformed character’s average for this season so far is 16.0% at the time of writing.

One final note: The table is arranged in order of the percentage of all passes which were long balls (25 yards or over). The manager with the lowest percentage is top and so on…

So without further ado, let’s take a look at the Newcastle United managerial long ball matrix!

So what can we learn from these figures?

1. Newcastle United don’t play like a big club.

We may observe that Alan Pardew isn’t Newcastle United’s only long ball miscreant. Though Newcastle United are a fairly large club even by Premiership standards, both with and without Pardew it has played more like smaller clubs with less skilled players who are utilising a more direct approach in an attempt to bridge the gulf in skill. Nowadays, even that approach seems to be coming to end, with smaller teams such as Swansea and Southampton bringing talented and highly progressive young managers like Michael Laudrup and Mauricio Pochettino, the antithesis of the older way where smaller clubs would mostly attempt to punch above their weight by bringing in old route one merchants such as Mick McCarthy, Alex McLeish and the abovementioned Pulis and Allardyce. The only manager whose long ball figures are anything close to reasonable is Chris Hughton in the 2010-11 season, and they were only somewhere in the middle. My journey into long balls has led to me blunder towards a rough scale which I am displaying below:

07% – 12% – A passing side who more or less completely eschew the long ball game.
12% – 15% – A mixed side who are somewhere in the middle
15% – 25% – A full on long ball side who positively embrace “percentage” football.

To illustrate my point, I have made another table, which captures the same stats as the one above, only for teams who have finished in the top four of the Premiership over the last two seasons. For this one, stats from the current incomplete season have not been used.

And to show this isn’t a “freak” result, take a look at the previous season’s top four.

As you can see, they’re all what could be described as “passing sides,” though this is hardly a recent phenomenon. Back in the days of the late seventies and early eighties, when Bob Paisley and Brian Clough owned both the domestic League Championship and European Cup, which they won five times between them (Paisley thee times and Clough twice), Clough had this to say:

“If God had wanted us to play football in the clouds, he’d have put grass up there!”

Paisley and his great predecessor Bill Shankly both described their own “Eureka” moment, the insight which helped Liverpool to dominate both domestic and European football. Shankly described it thus, saying:

“We realised at Liverpool that you can’t score a goal every time you get the ball. And we learned this from Europe, from the Latin people. When they play the ball from the back they play in little groups. The pattern of the opposition changes as they change. This leaves room for players like Ray Kennedy and Terry McDermott, who both played for Liverpool after I left, to sneak in for the final pass. So it’s cat and mouse for a while waiting for an opening to appear before the final ball is let loose. It’s simple and it’s effective … It’s also taken the spectators time to adjust to it.”

Paisley on the same subject also recounted:

“We realised it was no use winning the ball if you finished up on your backside. The top Europeans showed us how to break out of defence effectively. The pace of their movement was dictated by their first pass. We had to learn how to be patient like that and think about the next two or three moves when we had the ball.”

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that the more short passes and the less long passes a side makes, the better they will be. As you can see, if that were the case, Arsenal and Manchester City would be the ones fighting it out for the Premiership title every time and Manchester United and Chelsea would be left in their wake, which is obviously not the case. I’m not saying that it is the only factor either as obviously, a squad of very high quality players with strength in depth is also essential too, along with several other factors. However, if Newcastle United is ambitious enough to strive to be a real top club, there simply must change this aspect of their tactics, otherwise they will fail, just as they have many times before. Despite their F.A. Cup glories of the fifties, and their Hughie Gallacher led League title of 1927, not to mention one or two other trophies, Newcastle United have never been a genuine top team since the Edwardian era when they won three of their four league titles along with their first F.A. Cup. Despite the thrills and spills of Keegan’s “Entertainers” in the 1990s, it is no mistake that this Edwardian side was also the last time that Newcastle United had a repution as a genuinely innovative “passing” side who were taking the game forward tactically. In the fifties when they won three F.A Cups in a five year period they were rather like Tottenham a few years back, ie very good in cup competitions but ultimately a mid-table side when it came to the League.

2. Alan Pardew is all over the place tactically.

In studying the Premiership statistics for both Newcastle United and other teams and managers, one salient point seems to be that although other managers are fairly consistent in their approach to the game, Alan Pardew can be positively schizophrenic with an approach which is all over the place, and sometimes even within the space of one game! Though his default position has been that of an old school, long ball merchant who learned his trade in the world of lower league and non league football, on some occaisions he will shed his own skin and become and attempt to become Alan Pardiola the king of tiqui-taka football. In our game against our only game against Southampton so far this season, a whopping 23.5% of all Newcastle United’s passes were long balls in tactical performance which really pushed the envelope of sheer awfulness. Two games later, after another beating where his Newcastle United team made Stoke look like Barcelona (with a long % of 18.6% against Stoke’s 14.8%), Pardiola was back again, beating Wigan 3-0 with a long ball percentage of only 10.8%, which is around the same as better teams such as Manchester United, Chelsea, Manchester City etc. You simply do not get anything like this level of variation with other managers and it’s as if he doesn’t seem to know what he stands for one way or the other. His thinking is confused and inconsistent, and this will take him nowhere in the long run.

Conclusion.

You might think I am making far too much of one simple statistic here, however I cannot stress how vital it is. Though some teams who might be described as “route one,” “long ball” or whatever might well have won the odd cup competition, or reached the odd final in recent years, my many hours of poring through long ball stats have proved to me (amongst other things) that Newcastle United will never again be a regular top four Champions League side until they get a handle on this aspect of their play.

Pardew’s long balls – An in depth probe.

Are Pardew’s long balls getting even longer?.

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NUFCBlog Author: workyticket workyticket has written 1091 articles on this blog.

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