Sport Football
10 2GS Saturday September 12 2020 | the times
MARTIN RICKETT/PA; ALEX LIVESEYTrio of ‘failures’
who prove value
of taking risks
James Gheerbrant
Boateng said, the biggest difference
between Hansi Flick’s unstoppable
Bayern and the inferior version under
Niko Kovac was that Flick’s team
played with a carefree sense of fun.
That is why it was concerning to hear
Gareth Southgate admit, after the
Nations League game against Den-
mark, that he had instructed England
to be “secure and solid” above all. One
could understand his desire to avoid an
air of frivolity after the incident involv-
ing Phil Foden and Mason Greenwood,
but it was a mistake to blur the line
between tone and tactics. The surest
way for Southgate to take a hatchet to
England’s Euros chances would be to
suppress the team’s natural exuber-
ance, and allow the accountability he
rightly demands off the field to
constrain their performances.
As our opportunities for adventure,
enjoyment and risk-taking narrow in
the outside world, perhaps it’s doubly
important that the football pitch is a
place for all those things. Of all the
players that quicken my pulse, the trio
I’m most excited to watch again are
Alexander-Arnold, De Bruyne and
Fernandes: three torchbearers for the
value of trying difficult things, and
being unafraid to fail.During the two-month mini-season in
June and July, one Premier League
player gave the ball away 198 times —
more than any other outfielder. He
misplaced a league-high 106 passes in
the attacking half.
No one took more than his 13 unsuc-
cessful shots from outside the box. He
took needless risks. He tried absurd
flicks when there was a simple ten-yard
pass on. He attempted passes as surely
doomed as the headstrong blonde who
is seduced by 007 in the first 20 minutes
of a Bond film. In short, he was a liabili-
ty in possession. But he also happened
to be the most impactful player in the
league.
The man in question was Manches-
ter United’s Bruno Fernandes, who
finished with six goals and four assists
in the post-lockdown period and a total
of 15 goal involvements in 14 games
after his January transfer from Sporting
Lisbon. Fernandes, 26, was almost
always the most wasteful player on the
pitch but his consistent willingness to
attempt the most aggressive, ambitious
option available to him — whether
trying to play a blind back-heeled pass
or thread the ball through a defender’s
legs from 20 yards away — meant that
even if he failed 80 per cent of the time,
the rest of the time he was firing bullets.
The England cricketer Jos Buttler
famously has the words “F*** it” writ-
ten on his bat handle, and the suspicion
is that if you were to cut the spindly
Fernandes in half, you would find the
same motto written through him like a
stick of seaside rock.
Sir Alex Ferguson recognised the
importance of risk — he mentions it a
lot in his Harvard interviews on the
pillars of his success — and the fact that
Fernandes, De Bruyne and Alexander-Arnold are all not afraid to risk failure when they attempt the most difficult passesUnited had lost this intrepidity after his
retirement. When Ole Gunnar
Solskjaer was appointed in December
2018, Ferguson chose his words of
advice to the Norwegian deliberately.
“Go out and express yourselves and
take risks,” he told him.
It took the arrival of Fernandes, with
his freedom and infectious desire to roll
the dice, to recalibrate the mood of
United’s attack and restore what
Ferguson had prized. Suddenly, every
forward surge, even against a set
defence, was an opportunity. The effect
was transformative. In the 14 league
games before Fernandes joined, United
took 21 points. In the subsequent 14
games, all of which he played, they took
32 points and went unbeaten: the best
record in the division.
There have been trends in the recent
history of football — the Spanish
veneration of possession and the data-
led shift away from long-range shots
and Hollywood passes — that have
militated against this spirit of adven-
ture. But as we move into the first full
season of the 2020s, it feels as though
the present belongs to the risk-takers.
Last season, two players had a
strikingly similar statistical profile to
Fernandes in their frequency of failure.
Trent Alexander-Arnold and Kevin De
Bruyne were the leading assist-provid-
ers in the league, but they were also the
two players who lost possession most
often per 90 minutes. (Fernandes was
fourth).
The United man was guilty of more
errant passes in the attacking half, on
average, than any other player, but
Alexander-Arnold (second) and De
Bruyne (fourth) ran him close.
Fernandes and De Bruyne were secondand fourth for unsuccessful shots from
distance. The conclusion is inescapa-
ble: the best players, those who electrify
their teams and excite us as fans, are the
ones who get things wrong most often.
For playmakers in particular, being
unafraid to mess up is incredibly
important, because it liberates them to
try the sort of high-tariff passes that
really hurt teams when they come off.
The Premier League career of Mesut
Özil provides a neat illustration of thisprinciple. In the 2015-16 season, when
Özil recorded 19 assists, he misplaced
an average of 8.1 passes a game in the
attacking half. In subsequent seasons,
as his assists have dwindled, Özil’s pass
security has got better and better,
culminating in last season, when his
errant-pass average shrank to 4.8, but
he set up only two goals. The more
careful Özil has become, the less
effective he has been.
Cutting out mistakes may be the first
commandment of the firefighter man-
ager but it is not a recipe for success in
the modern game. Last season, the
team that committed the second-
highest number of errors leading to
shots (Liverpool) were champions with
a near-record points total. The team
that committed by far the fewest
(Watford) were relegated.
Bayern Munich won the Champions
League playing a style of football that
was, at times, ridiculously open and
risky, but also ridiculously enjoyable
and effective. In the closing minutes of
the final against Paris Saint-Germain,
holding a 1-0 lead, they had eight
players in the PSG half. When David
Alaba scored an own goal in the
quarter-final against Barcelona, he and
Manuel Neuer just smiled. As JérômeMost possession lost
last season*Average times per 90 minutes
Trent Alexander-Arnold (Liverpool)Kevin de Bruyne (Manchester City)Emiliano Buendía (Norwich)Bruno Fernandes (Manchester United)Diego Rico (Bournemouth)29.22.22.22.22.