Why is the Premier League boring? Not enough risk-taking mavericks…

We have an excellent explanation for how Premier League tactics have evolved into boredom, but there is some hope.

If you’re looking for post-Como Man Utd mails then click here.

An excellent mail about why the Premier League is boring In my opinion, one of the reasons why the Premier League is as dull (kinda) as it is, is because the prevailing tactics of the day do not accept risk.

A few years back we were living in a world where possession was king, with the ultimate expression of this being Tika-Taka. Endless, recycled, dominant, boring, (occasionally fun!), possession. The thought behind this desire to win the possession war was that, if you had the ball then the opposition didn’t. The opposition couldn’t score if they didn’t have the ball. Teams who kept possession the best tended to win the most games.

Tactics then evolved. How do you counter a team who is very good at possession? Well, you press them. You go man to man and you press, press, press until you get the ball back. Once you get the ball back, you go hell for leather and try to score a goal in the few moments your team has the ball. Counter attack, xG, directness, pace.

So, if you’re the team being pressed relentlessly, how do you counter this? Well, you buy players who are “press resistant”. Players who are happy and able to keep the ball, despite being pressed. You start off with your press resistant strikers, and when pressing the strikers doesn’t work you buy press resistant midfielders, and when pressing the midfield doesn’t work you buy press resistant defenders, and then ultimately you buy a press resistant goalkeeper. The result is that you cannot be pressed in to surrendering the ball.

So if you have the ball for 80% of the game, and the other team has no chance of pressing the ball off of you, (wasting huge amounts of energy as they try), then what is the next logical step? Well, you cede possession and you sit back, and you conserve energy, and you remain tactically rigid and you do press a little, but it’s very organised and logical.

But if you’re now the team who is used to 80% possession and your eleven press resistant, neat and tidy, and risk-free players are now faced with a very organised low block, then now what? This is probably where we are at right now. Arsenal, Liverpool, Man City (boilk), and to a lesser degree Spurs, Man Utd and maybe Newcastle are the possession teams, whereas most of the Premier League are the defensive teams.

So what happens next? Well, to some degree you reintroduce a bit of risk. If your neat and tidy attackers are being cancelled out by neat and tidy defenders, then someone needs to introduce a little bit of chaos. That for me is the next step for the Premier League. Chelsea are doing it, Brighton are doing it, Villa are doing it. They are buying players who are happy to take a risk, and are prepared for that hip-shimmy, or flipper-flapper, step-over, panna, or trivela, etc… to not come off, and to have the team prepared to mitigate for their own risk, rather than simply to prepare for 90 minutes of not having possession.

Many of the best and most fondly remembered players throughout history are remembered for the risks they took, (and which came off). They were called “maverick” or “luxury” players. For me at least, the likes of Cole Palmer, Johan Manzambi, Kaoru Mitoma, Adbdul Fatawu, Alysson, and maybe even Ethan Nwaneri, are the natural results of playing with more risk, as tactics evolve.

TL;DR – it won’t always be boring Dale May, Swindon Wengerite

READ: Ultra-processed Champions League is fast-food football with no nutrition or jeopardy

There’s good stuff too I think us Mailboxers have been jaded by football social media which primarily features people negatively reacting to any post. It’s infected the discourse so much that mailboxers just seem to be moaning about how s**t the game is, how *s**t’ Arsenal are or how s**t ‘insert player/manager’ is.

We’ve also been worn down by corrupt governing bodies, corrupt owners and orange presidents.

However, there is some good stuff too y’know. Diego Gómez’s halfway line goal was a thing of beauty. It’s so good, it’s in a class of its own. Not quite powerful enough to be a thunderbastard, nor high enough to be a lob. It was more like a mid-air torpedo. Absolutely loved that.

So c’mon mailboxers, what else from recent matches has given you pleasure recently? Nilesh, Harrow

Well done Arsenal

Yes Mikel my old son, lovely stuff. All we ask for is occasional bursts of this in the prem when you’ve patiently moved a back 6 around and found a gap or two please. RHT/TS x

(You be quiet at the back there saying “Bayern Reserves”, I’m trying to be genuine here)

…Well, well, well. See what happens when Arsenal plays a team that doesn’t have 11 on the edge of their own box for 90 mins? Who knew…?

In famous words that are simple enough for even Will Ford/Stewie Griffen, Graeme Souness, and all the other like-minded contributors to the mailbox to understand – “yous are all f****** idiots”.

All the best Josh, AFC

Really well done Villa We! Were! Top of the league!

Well, it was a fun 20 minutes being the best team in Europe anyway (that’s how it works right?). But another win, another good performance, another nice batch of goals. And nice to see we can still do the business when a stack of players are out injured as well.

Also nice to get a penalty again! That’s 3 in our last 5 European games. Whereas our last pen in a league game was so long ago, Alan McInally took it. Saturday lunchtime would be a lovely time for the refs to make up for doing nothing about Brentford, Forest and Newcastle treating Villa like the car in Street Fighter 2. Also would show there’s no pro-City agenda… are you out there Howard.. ?

And also a big up for Garnacho. Looked really lively and dangerous when he came on. Granted, it’s Viking, although tell that to Olise. But very happy to see he’s getting sharp and really seems up for it, considering how good Alysson and Mbaye are looking atm.

Just a few more points to get into the knockouts. So Barca away, Galatasaray away, Dortmund, PSG for the next 4 CL games. Not exactly what my idea of no jeopardy looks like, but oh well. It’s a hard life. Neil Raines UTV

It really does mean nothing

Old man simultaneously shouting at clouds and p***ing into a tornado, but how long can this Champions League format last when most games mean fk all?

I struggled to care watching a Liverpool comeback or Utd battering and haven’t watched most other games as they’re almost meaningless. Aidan, Lfc (TBF, did enjoy watching Como)

When is a cartel not a cartel?

Colin, with the latest in a long line of “red cartel” emails, spectacularly misses the target, in a manner reminiscent of Gabriel’s penalty, which I understand NASA have just started to pick up on satellites in space.

Yes, it’s an entirely valid point to make that, given the revenue rules are stacked in favour of them and only a small number of other clubs, Liverpool can and should be doing a lot better. But then so should Man Utd. So should Arsenal, who have only just broken a 22 year old league title drought.

And that is literally the point! They are all long term underachievers, leaving other clubs to have success instead. Ergo, it cannot possibly be a cartel! A cartel would be them carving everything up between them, and leaving the rest of the league to rot. That’s what a cartel would look like. The last 25 years have quite literally been the exact opposite. That’s why Leicester won the league, that’s why Chelsea have picked up 5 titles in that time too.

The number of people who don’t seem to understand the concept of a cartel is scary. Andy H, Swansea

We’re getting deep in the Mailbox

Tim McKane evokes Trigger’s Broom as a reason to stop supporting clubs. Indeed he says “there is nothing of the original broom left”.

Wrong!

Plutarch actually beat the Only Fools and Horses writers to this one in the 1st century. His philosophical thought experiment asked: what if, as a ship rotted, you replaced every plank, piece by piece with a new bit of timber? Is it the same ship once every part has been swapped out?

Ultimately the thought experiment asks, is there something more to the ship than just the collection of planks? Some undefinable but definite essence to the ship?

Football fans have known the answer forever – of course there is. It is precisely because our clubs are more than the collection of players, manager, stadium, badge, sponsor that we support them.

We are not dim for this. Far from it. That belief in, and support for, the essence of our club is what makes us a a fan.

Interestingly Thomas Hobbes, in the 17th century, proposed an additional question – what if you rebuilt a ship out of the old planks you’d replaced? Which one is the original ship? Perhaps an MK Dons or an AFC Wimbledon fan could opine? Luke

(If only there was some word for the essence of my club, Spurs. Tottenham-y? Hotspurian? It’ll come to me).