— Here are two things Declan Rice cam consistently do that Rodri cannot.
— And two things Rodri consistently does that Declan Rice can also do.
The Englishman is simply the better player. He just doesn't yet have enough accolades to go with it.
[A THREAD 🧵]
Here are some INSANE Declan Rice stats.
—Played the most switches of play in the league last season on top of all of this.
Look at the videos and think about the data. Look at how unbelievably immense he is. How he moves unnatural on a football pitch.
It does not matter what Rodri wins with Pep Guardiola. This is the best defensive midfielder in the game. Use your EYES.
He has nothing to be jealous of physically, technically and mentally.
His brain and overall performance mentality is in that gold tier. This is a laboratory product. A perfect profile. Nothing missing.
All about racking up accolades now for him.
Inherent talent is a superior measure to trophy logic and media hype, because the hype and accolades will all eventually catch up and wake up to talent.
Consistency, availability, champion mentality and leader of men. It cannot be better. This is an all timer.
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For many years, I thought not having access to WyScout was a limitation on my dreams to become the best scout around. I made do with maximizing what I could from comps and glimpses.
This is the unknown story of how I turned my disadvantage into a breakthrough career 🧵/
In 2020, I was rustling with ambition and energy.
I had read everything I could find on football, from Spielverlagerung articles to Stop Bunching blogposts to StatsBomb pieces. I had gained a marvelous technical background.
I understood the theory, I knew football—on paper.
But I had one problem: turning theory into actionable insight by watching games and players.
I was in university. I couldn’t watch every game live. There wasn’t even access to most leagues beyond the top ones. I needed a way to watch players beyond those.
—I was the first to sound the alarms on INEOS with detailed explanation. I remember United tacticos trying to defend them because of hope & big names. My insight goes beyond players.
(a thread)
—I announced Arne Slot as a T3 coach in the league via his presence before any game was played and a worthy rival to Mikel Arteta and Pep Guardiola. My insight goes beyond ordinary analysis.
I don't do too many predictions anymore because they have served their usefulness as a tool for me, but these are two of the major unfolding narratives in the EPL covered above.
Henry's narrative that Arsenal are trying to not lose the title while Liverpool are attacking it is wrong.
It is a narrative that assumes player quality = manager intentions, which is one of the common fundamental errors of team analysis.
1/
Fans and analysts too often give overwhelming responsibility to the manager for player decisions, quality and luck.
The other argument is that coaches ‘build’ teams and ‘buy’ players so they must yet hold some responsibility for the kind of team they have.
This is also a fundamentally flawed argument.
Coaches, no matter how powerful in modern football, rarely get full say in signings. There is, usually, a transfer committee where interests between the coaching staff, executive management and financial officiers are balanced.
There are too many bad arguments. Perfect preservation when you are relying on documentation by memory is obviously not even possible (unless Allah somehow miraculously made it so).
Then we have various extant manuscripts that doesn't align with the standard Uthman code.
If you claim that all of this is from God, then even slight variations in style, pronunciation, punctuations, much less entire words are necessarily lethal to the claim of divinity. It shows that human error & interference was possible at least in documentation and transmission.
This is all the difference between Pep Guardiola and Mikel Arteta.
Pep adapts his game model to his player's qualities, especially the forwards. Mikel uses Vieira and Martinelli in the same way as Bukayo Saka. Talent maximization is not completely there, yet.
Although, there's something to be said about the fact that the only big distances runner Arsenal have is Gabriel Martinelli, so that's a good argument for not tweaking the game model enough to suit him.
However, he's a regular & you're meant to get the best out of your regulars.
Part of it is also the fact that Martinelli doesn't have Jesus, a frequent rotator, available. This is why I still don't blame Mikel Arteta much. Because everything can be explained.
For me, however, what cannot be explained is Vieira playing like Bukayo in a friendly