James Ward-Prowse

[KangarooVillan]

I mean, to everyone who says he will improve our ball retention and complains about the passing of our existing midfield...

[AVTuco]

Just do it. 50 is ok.

[Killeen30]

2 hours ago, Delphinho123 said:

I find it slightly annoying that an injured Sanson is probably the reason we can't bring in a player like Ward Prowse. Never really got that signing. 

Sorry but why can’t we bring in a player like Ward-Prowse? Who actually said we can’t?

[thunderball]

I would rather some else: Anguissa, Bissouma, Sarr, Doucoure (and today McKennie) all suggest they have different attributes but better defensive ones with a good progressive element to them and possibly higher ceiling, and they would be cheaper. JWP is English and on the cusp of being an international which does count for a lot, especially in value terms.

But I also want Damsgaard too.

[villa89]

2 hours ago, Delphinho123 said:

I find it slightly annoying that an injured Sanson is probably the reason we can't bring in a player like Ward Prowse. Never really got that signing. 

an injured sanson is another reason to sign JWP. It's not replacing one midfielder with another, we are trying to build a squad. 

What price he is he'll be overpriced. You pay a premium for a player who you know will settle in straight away and make an instant impact. I would prefer to trust the scouts to sign two player from abroad for the same money but I guess wages need to be factored in too. 

[ejs1111]

7 minutes ago, KangarooVillan said:

I mean, to everyone who says he will improve our ball retention and complains about the passing of our existing midfield...

looks about 50/50

[sidcow]

Just now, ejs1111 said:

looks about 50/50

It's been a while. 

[PieFacE]

3 hours ago, Delphinho123 said:

I find it slightly annoying that an injured Sanson is probably the reason we can't bring in a player like Ward Prowse. Never really got that signing. 

Well, we didn't sign him to be injured

[omariqy]

Really hope we don’t spend £50m on JWP

[YLN]

I don't have an opinion on this signing. I hadn't really heard of him, but here's what i think.

JWP is a player who plays for Southampton. I think he is good at free kicks from reading this thread and i recall him scoring goals against us last season or the season before. £50 million seems like too much. We should be trying to get Frank Lampard for that kind of money.

I would say keep the money and invest it in Ethereum and S&P500

[MessiWillSignForVilla]

23 minutes ago, KangarooVillan said:

I mean, to everyone who says he will improve our ball retention and complains about the passing of our existing midfield...

That's because FBRef count crosses and set pieces in their pass completion %, stats where a completion stat of 25%+ is very good, and JWP has the most dead ball passes in the league, so naturally his total % is going to be dragged down a bit. His short and medium pass % are both around 90.3% which is pretty good.

Even if we take that stat at face value, it's still better than McGinn's 77%.

[KangarooVillan]

19 minutes ago, MessiWillSignForVilla said:

That's because FBRef count crosses and set pieces in their pass completion %, stats where a completion stat of 25%+ is very good, and JWP has the most dead ball passes in the league, so naturally his total % is going to be dragged down a bit. His short and medium pass % are both around 90.3% which is pretty good.

Even if we take that stat at face value, it's still better than McGinn's 77%.

I see your point, but both Nakamba and Dougie have %’s for short and medium passes basically at 90% and that doesn’t stop a fair chunk of this forum moaning about it...

[dont_do_it_doug.]

2 hours ago, Laughable Chimp said:

You're right. I wasn't making any detailed analysis with that post, just giving my thoughts from what I see from the statistics and in some cases just reiterating what I said a week ago with my post on why I think James Ward Prowse is just Douglas Luiz with dead ball ability.

To address some of your concerns, 

- Ward-Prowse completes 0.39 dribbles per 90 minutes. That's about a single successful dribble every 3 games with a 65.2 percentage success rate compared to Luiz's 0.78 completed dribbles per 90 with a 72.7 percent success rate. Meanwhile, every other stat from progressive carries to carrying distance gives Luiz the edge if only slightly. I don't think any context is really necessary here, its pretty clear that Luiz is the better dribbler and ball carrier.

- Yes, I do think the ability to carry the ball and progress the ball is something that's very important for most midfielders(sans pure destroyers) including JWP and the role we would want him to play. Hence, why I thought it deserved a mention. 

- The question as to whether Mcginn and JWP take on the same position on the pitch is difficult to answer. Technically, Mcginn actually played DM for quite a lot of games last season according to whoscored whilst JWP played entirely in CM. So at first glance it seems like if anything this context makes JWP look worse. However, I understand that sometimes these sites listing their positions aren't that accurate. Plus their positions don't always define their roles and I think most of us would agree that even if Mcginn technically played at DM last season, he was never actually one in reality.

Sofascore has heat maps of these players but honestly, I suck at reading heat maps. Knowing that, both look rather similar to me.

Mcginn touches the ball in the attacking pen at 1.49 touches per 90 compared to JWP's 0.61 per 90 fbref. Their corresponding statistics in the attacking 3rd per 90 are 14.19 and 18.24 respectively. Several ways to take this. 1.49 compared to 0.61 is a large difference relatively but is it large enough in absolute terms to justify the difference in shot creation? I'm not so sure. Plus, as I've shown, in the attacking 3rd as a whole JWP actually has more of the ball in this position. Further caveats are that since I'm talking about open play, I should ignore touches that are from free kick positions in the attacking 3rd but I don't really have the data for that. Secondly, proportionally compared to the total amount of touches both players get, 23 percent of JWP's touches happen to be to the attacking 3rd whereas 30 percent for Mcginn.

Honestly, there's so many ways to pull this that you could argue in several directions depending on which specific statistic you use and whether you consider the numbers relatively or in absolute terms. In my personal opinion, I don't think the differences in the positions both players take up actually matters that much in explaining the difference in shot creation. What perhaps matters more is the roles both players play. I don't think JWP is trying to pick apart defences with his carries and passes as much as Mcginn. Now, that also suggests he isn't particularly good at the job at open play shot creation that Mcginn in. He's not a new player, he's been around for a couple of seasons now. I think its clear if he happened to be good at this role, he'd actually been given this role. And as I mentioned in the post you quoted, him having a rate of only 1 assist in open play per 90 for the past 4 seasons suggest that this is true of him for a while now.

- As I also mentioned previously, I do not find the arguments that "he plays for a poor team" very convincing. Partly because I have 0 idea how to adjust the statistics to reflect that. There have been many cases of arguments being made for players these, only for them to move on to a better team to fail. Put simply, its a **** gamble to assume that a players performances being poorer in a poor team is because they play in a poor team and they'd magically become better if they went to a better team. Sometimes that's the case, sometimes not. No one really knows. Plus, it could entirely be the case that Southampton being a shit team is due to JWP himself not being very good in open play.

My personal theory is that top-performing players at clubs are capable of performing at their level because the team has been built around them to accentuate their strengths and hide their weaknesses. This makes them perform better than they actually are. On the other hand, they also clearly have worse teammates around them which should have a negative affect on their performance. I'd like to think both effects cancel out but most likely, which effect is stronger is very situational. Trying to guess which effect is stronger is not something I can do with the numbers I have. However, most of the time I see no real reason to think any single effect is stronger so I just assume that it cancels out. There's no point trying to adjust for something you can't predict. 

Hence, why I ignore arguments about how "player" plays for a poor team.

- I don't think its debatable that he's a worse defender than Nakamba. I'm rather confused by this problem you have because you don't seem to disagree with me that Nakamba is a better defender? You mention that he is not a very good footballer which I assume you mean to be in terms of being able to play the ball and to which I agree and also reflects in his on the ball statistics but that wasn't the point I was making here. I was just saying that he is better defensively than JWP.

You did mention a bit about positioning and honestly, positioning is one of those abilities that's not really captured in the statistics. Its why I don't like to look at defenders in particular centre backs stats because I think a lot of their ability comes from their ability to position themselves correctly and not necessarily tackling, intercepting and other active defensive stats which can measure. However, for a defensive midfielder, I think we should expect that a lot of his defensive statistics do correlate with how well he is defensively because they need to be active in breaking up play instead of just passively positioning themselves. Furthermore, I actually don't really think Nakamba is suspect positioning wise and I have no reason to think JWP is good at it.

-I've hope I've included enough context in the post above. I was gonna go on a rant a bit about "context" and just statistics here, not necessarily related to just football but felt like it was too long anyway.

 

 

I thought I would compound the tl;dr issue by responding in a manner befitting of the effort you have clearly put into it!

I don't think I adequately explained the point I was trying to make in my initial post. I have been a 'stats guy' long before it became the go to thing for discussing footballers. I have watched baseball for as long as I have football and that is a sport in which almost everything is captured by statistics. So I don't find statistical representation daunting at all, nor the task of trying to interpret them. I also appreciate the value of them in assessing a players performance, and in deed their overall value to a team.

However baseball, unlike football, is a static and finite game. It is pitcher vs batter vs defence. Pitcher vs batter outcomes are relatively simple to measure on the macro level, a bit more challenging on the micro level, but doable. For example, what did batter A do vs pitcher A in this situation, what value can we assign to that outcome and what happens if you string those outcomes together? The one area in which baseball has always struggled to quantify outcomes, aside from intangibles like leadership of course (which matters), is with defence. What happens when the ball is in play? What route does defender A take to the ball, where were they set up when the ball left the bat and how did they go about completing the play from there? You'd think this might not be that hard to pin down in order to provide a finite value to defender A, but it has proved almost impossible. And Baseball has been dealing with statistics for a century or more before Moneyball was even a twitch in Brad Pitts nutsack. 

Football on the other hand, is not static at all. There are an almost infinite amount of outcomes to every single phase of play. Players are moving all over the pitch at any given moment, systems are designed to be employed and countered on a rolling basis. Play by play. You can measure some outcomes with relative ease, like xG for example. But trying to quantify the value of a footballer in any given system is incredibly difficult unless you are privy to the nuances of that system and what particular tools a club are looking for in any given situation. For example, how can we know with any real certainty what Villa are looking for from their next central midfielder unless they tell us outright? How can we say with any specificity whether James Ward-Prowse fulfils that role better than Douglas Luiz, or Marvelous Nakamba? 

Maybe they don't think they need a deep lying midfielder as good as Nakamba in the defensive phase, perhaps with better ball retention skills they believe can make up for that in the aggregate? He's not as good a ball carrier as Luiz, at least not in Southamptons system vs Villas, and perhaps he's not as dangerous in the final 3rd as McGinn (although to write off his dead ball ability is ludicrous, tbh), but perhaps they think his all-round contribution within the confines of the system, is enough to make up for these deficiencies? After all, there's nothing stopping us using all 3 midfielders, or rotating them in and out depending on the opponent. 

In short, taking a few statistics here and there and applying them in a rudimentary 1v1 fashion is a fools errand. Football clubs, our football club, employ entire departments to sift through the data, using algorithms way beyond anything we are currently able lay our hands on in order to tell them exactly what they (think) they need. That doesn't mean we can't have opinions on players, on what we think the team needs, and that we shouldn't use statistics to try and demonstrate this. Far from it, I am not suggesting that at all. But at the same time we should not dismiss the eye test in these conversations, as a layman in particular there is still a great deal to be gained from watching a player, looking beyond the raw numbers and understanding what they bring to a team and whether that fits the role we think the club should look to fill. 

We know James Ward-Prowse is a good player, I don't think there's anyone who has watched him who can say with a straight face that he isn't. And actually that is borne out in the numbers too, he's a good all rounder. Do I think he is worth £50m? No, probably not. Do I trust Villa to have identified a particular set of attributes they want, tangible and intangible? Yes, definitely. They seem to think he fits the bill and until we see him in the shirt and within the system, I suppose I am suggesting that we trust their judgement until proven otherwise.

Trust the process.

[dont_do_it_doug.]

29 minutes ago, KangarooVillan said:

I see your point, but both Nakamba and Dougie have %’s for short and medium passes basically at 90% and that doesn’t stop a fair chunk of this forum moaning about it...

Exhibit A. We all know Nakamba is horrible on the ball, yet somehow his short/medium range passing isn't half as atrocious statistically as you would think. How we go about interpreting that data and amalgamating it with the eye test is where the magic happens.

[CVByrne]

1 hour ago, KangarooVillan said:

I mean, to everyone who says he will improve our ball retention and complains about the passing of our existing midfield...

 

He attempts signifcantly more passes than McGinn/Luiz do. He also attempts many progressive passes (ie those into penalty box or 10 yards further forward than the last 6 passes). these have more risk / reward, McGinn does lots of these too and that impacts his completed passes stats. 

[Laughable Chimp]

4 minutes ago, dont_do_it_doug. said:

Exhibit A. We all know Nakamba is horrible on the ball, yet somehow his short/medium range passing isn't half as atrocious statistically as you would think. How we go about interpreting that data and amalgamating it with the eye test is where the magic happens.

My interpretation would be most of his passes are safe sideways and backward passes. As evidenced by his pathetically low progressive passing stats.

It also means that when he does misplace one of these safe passes, it puts a lot more pressure on the defence than one of Mcginn's searching long balls forwards for instance.

To some extent, I also think that sometimes we just buy into narratives of players that simply are not true. I distinctly remember people thinking Ross Barkley would add "bite" to our midfield before he joined us or that Bertrand Traore was fast. The eye test isn't free from bias after all, perhaps Nakamba really isn't as bad at passing as we think he is.

[John]

1 hour ago, YLN said:

I don't have an opinion on this signing. I hadn't really heard of him, but here's what i think.

JWP is a player who plays for Southampton. I think he is good at free kicks from reading this thread and i recall him scoring goals against us last season or the season before. £50 million seems like too much. We should be trying to get Frank Lampard for that kind of money.

I would say keep the money and invest it in Ethereum and S&P500

I think we would get him for a lot less, after all he is 43 now... 

I remember HDE once said that he had matched an £11m Chelsea bid for Frank, he had waited until the player had signed his contract before he had put that bid in though, just to be 100% sure that he would not actually have had to find the £11m.   

[dont_do_it_doug.]

Just now, Laughable Chimp said:

To some extent, I also think that sometimes we just buy into narratives of players that simply are not true. I distinctly remember people thinking Ross Barkley would add "bite" to our midfield before he joined us or that Bertrand Traore was fast. The eye test isn't free from bias after all, perhaps Nakamba really isn't as bad at passing as we think he is.

Except to say that once we watched those players in a Villa shirt, we quickly realised that Bertrand Traore wasn't fast and Ross Barkley had less bite than yer nan after she has plonked her teeth in the glass.

I was guilty of falling for the narrative around Barkley myself, despite his physicality I had never really noticed him having 'bite' in the past, but enough people were saying it that I thought it must be true to some extent. It was never in the numbers either. 

[KangarooVillan]

8 minutes ago, CVByrne said:

 

He attempts signifcantly more passes than McGinn/Luiz do. He also attempts many progressive passes (ie those into penalty box or 10 yards further forward than the last 6 passes). these have more risk / reward, McGinn does lots of these too and that impacts his completed passes stats. 

I don’t really know what your point is about him attempting significantly more passes other than he gets more touches? Especially considering these stats are averaged over a year.

His progressive passes would mostly be his free kicks and corners that are successful...

[jimmygreaves]

Get him bought.... He's class.