You'd be wrong then.
Press Resistant Midfielder
- Thread starter quiet_united
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Really? How is that?
Just to make sure my visual impression from watching the games wasn't completely fooling me, I checked the stats.
21/22, he was 12th percentile in disposessions, losing the ball almost two times/90.
20/21 he was even worse, being dispossessed 2.39 times/90. In other words, 95% of midfielders lost the ball less than he did.
19/20, exact same figure as 20/21.
18/19, worse still - 2.66/90, 3rd percentile. 97% of midfielders did a better job than him not losing the ball.
In other words, throughout his PL career, he was one of the worst midfielders in the PL when it came to not losing posession of the ball. Press resistant? Right.
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Pogba often took too long on the ball, and ended up getting crowded out and losing it. That's the opposite of press resistant. It was more mental, than physical/technical for him.
It’s the current phrase used to shit on our players whilst praising everyone else.
I guarantee if we signed De Jong he’d be picked apart within a game or two for playing the odd loose pass.
I was hoping that we would get a young, talented, physical, press resistant ball carrier that can sustain pressure in deeper areas and help us progress the ball. The famously elusive Frenkie de Jong archetype whom our manager desperately wanted(chased) - and i completely understand why. Bernardo Silva, Mateo Kovacic also belong to this type of players.
Someone like Kouadio Kone, Khephren Thuram, Ryan Gravenberch(ETH's former associate) would have been splendid. That was the signing i was hoping for this summer but was left disappointed. Some of them may go to Liverpool and i'll be furious when they succeed.
Selling of Scott McTominay and addition of a young Casemiro understudy/cover(Caicedo, Lavia, Ugarte...), or even an experienced back up like Amrabat would have been great as well. Our midfield would've suddenly looked rejuvenated, reformed with the additional, potential emergence of a talent like Kobbie Mainoo. But, here we are.
Someone like Kouadio Kone, Khephren Thuram, Ryan Gravenberch(ETH's former associate) would have been splendid. That was the signing i was hoping for this summer but was left disappointed. Some of them may go to Liverpool and i'll be furious when they succeed.
Selling of Scott McTominay and addition of a young Casemiro understudy/cover(Caicedo, Lavia, Ugarte...), or even an experienced back up like Amrabat would have been great as well. Our midfield would've suddenly looked rejuvenated, reformed with the additional, potential emergence of a talent like Kobbie Mainoo. But, here we are.
We're falling into this trap that press resistance in solely an individual attribute. It's nice to see a midfielder break away from 3 players but there's more to it than individual capacity.
Pogba was press resistant. He regularly took opposition players out of the game to start promising attacks for us. Technically he was sublime and extremely skilful. His issues were a lack of awareness and an overconfidence when it came to using his strength to hold off multiple players. The lack of tactical structure in the team didn't help his cause either. I remember as a young kid, he came on as a sub in Bilbao and was one of the shining lights in what was a poor performance by the team. Even then it was evident how comfortable and confident he was in possession when pressed.
He would have been the best option alongside Frenkie, regardless of their availabilities. Maybe we can go after him next summer but then again we'll have many other positions to strenghen..
he cost us a goal at least a season minimum dawdling on the ball
Yet how many opportunities did he create by taking multiple players out of the game?
Herrera..
I honestly can't think of 2 more different players. Ander Herrera was a good player, no world beater but did well for us.
yeah, agreed. he'd be a fantastic addition but we'll probably need to strengthen a couple of other positions first.
Well, that's a....different perspective at the very least.Herrera..
Yeah, great player. But to suggest he was press resistant is just absurd. It's as simple as that. He obviously, clearly, flagrantly isn't. How anyone can think otherwise after watching him frequently is incredible to me, and even if you manage that, the stats tell a very, very, very clear story.
Whether he's prone to losing the ball because of technical deficiencies or bad judgment (overconfidence and lack of awareness) is really irrelevant. If you lose the ball more frequently than almost everyone else in your position, you're not press resistant. Period.
I think you're right.
I don't know what people see sometimes. I mean I think I'm extremely pessimistic/overly critical if anything, but there's almost always something like this on here claiming our players can't do some basic thing that if you watch, you can clearly see them doing. In this case we have two midfielders who can do it better than most other team's players (excluding City).
I think it was a problem before last season, but even then, it was often more to do with our set up, general performance levels, or players just wanting to play at half the speed of the opposition, than being technically or physically incapable of doing it.
I remember an aged Scholes coming on vs Barcelona in the 2009 final and being the only one on the pitch who looked like he had any time on the ball.
Mount is only 24 and plays a different position. He's pressing higher up the pitch and makes it so Bruno isn't the one doing that. He's also kind of making up for Rashford's lack of pressing who I think honestly can be a problem in our setup.
I agree that Rashford is a problem in our set-up.
I love the kid but I'm getting concerned that we need someone there (in the future) who is better in possession and can track back more and press too.
And yes, I'm aware Mount plays higher up the pitch.
I'm saying that I would have gone for Kovacic to play deeper next to Casemiro instead of the formation we've been using in pre-season and against Wolves.
MacAllister was a nobrainer upgrade on Eriksen.
Surprised by the Pogba mentions. He’s big and strong, but turned the ball over too often leading to opposition chances due to lollygagging and dwelling on it. He didn’t even need to be double teamed.
Scholes was good and more recently and to a lesser extent I’d say Herrera
Scholes was good and more recently and to a lesser extent I’d say Herrera
looking for a press-resistant midfielder who can come up against 4-5 players at once, does such thing exist in this world? 
Dispossessed and press resistant I don't think are the same thing. It's fine to attempt a trick when you're out on the LW / at #10 and lose the ball. During the build-up phase, he was fairly good at being press resistant but partly due to the lack of any build up patterns on our part and partly because he was overly casual he gave the ball away deep leading to trouble.
Still, a guy with his technique / strength / power not being press resistant would be strange.
MacAllister definitely the one that got away, half the price of Mount as well....
Surprised no one has mentioned Anderson .
I think some people say him because obviously he could be extremely press resistant if he wanted to be just based on his attributes. He just chose to fanny about like an idiot half the time.
Yea he definitely had the tools to be. That made his time here doubly disappointing.
Of course not. But it's hard to see how you could be considered press resistant if you give the ball away more than 90% of the other players in your position. If the explanation was what you say, then there'd be similar high values for our other midfielders and attackers. So maybe you could check if that's the case before making that argument. And again, in my view you don't even need the statistical side of the argument - it's blatantly obvious from eye test alone.