Your defence is in trouble

Soccer /

When the news broke that Gabriel Jesus needed surgery for a knee injury he sustained during the World Cup, there was a sense of panic among Arsenal’s fan base. Jesús had transformed Arsenal as an attacking force and while Eddie Nketiah made quite an impression with his scoring run at the end of the previous season, many wondered if Nketiah would be able to deliver the same overall performance as Gabriel Jesús.

It sparked a debate that would have seemed unthinkable 20 years ago. The fans were generally satisfied that Nketiah would score goals. Most would have happily made the bet that he would prove more prolific than Gabriel Jesus, who has scored five goals so far this season. It was “all the other stuff” that fans were worried about.

Imagine explaining to someone 20 years ago that football fans would be happy to accept the possibility of a striker scoring more goals than the player he is replacing. It’s also a perfectly logical line, as we saw during Cristiano Ronaldo’s time at Manchester United, he scored a lot of goals, but his attacking colleagues saw his numbers drop as a result, which was negative for the team. (Allied to the fact that Ronaldo is a jerk).

It is remarkable that Arsenal never really won the league when Ian Wright was in his prime. He signed for the club when they were defending champions in 1991 and they did not win the award again until 1998, Wright’s last season in which he was badly injured. Ruud van Nistelrooy only won one league title with Manchester United in five seasons at the club.

As soon as it was sold in 2006 United moved on to a more multifaceted front line of Tevez, Rooney and Ronaldo and they won three straight league titles and a Champions League title. Teams with only one route to goal tend not to be dangerous enough compared to more democratic attacking models.

Despite Nketiah’s obvious overall improvement when he joined the team last season, it was not without reason that Arsenal fans were worried about the loss of Gabriel Jesus. Nketiah is a much, much more complete player than we were introduced to in his fledgling career at Arsenal and he has shown that over the last 12 months or so.

Arsenal had a clear advantage given the timing of Jesus’ stoppage time. Jesús was injured on December 2 and underwent surgery about five days later. At the time, the Gunners’ next competitive game was three weeks away and they had three mid-season friendlies to play as the team prepared for the return of the Premier League.

It meant that Arteta had a long preparation time to prepare. While Nketiah has clearly worked incredibly hard to develop his entire game, it would have been futile to ask Nketiah to wear a Gabriel Jesus mask and try to copy-paste the Brazilian’s approach in its entirety. No club should keep a player if he doesn’t feel comfortable asking them to play to his strengths.

Nketiah has strongly responded to his doubters through a combination of performance and final product. He deserves the rounds of applause for that because he’s clearly worked so hard for this moment and waited so long. But Mikel Arteta and his coaching staff have made some subtle but noticeable changes to the way they attack to take advantage of Eddie’s more obvious strengths.

Gabriel Jesus operates a lot as part of the left capsule of the attack, rotating with Gabriel Martinelli and Granit Xhaka, leaving the right largely to Odegaard and Saka. So let’s see what the data says, firstly about Gabriel Martinelli, who particularly enjoyed a rotating relationship with Jesus, who often veered to the left touchline in a way that Nketiah does less regularly.

With Gabriel JesusWith Eddie Nketiah Passes attempted per 9030.235.2% of passes completed per 9083.2%66.6%

I’ve only taken Premier League data since, clearly, Jesus started every Premier League game before his injury and Nketiah has started every game since, giving a direct correlation in the numbers. I also skipped the FA Cup game against Oxford, which was started by Nketiah, as the opposition standard was unrepresentative.

We see here that Martinelli now has more responsibility in possession, he is attempting more passes with a much lower success rate. Martinelli has probably gotten tired since the fall, which would explain part of the drop in his pass success rate, but the story these numbers tell me is that Nketiah doesn’t play as close to Martinelli as Jesus does.

The Brazilian has made a sacrifice, facing only the full-backs, not least because Zinchenko doesn’t really provide an overlay from left-back. Nketiah doesn’t lean into Martinelli and provides those short passing combinations or lures for Martinelli to exploit. We can see this when we look at Granit Xhaka, who plays just inside Martinelli, and the touch data from him.

He averaged 53.7 touches per game with Jesus on the team and that increased to 57.2 with Nketiah, which is a strong increase given the sample size of five games with Eddie. A quick look at the comparative contact details for Jesús and Nketiah shows why Xhaka and Martinelli are losing a bit of slack, in terms of overall participation. Eddie’s touch data is not bad at all, he is in the 88th percentile of penalty area touches, only Gabriel Jesús is in the 99th percentile. The Brazilian ruins the overall participation curve.

Gabriel Jesus Eddie Nketiah Touches by 9045.133.8

However, none of this means that Nketiah has a good time while others pick up on Gabriel Jesus. He comes at a price and that price is that Nketiah offers a superior goal threat as Martinelli and Xhaka have had to recalibrate their creative play a bit. Needless to say, Eddie is delivering in this regard.

Nketiah is not Erling Haaland, he is not going to have three touches and somehow score four goals. He has a decent level of involvement in the build, but Arteta and Arsenal haven’t asked him to become a total facsimile of Jesus. Martinelli and Xhaka, in particular, have picked up some of Jesus’ workload and allowed Nketiah to take up more central slots where he can do Eddie Nketiah stuff.

Follow me on Twitter @Stillmanator

The post Your defense is in trouble first appeared on Arseblog… an Arsenal blog.

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