C€SC FABR€GAS HAS €L€VAT€D HIMS €LF INTO AN €LIT€ GROUP FOOTBALL €RS AND WILL B€ TH€ ARCHIT€CT OF CH€LS€A SUCC€SS Midfield maestro: Cesc Fabregas is Chelseas conductor on thepitch In Cesc Fabregas, Chelsea have a player who is not just a provider or a goalscorer but a midfield architect comparable to the likes of Pirlo, Scholes and Xavi Chelseas 3-0 victory against Aston Villa last weekend created a little tremor in my mind. It was that Cesc Fabregas 144 passes were the most in a Premier League game since Paul Scholes 148 in 2012 against Tottenham. With the extra subtlety of Cesc and Eden Hazard, especially, this Chelsea side could surpass the performance levels of recent successful Chelsea teams. The stat passed largely unnoticed but left a mark on me. Since then, ahead of Chelsea v Arsenal on Sunday, Ive been trying to decide how you measure the importance or quality of passes. What are their effect? When Im asked to choose the best player I played with throughout my career I come up with Paul Scholes. RELATED ARTICLES Cesc Fabregas: Revealing how Chelseas midfielder has dominated the Premier League Gary Neville: Ageing Manchester City are running out of time if they want to win Champions League The truth about England under Roy Hodgson: Young players are making real progress Why does Scholes stand alone? When I started to look into total passing and touches in matches over the past three or four seasons, the top 10 names point to a correlation between those players and team success. Consider those with more than 120 passes: Xavi, Thiago, Alonso, Pirlo, Iniesta, Motta, Yaya Toure, Busquets and Carrick. And you can add Schweinsteiger and Kroos. There is a common thread. They are all champions in their own country and almost all have won the Champions League. The definition of a great side to me is that it has to win the Champions League - and has to win the domestic title two or three times. Breaking it down further from there, the hardest thing to do in football can be keeping possession in the last 20 minutes against the best teams when youre 1-0 or 2-0 up. If you have 20 minutes to play against one of the elite teams the mark of superiority is that you can keep possession when a top opponent is desperate, is chasing you - when it becomes frantic, and you are the calmest players out there, because you know you can keep the ball, in what may be a hostile atmosphere. Over the last 10 years, teams that win the Champions League, domestic leagues and international tournaments tend to be those teams who can dominate possession even when theyre in front. There will always be exceptions: Greece at Euro 2004, the Rafa Benitez Liverpool team who won the Champions League in Istanbul in 2005, playing very much on the counter-attack. However, to sustain it, you have to demonstrate possession- dominating football from year to year. The number of times a player has made 120+ passes in a match since Jan 1, 2010 Xavi 24 Thiago Alcantara 5 Xabi Alonso 4 Andrea Pirlo 4 Andres Iniesta 3 Thiago Motta 3 Marco Verratti 3 Yaya Toure 3 Sergio Busquets 2 Michael Carrick 2 Cesc Fabregas 2 Which brings you back to the Fabregas type of player: the Iniesta, Pirlo, Xavi, Kroos, Scholes. These players are absolutely critical. More often that not theyre not the best goalscorers, they dont often have the best defensive characteristics in terms of strength or power or tackling, they arent the best dribblers, theyre not usually very quick. Instead they need something different to all the normal measures of a great player.
Posted on: Fri, 03 Oct 2014 23:11:08 +0000
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