Sigi praised Bradley's contributions in his Toronto post-game interview. To me, it seems that Brad adds little to the flow of play. He seems to win very few balls when on defense, has a hard time turning on the ball, seems unable to take on defenders 1v1 (ever), seems to kill momentum rather than build it, and at best doesn't turn it over. For a central midfieldder, his number of touches seems extremely low. Stats can be deceiving, but one goal or assist roughly every 3 games doesn't seem like a ton of production... I think these shortcomings are highlighted even more when he plays next to someone like Rosales. Maybe he make his contributions... off the ball? Making runs I'm not seeing, creating lanes, cutting off lanes, etc. I'm just not seeing it - someone, please help me open my eyes...
I think his value is simply that Sigi is comfortable playing him. I wouldn't say he's bad by any stretch, but I think Sigi places too much value on the things Brad does in any given game.
I've slowly come around on Evans to the point where I don't consider him completely worthless. He wins a ton of 50/50 balls, keeps things tidy as they say, and generally fills the spaces that are vacated so we maintain some shape. Although, I could probably be convinced this doesn't make up for his marginal technical and passing skills. Also, B-Rad has a fairly humorous twitter account. That's got to count for something right.
By the end of last season I was beginning to think that Evans was my new jaqua (meaning we are better off with 10 men on the field than having him in the game). But, these past 3 games he seems to be doing better. He has been more involved in the games without causing problems. There were a few times last night where one of our guys would lose the ball and Evans was in good position and got it back. Heck, he even scored a goal. Yes, it was with the back of his head or neck, but it still went in.
Yeah, that's pretty much it. That's the only thing I find him very good at. He makes smart runs without the ball to the box when is required, that's how he scores the occasional goal, and that also takes marks away from his teammates. On the other aspects of his position he just doesn't excel at all, and that's the issue I have with him. Well, It's not so much about him, but with the people that think that he actually does excel as a CM, like for instance, Sigi Schmid, who's always had a crash on the guy. He is a CM with almost zero playmaking ability. He's not a bad passer at all, but his passes have zero risk, or creativity. Just watch him receive the ball in the midfield, and see how he rarely carries or looks forward. That's ok for a DM, but a CM should have a bit more of an edge. His first instinct is to always make the safest short pass possible, which is not necessarily bad now that Rosales is the team playmaker, but remember the time when he Rosales wasn't here yet? And how Sigi would never admit (at least publicly) that there was something disfunctional with that midfield because we had "amazing" players like Brad Evans? That drove me crazy for so long, and people would misinterpret that as me hating on Evans. As a defender he's generally bad 1 on 1, but overall he's not a terrible defender. I must say he has decent positioning and he is a presence in the air. He doesn't have half the defensive ability of Alonso, but he never loses his shit, and becomes a trainwreck like Alonso does time to time (like at the last CCL game). He's a very centered, professional, hard working player, and some coaches love that over everything else. Sigi definitely does. In summary, I don't think he's either that good, or that bad. Now this is completely personal, and has to with style more than anything. I find him boring. I'd rather see a team with more talented crazy players that with good generic soldiers. But that's just me, I find it more entertaining and interesting. That doesn't mean a team with robots can't be successful.
As the wife and I were driving home last night, we both summarized Evans' performance last night as "the first time in a long time we haven't hated him." What a ringing endorsement, eh?
It is true that he does a very good job positioning himself to close off passing lanes and he covers a good amount of ground. In the game against Toronto, the stats guys credited him with 3 interceptions and 8 recoveries, which is not too far behind Alonso's 4 interceptions and 10 recoveries. On the offensive side of the ball, it's true that he doesn't contribute nearly as much as Rosales, but Rosales is out there primarily for his attacking contributions and so it's a bit of an apples to oranges comparison. I think a fairer comparison is, again, to Alonso. Brad has 9 goals and 10 assists in 60 games. Alonso has 5 goals and 9 assists in 84 games. I think that, when you compare our two central midfielders, Ozzie does the better defensive work and Brad contributes more to the sharp end of the attack. Ozzie may be the better player, but there are very few central midfielders in the league who compare favorably to Alonso. Finally, Evans does a good job making himself available for teammates, he regularly shows for the ball and helps retain possession when a teammate is short on options or in a bit of a cul-de-sac. When he get's the ball, he often shuttles it quickly to someone laterally/nearby, retaining possession and hopefully opening up the field. These contributions may not be flashy, but they're quite useful.
Thanks all for the feedback. There's a seeming consensus of "meh" when it comes to B-rad, which is definitely at odds with Sigi's man-crush, identified above. The way I phrase this is, "Bradley continues to show his value." Jonny - where are you getting these stats? I'd love to see them & take a look over them, throughout history. I almost re-watched the game just to track stats like this. Thanks!
They're available on the leagues website, go to the game recap and click on "chalkboard" then scroll over the players. They are not the be all and all of a players value, but I find them useful for testing my assumptions/observations. As far as the popular theory of Sigi's "man-crush" on Brad goes, it's clear from his continued flirtation w/ the national team that Sigi isn't the only coach out there who sees something in him.
And this here is why Sounders fans are completely wrong about Brad Evans. Brad Evans is not a CAM. He is not a playmaker. Frankly, it shocks me that after three full seasons of watching the Sounders play that Sounders fans still do not understand that Evans only plays slightly ahead of Alonso. Alonso does have more defensive responsibilities than Evans, but that does not mean that Evans is a CAM. Evans is, at best, a box to box midfielder, but more realistically, he is a CDM with some offensive responsibilities. It is completely fair to knock Evans for being injury prone, but any complaint about him not being a play maker is completely misplaced, because that is not Evans's role. If you are surprised that Sigi compliments Evans, perhaps the problem isn't Sigi, but rather it is your misunderstanding of Evans's role with this team.
According to the MLS site that has all the stats going back to 2009, Evans is 100% on pk's (3/3), whereas the rest of the team is 57% (5/9). Alonzo is also 100% with 2/2, so I guess he has some value too.
im going to bight my tongue here and say evans has started this year well. the value that evans brings can be seen in estrada's third goal saturday. he makes a deep run into box occupying 1-2 defenders that hesitate to committ to estrada as they are afraid of leaving evans alone in box. the downside of evans is his complete lack of creative forward passing. he is a possession black hole. For example: evans is the one that should be passing the ball up to forwards but it took ozzy to do this (recall the pass to montero with a slight flick to rosales-who should have scored but eckersly tackle was well times). Evans should be the one doing this...but he cannot. he hesitates on the direct pass and prefers the square pass. too often do we have a fast dynamic play about to happen and then comes the "pull my hair out" square pass that slows the action down and lets their defensive shape recover.
I think Evans fills our "Workhorse" role. It is useful to have a guy that just keeps going so long as you aren't a team full of them (unless they also happened to be skilled). Roger also plays this role and I would have said Estrada too but he has shown some finishing skill now so maybe he is more than just work rate. I think it can be useful to sacrifice a bit of technical skill for a guy that can run for days and will be everywhere all the time. In regards to that though, more than 1 or 2 of those type of guys and you can see it falling apart.
We're pretty sophisticated soccer watchers. But there's a lot we miss by focusing on goals, assists, and passes. To describe Evan's value I'm going to use a non-soccer analogy. Evans is like a football interior lineman (offensive or defensive). He prevents the other team from doing what they want in the midfield and helping make our attacks possible. His contributions, like a lineman, aren't often in the stats. He makes runs to open up holes for other attackers. He gets a fair number of interceptions/blocks or forces someone into making a bad pass that someone else intercepts. He and Alonso are our best pressers (better than any of our defenders) and best at closing down passing lanes in the midfield. He's very good in the air. He's got a great work rate. He's our best pk taker since Seba.
Muchas gracias - the chalkboard, in spite of its limits, in interesting - see below. I think the only reason he's getting called up is that Sigi's pushing him on Bradley or Klinsi. Yoshou - there's a lot of pointing out of what Evans *is not*, but not a lot of pointing out of what Evans *is*, which I think is why so many fans are having a hard time figuring out what he does. I'm not sure that all fans are "completely wrong" about Bradley. He certainly does seem to let the ball come to him and is content to contain where others seem inclined to tackle, etc. See the stats below - I'd love to have a better understanding of what % of Evan's successful passes are backward or square instead of switching or forward. Well... let's see what the stats say, anyway. I used the Chalkboard feature that Jonny B pointed out, and tallied up a set of stats for 12 games. Brad played the full 90 in 10 of them and 71 in the other 2. As Yoshou points out, it's not easy to track down games where Brad played a lot, as he was out for some pretty serious stretches last year. Here's what they showed: Code: Total Ave Per 90 Min Totals Evans Ozzie Evans Ozzie Min 1042 1080 90 90 Touches 996 1292 86 108 Successful Passes 390 554 34 46 Unsuccessful Passes 122 129 11 11 Tackles Won 12 59 1 5 Tackles Lost 5 11 0 1 Interceptions 21 26 2 2 Recoveries 78 132 7 11 Tackled and possession lost 150 175 13 15 Fouls won 9 16 1 1 As people have pointed out, there's a lot that isn't in the stats, but... where is "it" that Brad does? He's clearly not a tackler. Compared to Ozzie's passing, I *feel* like Brad's passes are less constructive than Ozzie's, even though he plays in front of Ozzie, even if just slightly. He also turns over the ball with passes and by getting tackled far more frequently than Ozzie, relative to the number of touches. It's just hard for me to figure out how a guy in the middle is getting credited for his off the ball runs, regardless of whether he's defending or attacking.
Main Man pretty much covered what Evans is. Evans is a CDM with some offensive responsibilities. His role is to disrupt the possession of the other team in the midfield, to provide an outlet for our wingers and forwards to maintain possession, and to make offensive runs to attract the attention from their defenders.
I think the numbers only confirm the fact that Alonso is the primary tackler and ball-winner on the field, and he's one of the best in the league. W/ regard to turn-overs, I think that's also to be expected as Evans plays slightly ahead of Alonso (the farther you go forward, the lower the pass completion percentage, look at Montero's or Rosales'). As an example of what I mean in comparison w/ Alonso, look at the distribution maps for Evans and Alonso in the Toronto game. Alonso's distribution map: 56 total instances recorded 35 originate in defensive half (62.5%) 24 originate below the center circle (42.8%) Evans distribution map: 43 total instances recorded 25 originate in defensive half (58%) 12 originate below the center circle (27.9%) What this tells me is that while Alonso is receiving and passing the ball a lot more than Evans, virtually all of the disparity can be traced to passes deep in our end of the field. Alonso played 13 more passes total, and 12 of those came from below the circle in our half of the field, most going sideways or backwards. Ozzie's the go to guy when playing on the ground out of the back, and that improves his numbers (both passes and touches) significantly. If you switched Alonso's and Evans' positions on the field, you'd probably see the disparity in touches and passes decrease dramatically. As far as what Evans brings that Alonso doesn't, he's got twice the goals in 70% of the games, and more assists as well. He also applies pressure higher up the field, forcing iffy passes that Alonso can then snap up. This isn't to say that I think his game is on par with Alonso's, if we had two Ozzies Sigi might well choose to start both of them. But there's only one Ozzie, and he's one of the best (if not the best) central midfielder's in the league. Most guys put next to him will suffer by comparison. Finally, Klinsi don't give a **** what Sigi thinks, and neither did Bradley. Evans made it into those camps and earned those caps on merit.
You would have to go find the information, but I believe it is the Castrol Index which tracks pretty much everything a player does and then gives it a value. Things like passes that contribute positively to an attack are rated higher than a random back pass that just simply maintains possession. Before Evans got injured last year, he was the top Sounder and I think ranked 2nd overall? Granted it was a small sample size. But it goes to show that people who actually sit down and make note of pretty much every single thing that happens on the field were seeing Evans contribute positively to the game based on their methodology.
Thanks all for helping me point my eyes in a little different direction. Jonny B's last analysis seems to point out an easy discriminator - watch where Brad and Ozzie are injecting themselves into play the most - which side of the midfield stripe. Then, judge the type of play more on that basis, especially wrt the flow of the game. Yoshou & Main Man - muchas gracias. As for the scoring value add, I'm still not sold, especially if Brad's extra goals have come from PKs. Asoc - thanks for the reminder about the Castrol Index. I've always been as suspect of it as I have of the stats I posted, but here's the quick reference: Last year: from MLS Castrol Index Code: Overall Name Minutes Castrol Index Score 1 Chris Wondolowski 2672 9.31 2 Alvaro Fernandez 1845 9.26 19 Fredy Montero 2302 8.71 27 Jeff Parke 2386 8.55 38 Osvaldo Alonso 2891 8.35 51 Jhon Kennedy Hurtado 1943 8.15 61 James Riley 2578 8.01 67 Mauro Rosales 1868 7.93 89 Tyson Wahl 1989 7.66 145 Kasey Keller 3060 7.08 149 Erik Friberg 1894 7.04 153 Brad Evans 1509 7.01
I'm not a big fan of statistics when it comes to soccer. There are things in soccer that is not shown in statistics. For example, in Estrada's third goal, Evans is in good position in front of the goal mouth. First, he keeps Estrada onside; second, Maund is marking him and can't let him go leaving Eckersley alone to handle both Fernandez and Estrada. But you really can't find Evan's effort in the statistics except maybe in the heat map. There also a lot of positive actions that were treated negatively by stats. For example, Johansson or Rosales made a good cross that seems to be landing somewhere in the penalty area with a fairly good chance that it will hit the forehead of Fernandez. But it is unlucky that the defender was able to properly guard the cross. This will still record as an unsuccessful pass.
All well worth remembering, there's always something more behind the numbers, or some ambiguity in the interpretation, in soccer.
Say what you want about Evans, but as of the moment, I would give him a very high value because of this. We have a lot of games last 2011 that ended in a draw/loss because of a missed PK. I even think that we could've won the shield if we scored all of our PK's. Unless Sigi could solve our PK situation, I don't want Evans on the bench.