In my continuing effort to understand the game better, I have been trying to focus on different areas. In judging players, rightly or wrongly, I have put a lot of weight on the passing game. Essentially, the way I view passing is this: Whether you are a possession oriented team or a direct team, I figure that whenever you pass the ball it's a failure if it leads to the other team taking possession. There are probably different degrees of success/failure, but is that more or less a fair assessment, or is it too simplistic? Also, not all passes are created equal. Maybe player A never misses a pass, but he is also constantly recycling it through the players behind him. Or maybe player B likes to send long passes to his forwards where there is greater risk / more reward. Is it easy to tell when a pass goes awry at whom shares the lion's share of the blame or when someone playing in a forward role has to come back to retrieve an apparently errant pass? At any rate, I am really fascinated with this part of the game. I would love any discussion whether pertaining to my initial views or what you look for or anything passing related. Thanks as always!
I am very intersted in the topic myself, but i am not sure what do you want me to say about it. For starters i can share with you a very interesting article, slightly off topic, but i'm sure you won't mind that: http://thesefootballtimes.co/2017/0...on-making-in-the-professional-and-youth-game/
Not all passes being equal is what fans say in the USA Men forum. There can be times when it can be hard to say if losing possession should be blamed on the passer or the player attempting to receive the pass. It's also possible for Player X to complete 90% of his passes without contributing to his team scoring and Player Y to complete 60% of his passes and contribute to his team scoring without his bad passes contributing to Team X scoring.
What you are describing is different selection of passes, but that is down to role you have in your team and system your team plays. For example, Messi is allowed to be carefree with his passes, because he is playing in more advanced positions, which isn't case for Busquets who has to be more careful. Passing and decision making is the most delicate skill in entire football, that's why midfielders are never judged by statistics. You have to watch them play to get an overal idea on how good they are, how frequently they make a good decision and how frequently they fail to do so.
Depends on what types of midfielders they are. Think about the two archetypes of defensive midfielders, 'Ball-winner' and 'Anchorman' (most fall somewhere in the middle.) If we're talking about a ball-winning midfielder, then interceptions and tackles and distance covered is actually a pretty good indication. If we're talking about anchorman, it becomes much more difficult as the best anchorman can do his job very well with very little statistical proof. Some of the best games I've seen of someone like Gilberto Silva is him shutting down the opponent's no.10 so well that everytime the no.10 gets the ball, he has to release the ball out wide. Makelele in his latter years would force teams to attack down the flanks just because he locked down Zone 14.