mancinimadness said:
completly one dimensional and lacking of any pace something we need in games like today .
It's getting really stupid, this harping on about Dzeko's pace. I wrote about this in the matchday thread, but it got lost in the avalanche so I'll post it again. It'll be long, but I'd like to try and settle this issue. This could probably be a separate thread, but I'll leave it to the mods to decide.
In the several years that I've followed Dzeko's career, I've never heard so many people focusing so much on his supposed lack of pace than now that he's gotten to England. No offense, but I blame it on the Anglo-saxon (it's the same way in the States) outlook on sports and athletics, which basically boils down to power, speed, power, speed, power, spe... ad nauseam.
Well the past few days I was working on a compilation of his play against Villa (here it is btw: <a class="postlink" href="http://hotfile.com/dl/100358745/0b57f08/EDprotivAVkomp.wmv.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://hotfile.com/dl/100358745/0b57f08 ... p.wmv.html</a>) where I cut the game down to every single time he touched the ball, and while I was at it I figured I would look into just how slow he really was compared to the average Premiership player. After all, I read in a couple of forums about just how
shockingly slow he was for a center forward.
So here's what I did. Every time I came upon a play where Dzeko was sprinting at top speed, in a straight line and with the ball either straight ahead of him or reasonably heading there, I timed just how long it took him to travel 10.5 meters. That's the equivalent of two of those alternating stripes of grass that you see on English pitches, so it was an easy reference point. I slowed down the video and looked at it in the hundredths of a second, to determine exactly when his foot touched the beginning of one of the lines and when his foot touched the second one after that. I also did the same exact thing for a handful of other players who found themselves in similar situations in the game.
Admittedly, it's not a very long distance, but at the same time, the players very rarely ran significantly farther than that (and when they did they tended to maintain the same top speed), so the point is moot.
Anyways, the results. After looking at a good 20+ runs made by City and Villa players, I found that in hard numbers Dzeko really wasn't any slower than many of his teammates / opponents.
In fact, he consistently ran the distance I measured in the exact same time as Ashley Young and Marc Albrighton, two of Villa's offensive midfielders. He was slower than some of the City players, such as Boateng, but he was also faster than others, such as Tevez.
The ironic thing is that I never particularly hear fans, commentators, etc. dwell on just how
slow Carlos Tevez is, much less Ashley Young, but when I actually looked at the game in the hundredths of a second he consistently matched Young and outstripped Tevez.
I think part of it is probably that, as a taller player, he takes longer strides and his runs might simply look slower to a naked eye. Part of it is also probably psychological, since people keep saying that he's slow so the average skeptic will dwell on any perceived lack of pace far more than he would with, say, Ashley Young.
It's also possible that his acceleration bogs him down, especially coming off the month-long break, but that's harder to measure because of the countless sorts of situations in which a football player starts actually running - I just focused on top speed. There's also agility, which is definitely a factor since he so often has to make turns and change directions, especially when he drops deep to retrieve the ball as he's constantly had to do due to lack of midfield support. For a big man, this could understandably be an issue compared to, say, Tevez or Silva.
All that said, in terms of that much-talked-about, fabled "pace," I'm now convinced that Dzeko is no slower than the average offensive player in the Premiership. Not especially fast, but by no means slow.
Interestingly, Football Manager (which, although a computer game, has an extensive scouting database) seems to agree with what I've found: it assigns Dzeko roughly the same value for pace as Ashley Young (15 vs. 16), but places both of them behind Boateng (18). It also pins Tevez as somewhat slower (13). From what I've seen, that's pretty much right.
Now obviously there are some limitations to this kind of analysis, but I think it serves its purpose. If you wanted to settle a players top speed once and for all you'd probably do best to have them run the 100 meters and then electronically time them. If you want to see how well they meet the demands of pace in modern football, though, then I think this gives you a pretty good rough idea.
I occasionally make these play-by-play compilations, so I'll keep looking at this as the season goes on out of curiosity.
But for now, let's please stop with this stupid maxim that, based on his first few games, Dzeko is somehow especially slow by Premiership standards - it's just not true.