Written by Mark Brus on Saturday, November 14, 2009

I don't know how many of you pay attention to who writes what around here, so this may not interest you very much, but up until the 2nd of February 2008 I used to write on here all the time.

For most of the 07/08 season I was very surprised at how well we were playing and couldn't understand if we were overachieving, or if we'd been underachieving in the two seasons prior to that. For the first time in my life as an opinionated football fan, I looked at our team and simply didn't know how good we were, or what being a good footballer even meant, so I stopped writing, because I basically had nothing to write about, but I've been thinking about writing about my confusion for a while.

I felt like I'd watched so much football in so much detail that I realised how ridiculous it is that people feel they can somehow attempt to 'sum up' an entire match, never mind an entire season. A match, even a half of a match is just made up of moments, and decisions. A player like Fabregas can have the ball in the middle of the pitch and can do a number of different things with it, which also depends on how the players around him, on his side and the opposition, choose to behave, and different teams might tend to go into games with a different mentality, which might be pressure from their manager to play a certain way, and of course these days, the increasing pressure of the media, or even the atmosphere in the stadium at the time. Everything has some kind of impact.

And Fabregas will find himself in that situation hundreds of times in just one match, but we call him a good player because the vast majority of the time he will make what seems to be the right decision; he rarely gives the ball away, no matter how ambitious his pass, he has an incredible record of making it near-perfect. That tends to make us think he's really good at passing, and people on forums or pundits on TV will say things like "he has great vision" and "he sees things that other players don't", but I feel like it's more than that.

Fans all over the world scream from the stands or at their tellies, telling the players what to do, and often we're frustrated. How is it that a player like Robbie Savage, who played in the Premiership for probably a decade, doesn't often make as good passes as a youngster like Fabregas was making at the age of 17?

Did it help that Fabregas came into a team of exceptionally talented players? Not many 17-year-old footballers will walk into a side and play with Thierry Henry, Dennis Bergkamp and Robért Píres, and players like Savage can play a whole career and never come close to playing with players of that calibre.

He might have found it easier to pass to them because they were so good at receiving the ball, making him look good. The mere fact that Fabregas was playing for the name Arsenal makes him slightly more intimidating. You almost feel that opposition will automatically fear any player wearing that shirt just a little bit more. And once Fabregas plays some good passes for a season, he builds up a reputation of being the kind of player that does that, and then what? His team-mates think "Cesc is on the ball, I'm going to run into a good position because he'll probably find me", and then everything on the pitch changes. Fabregas gets the ball, one player makes a run, one player follows him, trying to mark him, leaving space somewhere else for another player to run into. It's pretty chaotic. Team-mates get excited, fans get up from their seats and defenders panic.

I know I'm just analysing the very basics of a football game in ridiculous detail, which feels a bit pointless. Everyone knows that this is how football works, but I think some people forget. On forums all over the web people post their preferred team lineups with their preferred players in each position in their preferred formation. I can't decide whether or not it means anything. Even if Henry was upfront and Píres playing on the left of midfield, so often Henry would appear on the left and cross to Píres in the middle, or even Vieira, running from a "defensive midfield" position. Positions change all the time. I suppose it's the mark of a really great football team if players aren't too pinned down by their supposed positions on the pitch, much like the old Dutch 'total football' teams, or to an extent the way Arsenal's Invincibles played.

So when I watch Match of the Day or any other example of the fast food approach to football analysis we're surrounded by, and they show a replay of Frank Lampard scoring one of his many goals, and the pundits talk about "what a great goalscoring midfielder" he is, I feel like they're really just simplifying what we're seeing, and it's easy to do so because it happens so often, but I feel tempted to say we're seeing a talented footballer in a team with other talented footballers, who tend to make the right decisions more often than some, probably because they've been taught to do so by their coaches, doing the simple things well.

I see Lampard and I compare him to someone like Tomas Rosicky, who seems far more naturally gifted in almost every area; he can make more inventive passes, run with the ball better and even has a more powerful shot, and because he plays for Arsenal, who have the uncanny ability to create what seems like a thousand chances a match without scoring, he usually finds he has far more goalscoring opportunities than Lampard, and yet he ends up with a small fraction of Lampard's impressive tally.

If they switched teams would it be different? Is it just luck? Did Lampard happen to find the net more times ealry in his career? Once he did it a few times did he then have extra confidence when going for goal? Players often have purple patches when it comes to finding the back of the net, just as Fabregas is having at the moment. Once you do it a few times, you're bound to think you can do it more. How much of a difference does simply believing in yourself make?

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