- 2 years ago
Kalvin Phillips time in the wilderness at Manchester City looks to be over as he joins West Ham United. His lack of minutes over the past two seasons makes it easy to forget, but with his unique combination of ball-winning and passing range, he could be the perfect addition to David Moyes' team.
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00:00 *ding*
00:00 And to explain why, we're gonna break this down into three segments.
00:05 And if you're a West Ham fan, then the first segment is really good,
00:08 and the second segment is really good,
00:11 but the third segment is...
00:13 *gibberish*
00:16 Alright, so who is Calvin Phillips?
00:18 Because...
00:18 you might have forgotten.
00:20 Well, the basic facts are he is an England international defensive midfielder,
00:25 28 years of age, so coming into his prime,
00:27 who at one stage was so highly regarded for the job he could do in the middle of the pitch,
00:31 that Man City chose to pay...
00:33 the number of pounds it's on screen now, 'cause I can't remember.
00:37 42 million!
00:39 Wow! Wow!
00:41 But the reason they, and everybody else, valued him so highly
00:44 was because he was a very rare breed of footballer.
00:47 Before I go on, just gonna place behind me this enormous comedy asterisk,
00:52 which will become apparent later on.
00:55 Like what a lot of defensive, or holding, or sitting midfielders, or number sixes,
00:59 whatever you want to call them,
01:00 what they will try and do is their job.
01:02 They will disrupt the play, they will win the ball back,
01:05 and then they'll play short, simple passes to their teammates,
01:08 who are capable of doing more expansive and ambitious forward moves.
01:12 And Phillips absolutely does that.
01:14 If we look at his numbers, comparative to some of the other ball winners in the Premier League,
01:18 he is up there with the absolute best of them.
01:20 He's arguably the best of them.
01:22 He gets loads of blocks in, which shows you how hard he works.
01:25 He gets lots of interceptions, which shows you how well he reads the game.
01:28 But if you look here, the spread of where his tackles occur is quite all over the place.
01:33 Like there's a bit of a drop-off between the attacking third and the defensive and middle third of the pitch,
01:37 but that's like fairly natural if you're a sitting midfielder.
01:40 It's far further for you to travel to get up there to do stuff,
01:43 but he still does quite a lot.
01:44 If we overlay his seasonal heat map, you will see that he just gets round absolutely everywhere.
01:49 He doesn't just sit in front of the back four or stay confined to sort of the middle part of the pitch.
01:54 He will read the game really well and get out to win it back on the flanks,
01:57 further up the pitch, absolutely everywhere.
01:59 Now, if you are looking at that going,
02:01 "Hang on, Adam, what seasonal heat map is this from? What season specifically are we talking about?"
02:07 We'd just like to direct you back to our friend, the enormous Asterix.
02:10 We are currently still talking about Calvin Phillips, the concept,
02:14 not Calvin Phillips, the lived cinematic experience.
02:18 So yes, eyes back on me, please.
02:19 He goes round all over the pitch winning the ball back,
02:22 but what makes Calvin Phillips different is he doesn't then do what a Declan Rice would do
02:27 or an Alvarez would do and play a nice short, simple pass to someone who will run it upfield
02:31 or try and make something happen.
02:33 He is the make something happen.
02:35 What makes him so special is the passing range he brings to this defensive solidity.
02:41 In fact, if you look at his numbers here, these are simply staggering.
02:45 For a player who was winning the ball back as much as he is,
02:48 to then be contributing all of these key passes,
02:51 which is any pass that leads directly to somebody having a shot,
02:54 or all of these passes into the final third,
02:57 even just the number of progressive passes,
02:59 that number's not astonishing,
03:01 but bear in mind it's comparative to all the other midfielders in the league,
03:05 including the ones whose job it is specifically to do this more creative stuff.
03:09 But look at these as well.
03:10 You can sort of see why it was never going to work from its city.
03:13 He's not really interested in playing loads of short, simple passes
03:18 and knocking it around and just gently probing.
03:20 He wants to get on the ball and go, "Right, how can I hurt them?"
03:24 Now, you're going to have to remember me saying this,
03:25 but he also scores really high in the Premier League for the number of switches of play.
03:30 So he gets on the ball, let's say he's just won it back anywhere in this sort of area.
03:34 There are short, simple passes around him, but he goes,
03:36 "Actually, all the game is concentrated on this side of the pitch,
03:39 so I'm going to stick the ball on the other side of the pitch
03:41 where my teammates have loads of space."
03:44 Calvin Phillips is one of, if not the,
03:47 best midfielders in the Premier League at doing that exact thing.
03:51 So if you add all of this up, what does it give you?
03:54 It gives you a player who is in the top 10% of the entire league
03:59 for defensive actions that lead to a shot, because there is a statistic for that.
04:05 Shot creating actions, which as the name implies, is an action,
04:09 so something you do that creates a shot, and the little subcategory, defensive actions.
04:14 So if you win a tackle, if you intercept the ball,
04:17 if you basically get it back off the other team,
04:19 and you then immediately do something that makes a shot.
04:23 Or just to put that in even simpler terms, go get ball, then do something with ball.
04:29 There are very few of those players in football.
04:32 Calvin Phillips is one of them.
04:34 So why does that make him perfect for West Ham?
04:39 Well, statistically speaking, and I know that's not everything,
04:42 but I do know that a lot of West Ham fans just agree with this anyway,
04:45 West Ham are currently the most direct team in the Premier League.
04:49 Just to illustrate this for you, here is the rankings in the Premier League
04:53 for the average amount of possession that teams currently enjoy.
04:57 And here, just to hammer that point home, is where teams with low possession
05:01 currently rank in the Premier League.
05:03 West Ham, a little bit of an anomaly there, I'm sure we'll agree,
05:06 which should tell you that they don't not have the ball because they're bad
05:10 and they can't get it.
05:10 They don't have the ball because they don't want it.
05:13 And now if we look at the number of short passes completed in the Premier League,
05:17 that's any pass between sort of like five and 15 yards.
05:20 West Ham are also right at the bottom.
05:22 But then if we look at the number of long passes in the Premier League,
05:25 that's any ball that travels more than 30 yards.
05:28 Well, would you look at that?
05:29 They're now right near the top.
05:31 West Ham United are not interested in your tappy little nonsense.
05:35 They just want to win the ball back somewhere
05:38 and then immediately try and score a goal with it.
05:40 And the reason they are currently sixth in the Premier League
05:43 is because they're really f***ing good at it.
05:45 So we've got a relatively typical lineup following me.
05:47 I've got them in a 4-3-3, but sometimes, as you will know, West Ham fans
05:50 ends up being a 4-2-3-1.
05:53 Sometimes Paquette is on the left, sometimes he's central.
05:55 Moyes is kind of flexible with how he does it, but it's always very well disciplined.
05:59 And that discipline will invite the opposition onto them,
06:02 allows the opposition to have more possession, more control of the pitch,
06:05 as we've just seen, and they get them up and up and up and up and up the pitch.
06:08 Then eventually, bang, they win the ball back
06:11 and they've got all of this space to play into.
06:14 Mohamed Koudis in particular is having an absolutely brilliant season
06:17 because not only is he one of these players that is really good at winning the ball back,
06:20 but he's an absolute lightning machine and a deadly finisher.
06:23 So he's really having a lot of fun with that.
06:26 Jared Bowen, likewise, is flourishing up front this season, despite his,
06:30 I'm not going to say diminutive stature,
06:32 because I think he's pretty much the same height as me.
06:34 But for a footballer, neither of us would be considered big.
06:37 He's loving all this running.
06:39 And behind them, whether he's here, here or here,
06:41 Lucas Paquette is just fantastic at getting his head up
06:45 and straight away knowing where to put that ball.
06:48 And credit to David Moyes, by the way, because they're not one trick ponies.
06:51 They have more than one way to skin this proverbial cat,
06:54 that's too many animal analogies.
06:56 And when they do have the ball, when they do have possession,
06:58 they are good at sort of like artificially creating this space.
07:02 So this with the Kudus goal against Arsenal,
07:04 they will just try and overload.
07:05 So a one side of the pitch, everybody gets over there,
07:08 but the opposite wide attacker, they'll stay really far off,
07:12 which obviously gives the defenders a headache like,
07:14 oh, I've got to go there, but I can't, I've got to, I've got to watch him.
07:16 And then with the space that creates, bang, another accurate long ball
07:20 or switch of play.
07:24 So if you're West Ham United and you were shopping for an addition to this team,
07:29 what do you want?
07:30 Well, you want someone who can read the game very well,
07:32 because when you don't have the ball,
07:33 you'd need to be able to work out exactly where to put yourself.
07:36 So you want a high level of defensive intelligence.
07:38 You want to couple that with just defensive fundamentals,
07:40 like you physically need to be able to win that ball back,
07:43 to win your challenges, to get your interceptions,
07:45 to get your blocks in you.
07:46 You want that too.
07:47 And then an ideal world, when you do get it back,
07:49 you don't just want like a neat and tidy,
07:51 oh, you take it, please, sir, player.
07:53 You want somebody who's got that mindset going, right, it's ours now.
07:57 What can we do?
07:57 So you want a quite creative player with a really good sort of long ball
08:01 in their back pocket,
08:02 but who also, when you are pushed on the pitch,
08:04 can do those long balls horizontally instead of sort of directly forward.
08:09 Almost as if Calvin Phillips would be the perfect player for you.
08:15 And I guess that's all there is to talk about.
08:18 That wraps that...
08:20 Oh, it's getting bigger. It's getting bigger.
08:21 Yeah, OK, so the enormous, glaring elephantastrics in the room here.
08:28 All these stats you've seen about Calvin Phillips,
08:31 all these numbers, all this data,
08:32 everything you would base this decision on,
08:36 they're not recent.
08:36 They're all from his last full season at Leeds,
08:39 which you would argue is a far better indicator
08:42 of how you'd play for a team like West Ham
08:43 than how your time at Man City would pan out.
08:46 But the problem was,
08:48 he didn't really have any time at Man City.
08:50 Like, just for context, in the entire time he's been at Man City,
08:53 he's played something like 300 odd minutes in the Premier League,
08:56 which I think is slightly less than the combined running time
08:59 of the three Lord of the Rings films.
09:02 And not even the extended director's cuts or anything,
09:04 just like the original ones.
09:05 West Ham United fans, there are two ways of looking at this,
09:08 and you get to pick whichever one you want.
09:11 Either, when he's trusted and he's used and he plays regularly,
09:14 he is probably just the most valuable midfield asset
09:18 you could possibly have hoped to add.
09:21 Or option two, he's not done any of this for a long-ass time
09:27 and may never be able to do it again,
09:29 and signing him is just a complete waste
09:32 of everybody's just life and effort.
09:34 And I will tell you this,
09:36 as a 442 certified cast iron Adam Cleary rubber stamped,
09:41 guarantee it's going to be one of the two.
09:45 But saying all that, that is just what I think
09:48 in my head, and if you are a West Ham fan,
09:49 and in your heads, you think things,
09:51 I'd like to see those all typed out in the comments
09:53 so I can assess the vibe and the energy behind this transfer,
09:57 because it's been a dry January for me,
10:00 and I ain't talking about the fucking pints.
10:02 As ever though, grab me on Twitter, Instagram,
10:04 wherever you like, Adam Cleary, C-L-E-R-Y,
10:06 the 442 socials in the corner of the video.
10:08 Latest issue of the mag,
10:09 am I going to pick it upside down or not?
10:11 I don't know, I think it's the right way up.
10:12 I'm going to guess that's available in shops now.
10:14 Alex Ferguson is on the cover.
10:15 Ah, Tony again.
10:17 Until next time though, thank you very much for watching.
10:18 Please do consider subscribing to the channel
10:20 if you haven't already, that does genuinely really help us out
10:22 and makes us really, really happy in our heart of hearts.
10:25 And until next time, I've rambled now,
10:28 so I'm just going to go.
10:30 See ya, bye.
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