Against Naïve

Railing against the Premier League pundits' favourite cliché

As any fan of Bryan’s Gunn (late of twitter, now of Bluesky) will tell you, football has a vocabulary. The same phrases repeatedly emerge from most sofa pundits, commentators, summarisers, managers and players. Recently one in particular has rattled round my head as I watch Ipswich Town: naïve.

Naïve is a pundit’s word, perhaps the definitive pundit word for describing struggling promoted teams like Ipswich. You can almost guarantee any team showing reckless ambition will have the men sat next to Gary Lineker shaking their head sadly. Naïve to get caught like that, naïve to try and play that way.

It always struck me as useless to describe what happens when a team fails to overcome superior opponents in a football match. I remember watching the 2006 world cup and noticing how it was the go-to description for unfamiliar foreign opposition at Summer tournaments. African teams in particular seemed to be thought “naive”, lending the word a sort of colonial air.

Bill Schwarz, historian of culture and the British Empire, argued that with de-colonisation such mindsets “came home” and started shaping domestic encounters.¹ The Premier League with its hierarchies of esteem and status, its endless expansion and its funnelling of resources upwards resembles nothing so much as settler colonialism, so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that it mimics the attitudes and language.

It always seemed obvious to me that anyone who succeeds in professional football must have ample exposure to how hard, cynical and merciless the game can be. That goes double for players forged in the EFL. If any experience in football teaches you every trick in the book, helps you learn that skill doesn’t always trump know-how, it’s bloody Accrington Stanley away.

I am obviously reluctant to have any sympathy for former Norwich full back Russell Martin, but after getting roundly pasted by pretty much everyone for Southampton’s possession-based style he must have taken some small satisfaction from watching his former team continue to get regularly destroyed despite playing in an ostensibly more attritional style. The truth is any team coming up starts the Summer with inferior players to all their rivals and no amount of pragmatism changes that. Neither Nottingham Forest nor Everton look to dominate possession or attack with reckless abandon, but the centre backs guarding their penalty area are better than yours and the forwards driving their counterattacks are faster and more skilful. If you do the same things as them, they will doubtless finish above you.

The trouble is, fundamentally none of the punditocracy are interested in us (or Southampton). We aren't the main character(s) and curiosity doesn't seem to be a very strong driver of football media. They might like one player (it’s Liam Delap, they like Liam Delap and the most important thing about him is where he’s going next), but everything else will be largely derivative. So, whilst you might presume something tactically interesting must have being going on for Ipswich to draw away at top half side Fulham last Sunday, you’ll not get much reflection on it beyond modest praise for the point and repetitive critique of what we got wrong.

They are going to play the hits and “too naïve to survive” has been number one for a couple of seasons now, so McKenna and his players have copped at least some "naivety" flak, if not quite as much as Martin and Southampton. Aro Muric leading the goalkeeping error statistics has been one regular prompt, with ball-playing goalkeepers a cardinal sin. Though in truth Muric's errors have generally been more in the "general brain fart" category rather than a product of excessive ambition. Leif Davis' aggressive attacking positioning has been highlighted at times too, against Newcastle from kick off and again for the late penalty concession last Sunday against Fulham. So generic is this commentary, with regard to the latter Shay Given on Match of the Day 2 and Micah Richards on The Rest of Football podcast managed to produce the exact same formulation, “I don’t want to say naïve…”

As unimaginative as this stuff is, after Newcastle even I felt maybe we'd been excessively “brave”. Less because of the much lamented third goal and more in concern at the high wing backs and man for man press. Perhaps a little more caution would have done us some good, though in truth I can see no set of tactical instructions that would have seen us compete with the Magpies in that mood and without our striker.

Still, after a couple of seasons of rock and roll attacking football, at Arsenal it felt dirty to be happy that we seemed to indulge in a bit of (Mick) McCarthyism, shuffling a big centre half out to right back, then sticking an additional full back in front of him. Realism? Cynicism? Pragmatism? Cowardice? Who cares. 10 in the box and no pasarán. Barely a touch of the football either, Arsenal must have set a record for Premier League possession in that first half hour. We repeated the dose against Chelsea and reaped handsome reward.

Now, it's one thing to set up that way when you're playing one of the acknowledged elite. Quite another against more everyday opposition. Before Fulham I did wonder if we'd revert to type, move to a more orthodox back four and get aggressive off the ball. In a way it was braver to treat Fulham a bit like Chelsea. We recognised early that their backline wouldn’t win many duels with Liam Delap, so there was little to be gained in playing through the thirds. We recognised Fulham wanted space, in behind for Antonee Robinson and Timothy Castagne to drive into, between the lines to sneak Alex Iwobi, Tom Cairney and Harry Wilson into pockets, and wisely decided we preferred to be compact and let them pass it in front of us.

It was a case of making Fulham do things they didn't want to. Put in percentage crosses, attempt ambitious through balls into a packed penalty area, take shots from distance, somehow threaten from a set piece. It wasn't necessarily comfortable but Fulham weren't really going anywhere. They passed and passed in a way that seemed likelier to get them into trouble than us. It was not dissimilar to the trick Mick McCarthy pulled on another Fulham team back in Summer 2015.

Yet it surely cannot be that simple? Back five, as many centre backs as you can muster, punt it long to the big man? If that was all there was to it, no promoted team would ever struggle. You know there's more. If all you try to be is tough to break down eventually you always succumb. There has to be a plan, a way to hurt the opposition going the other way.

Perhaps there is more than one way to be "naive". Pundit-land imagines a parallel universe where teams of limited means eschew all risk and always triumph in their caution. They knock it long and never give the ball away in dangerous areas. They keep players behind the ball just in case and stay compact at all times. In this world, there is no punishment for constantly ceding possession, no downside to refusing to commit players to attack when in the lead. This, of course, is not the real world. Good Premier League teams are well-used to breaking down a low block if that’s all you have to offer.

How Ipswich's setup has evolved this season defies the naive/pragmatic discussion. Throughout there have been attempts to pass through teams where possible but also a willingness to bypass midfield when necessary. There has been the shift to something that looks more like a back three in personnel but, as Shaun Calvert noted after the Arsenal game, we remain in roughly the same shape we have adopted for several seasons now. If the out-of-possession shape is more prominent this season, it is probably product of the reality that we can’t get hold of the ball more than one third of the time (28%, 24% and 35% in the last three games).

The change of personnel has not massively changed assigned roles. Dara O'Shea might be a specialist centre back but watch him harass João Felix against Chelsea or Alex Iwobi against Fulham. He's aggressively following them into areas high up the pitch and into midfield where necessary, just like Harry Clarke would have. Further forward Ben Johnson was still jumping on to the opposition full back Antonee Robinson, though Robinson was so high most of the time this often translated into defensive positioning.

In possession, our attacking shape still looks to pen the opposition in their half when the opportunity arises. The first goal against Fulham stemmed from not quite a spell of pressure and not quite a counter-attack. It started with Luke Woolfenden and Sam Morsy almost making a hash of passing out from the back, before Woolfenden hooks the ball clear. Delap made enough of a nuisance of himself to win a bit of space for Nathan Broadhead.

Broadhead if anything looks happier in the Premier League than he did in the Championship. He has vision and composure, he plays passes that many Ipswich players don’t currently seem to execute well at top flight game pace. He scampered away from Anderson, who desperately tried to foul him, then spun and picked out Davis to his left. Davis scuffed his cut back and that attack broke down.

But Fulham didn’t escape. By the time they come to play the ball forward the Ipswich backline had advanced to the halfway line, Sam Morsy and Jens Cajuste were fighting for second balls midway into the attacking half of the field. Fulham looked to press Ipswich backwards but Woolfenden now had space to spare as last man, speeding away from Raul Jimenez.

Once we’d actually forced Fulham into their rest defence, we moved them around patiently. Out left to Davis, back through midfield, an exchange passes between Woolfenden and O’Shea, into Morsy then forward to Broadhead. Broadhead was the apex of the goalscoring move, first dragging Issa Diop upfield (just as did so many League One defenders), then rolling him, feeding Delap into the space.

As Delap lays the ball back to Davis, Ipswich players are flooding forward. Broadhead back into a little pocket on the edge of the penalty area, Johnson towards the 6-yard box, Sam Szmodics hovering around the penalty spot, Jens Cajuste and even Dara O’Shea tiptoeing to the edge of the area. As Broadhead’s delightful little pitched cross approaches Johnson at the back post, pink shirts are taking over Fulham’s final third.

Ipswich’s threat in away games is about being defensively organised and maintaining their identity when they attack. The way that defensive 5-2-3 flips to a attacking 2-3-5 when we do get quality possession in the opposition half is key. And doing that is a pragmatic risk/reward calculation. It depends on our left back leaping into the forward line not just at 0-0 but also at 2-1 up in the final minutes, to give us the maximum chance of killing the game off rather than hoping to just survive.

Pragmatic? Naive? Principled? Compromised? My words are “calculated”, “adaptable”. The same patterns, same roles, the same shapes, crafted to the situation, not impervious to the opposition’s qualities, but worked out, balanced and adjusted to maximise our chances. Week by week it looks ever likelier to give us a chance in most games. Maybe one day it'll force the critics to work out some more interesting things to say about us.

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Nathan Broadhead v Fulham

Minutes 80

Accurate passes 18/20 (90%)

Chances created 1

Shot accuracy 1/1 (100%)

xG 0.08

xGOT 0.14

xA 0.72

Touches 34

Successful dribbles 3/5 (60%)

Passes into final third 4

Clearances 2

Interceprions 1

Ground duels won 7/12 (58%)

Aerial duels won 0/2

Was fouled 3

Fouled 1

1. Bill Schwarz, Memories of Empire: The White Man’s World (2013)