The Celtic Creatives with Alan Morrison: Get it in the mixer!

The data allows us to break this down into various components of creative play. We started in the previous article with the concept of ball progression.

Which Celtic players, either through forward passes or by running with the ball at their feet, were most able to get the team up the park and to take opponents out of the game?

It showed that Stephen Welsh stood out among the centre-backs in his ability to both pass and carry the ball beyond opponents’ defensive alignment.

Of the attacking players, Jota and Sead Haksabanovic had considerably better performance data for ball carries and pack passing volume.

You can read part one here. In part two, we look at a more direct aspect of creativity…

The mixer

You’ll hear pundits at the World Cup talking about ‘putting balls into a good area’… but what does that mean?

I was a frequent visitor to Bramall Lane in the late 1980s and early 1990s when Dave Bassett was their manager. He started with Sheffield United in the old Third Division (now League One, confusingly). Under his management, the Blades managed back-to-back promotions to the top division of English football and he kept them there for the birth of the Premier League in 1992-93.

The football style was highly direct and relied upon getting balls into the box for strikers Brian Deane and Tony Agana. In the lower leagues this was effective, allied to a dependency on set-pieces and similarly large defenders causing aerial havoc. It was not pretty but oddly thrilling with many high-scoring games.

All that preamble was to get to this point: the most oft-heard phrase on the terraces when the team had played maybe two or three consecutive passes was “get it in’t mixer!”

Impatiently delivered, the more colourful Yorkshire vernacular roughly translates to “please lump the ball into the box – and quickly, young man.”.

Back to the wonderful world of data and how do we measure the players’ ability to put the ball into dangerous areas close to goal?

The danger zone

For the purposes of this analysis, we will plot cross success percentage (the percentage of crosses that successfully find a team-mate) with danger zone passes.

A pass into the danger zone is one that is complete and finds a team-mate in the zone within the opponent’s box and between the goalposts out to the edge of the penalty area. This is the area that tends to have the highest expected goals value if shots are taken from within it.

Let’s deal with removing some noise first. In the bottom left segment sits the centre-backs and strikers. They generally are not crossing the ball nor are they usually providing passes into the central area where we expect the strikers to be. So there is nothing remarkable about those low numbers.

If we start with the full-backs, we see that Josip Juranovic is by far the most accurate crosser, hitting a target with 27 per cent of attempts. However, it is Anthony Ralston who puts the most balls into the danger zone despite his cross accuracy being lower than both Greg Taylor and Juranovic.

Of the midfielders, Callum McGregor is by far the most accurate. However, as you will see below, this is from a relatively low volume of attempts.

David Turnbull, as expected, has the highest volume of passes completed into the danger zone and crosses as accurately as Matt O’Riley. I say ‘as expected’ because this data does not split out passes delivered from set-pieces from those generated in open play. So, while a ‘cross’ is an open-play-only concept, a danger zone pass may be generated from a set-piece such as a free-kick or a corner. Turnbull tends to excel at those.

Of the central midfielders, Reo Hatate has the lowest volume of danger zone passes while Aaron Mooy has the lowest cross success but a good volume of danger zone passes.

Among the wingers, as with the ball progression data, there is clear evidence that Jota and Haksabanovic may be the numbers one and two in terms of creative passing and dribbling. Not only do they top the squad in the volume of passes into the danger zone but they both also get close to the 25 per cent cross-success benchmark.

To put the crossing data into a more specific context, here are the volume numbers of successful and unsuccessful crosses:

Think of Jota as a ‘volume’ guy. He puts a lot of crosses and shots in and gets success through attrition. Very useful in a possession-dominant team.

Haksabanovic has a lower volume of failed crosses and we can see from this how Liel Abada’s game can be improved if he can up his crossing accuracy.

Juranovic’s value is clear from this – as is Ralston’s. He, like Jota, relies on volume.

More could be demanded from Hatate and Daizen Maeda in particular.

Summary

Building on the analysis of ball progression, it is clear that Jota and Haksabanovic are the most effective at getting the ball forward and at placing it into dangerous areas central to the opposition’s goal.

Celtic have a good range of full-back options and Juranovic’s value is clear in this regard.

While Turnbull will rely on set-play passes, it seems it will be good idea to get O’Riley back into a more advanced midfield position with McGregor returning from injury.

There is potential for Taylor, Abada, Hatate and Maeda to all be contributing more in this particular creative category.

In the final piece of this ‘creative trilogy’ we will get down to brass tacks and look at assists and expected assists.

READ MORE FROM THIS AUTHOR:

• The Celtic Creatives with Alan Morrison: Ball progressors
• Do Celtic have a penalty problem?
• The one 'huge but subtle' Celtic improvement behind Greg Taylor's rise