Todas las publicaciones de Jonathan Wilson en WhoScored Artículos RSS

Player Focus: Underrated Carrick Key to Upturn in United Form

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Player Focus: Underrated Carrick Key to Upturn in United Form It’s very hard to look at a run of six successive victories and see a problem, but it’s equally very hard to look at a Manchester United game these days and not see a host of major issues. Their surge into third has been baffling, deeply flawed performances masked by consistent results. ...

League Focus: Questioning the Importance of the Goals Against Column

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League Focus: Questioning the Importance of the Goals Against Column Who’s got the worst defence in the Premier League? In some ways, that’s an easy question to answer. Look at the table and you see Queen’s Park Rangers have let in 27, Leicester City 26 and Burnley 24. They lie, respectively, 17th, 20th and 19th in the table. In fact, as you’d...

Team Focus: Have Pochettino's Tottenham Reached a Turning Point?

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Team Focus: Have Pochettino's Tottenham Reached a Turning Point? Seasons probably never hang on a single moment, but sometimes they can seem to. There are too many factors at play, psychological and tactical, to do with mental and physical fitness, with luck and with design, ever to say decisively at what point a season turned, but there can be incidents when a p...

Team Focus: Wasteful Arsenal Made to Rue More Missed Chances

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Team Focus: Wasteful Arsenal Made to Rue More Missed Chances In some games you sense the pattern early. Arsenal missed a couple of early chances and then a third and there was a strange inevitability about the fact that they would go on missing chances and that Manchester United would then score with their first clear chance of the game. As it turned out, it ...

Player Focus: Examining Jordan Henderson's Recent Dip in Form

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Player Focus: Examining Jordan Henderson's Recent Dip in Form England’s game against Slovenia was never going to be an easy one. There is a paradox to this qualification campaign in that England’s strength is their strength on the counter-attack, but such is the poverty of opposition in the group that they’ll rarely get the chance to sit back...

Player Focus: Has Bojan Finally Found a Home from Home at Stoke?

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Player Focus: Has Bojan Finally Found a Home from Home at Stoke? Barcelona, Roma, Milan, Ajax… and Stoke. There was something almost comically incongruous about Mark Hughes signing the 24-year-old in the summer, almost as though this were some kind of experiment to see if one of Barça’s tippy-tappy tiki-taka merchants actually could do it on a...

Player Focus: Fellaini 'Rebirth' a Consequence of Lowered Expectations

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Player Focus: Fellaini 'Rebirth' a Consequence of Lowered Expectations Football has an in-built tendency to self-fulfilling prophecies, particularly when it’s selecting scapegoats. We’re seeing it now with Mario Balotelli. It would be absurd, of course, to suggest that the Italian is playing well, but neither is he the toblerone-footed lummox some would mak...

Team Focus: Instability Continuing to Derail Spurs' Ambitions

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Team Focus: Instability Continuing to Derail Spurs' Ambitions There’s a story of Roy Keane’s new autobiography that begins with him waiting for Alex Ferguson to give his team talk before a match against Tottenham Hotspur. It’s an anecdote Keane uses to explain Ferguson’s feel for what a dressing-room needs, but it also says much about S...

Team Focus: What Will Defeat at Southampton Mean for Sunderland's Season?

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Team Focus: What Will Defeat at Southampton Mean for Sunderland's Season? There aren’t many ways of looking at an 8-0 defeat that see anything other than an unmitigated disaster, which is right and logical. Sunderland were terrible in losing to Southampton on Saturday, a pitiful showing by a team who, by the second half, seemed to have given up. That is inexcusable ...

Player Focus: Oscar Happy with Supporting Role to Chelsea's Stellar Cast

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Player Focus: Oscar Happy with Supporting Role to Chelsea's Stellar Cast Everywhere you went in Brazil during the World Cup, you saw Brazil players on advertising posters. There were pictures of Neymar hawking everything from headphones to boots. There was the – frankly disturbing – image of David Luiz dressed as a pilot standing in front of a plane. And ther...