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Oliver Skipp

Finney Is Back said:
I think he has a huge amount of improving to do on the ball. Has a heavy touch and turns over possession too easily. Still young so has a chance of being good enough for where we want to be but has a lot of work to do to get there. If I was scouting him for a footballing team I’d recommend they passed based on ability on the ball.
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Compared to who though? For what role?

Playing next to another midfielder that isn't a playmaker, with centre backs that are somewhat limited on the ball, with a goalkeeper that's fairly limited on the ball. Yeah, he's not a difference maker on the ball.

Against Palace Hojbjerg was the one mostly dropping into the back line, Skipp playing slightly more advanced, receiving it more under pressure. Think he does that well, but the step up to true press resistant or deep playmaker types is obviously big.

As the deeper midfielder I think he would "look better".

For me he's rather effective and tidy though mostly unspectacular on the ball. That's fine. But as a team we need more. That's mostly not down to him though imo. Don't think he will improve by a huge amount, but he'll hopefully get gradually better. The rest is down to other players, or players we sign.
 
Finney Is Back said:
I think he has a huge amount of improving to do on the ball. Has a heavy touch and turns over possession too easily. Still young so has a chance of being good enough for where we want to be but has a lot of work to do to get there. If I was scouting him for a footballing team I’d recommend they passed based on ability on the ball.
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It’s amazing how differently we can see things. We’ve got an academy product who has quietly become one of the first names on the team sheet regularly producing motm contender performances at 21 and your position is that you’d be actively against signing him if he wasn’t ours?

I haven’t seen the stats but it’d help if you found something to back your position of him having a heavy touch, turning possession over too easily and lacking ability on the ball...Three pretty damning characteristics that I couldn’t disagree more with, it feels like you’ve mixed him up with another player or expect that every midfielder should at the very least be a Modric / Pirlo/ Kante hybrid

Edit: I don’t know if I’ve come off overly defensive, appreciate that the lad isn’t the finished product but there’s so much to like in terms of his all round game imo
 
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spurspinter1 said:
It’s amazing how differently we can see things. We’ve got an academy product who has quietly become one of the first names on the team sheet regularly producing motm contender performances at 21 and your position is that you’d be actively against signing him if he wasn’t ours?

I haven’t seen the stats but it’d help if you found something to back your position of him having a heavy touch, turning possession over too easily and lacking ability on the ball...Three pretty damning characteristics that I couldn’t disagree more with, it feels like you’ve mixed him up with another player or expect that every midfielder should at the very least be a Modric / Pirlo/ Kante hybrid
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Bedfordspurs said:
Skipp had a passing accuracy of 96% with 82 passes (second highest behind Dier)
He is joint top though in the dispossessed list along with Kane and son at 2
He is middle is with unsuccessful touches with it happening once for him
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Passing accuracy isn't necesairly a good thing though. 100% of short sideways shuttle passes will have less weight than 50% of passes everyone of them an attempted killer ball into a dangerous area.

Obviously I know that isn't a realistic comparison but it's just too say I keep seeing ppl using passing accuracy as if a high number is automatically a good thing. Winks had tons of games where his passing accuracy was very high but with a progressiveness of 0.

Instead of looking at stats about the number of passes, we should be looking at the area they were made from, areas passed into, how progressive said passes were and of course their accuracy.
 
Bishop said:
Passing accuracy isn't necesairly a good thing though. 100% of short sideways shuttle passes will have less weight than 50% of passes everyone of them an attempted killer ball into a dangerous area.

Obviously I know that isn't a realistic comparison but it's just too say I keep seeing ppl using passing accuracy as if a high number is automatically a good thing. Winks had tons of games where his passing accuracy was very high but with a progressiveness of 0.

Instead of looking at stats about the number of passes, we should be looking at the area they were made from, areas passed into, how progressive said passes were and of course their accuracy.
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we should be looking at retaining the ball as a metric which comes from complete passes
And then looking at the failed passes to see why
So Dier hit 13 long accurate passes very Liverpool, but it was also 100% accuracy as everyone made their man. That’s a great measure
Skipp made 96% vs palace which is exceptionally high for any game but we had a lot of ball and it was in their half too (look at the heat maps for that - ball was in their defensive third 33% of the time vs 21% in ours)
 
Some of the criticism of Skipp is way over the top (imo), Jesus he is only 21 and playing in is one of the hardest sections to play in (cm). I heard the same over the top criticisms of Perryman from so me when he first broke into our first team. The kid is still learning and if he keeps improving will be a BIG player for us in the future.
 
Bishop said:
Passing accuracy isn't necesairly a good thing though. 100% of short sideways shuttle passes will have less weight than 50% of passes everyone of them an attempted killer ball into a dangerous area.

Obviously I know that isn't a realistic comparison but it's just too say I keep seeing ppl using passing accuracy as if a high number is automatically a good thing. Winks had tons of games where his passing accuracy was very high but with a progressiveness of 0.

Instead of looking at stats about the number of passes, we should be looking at the area they were made from, areas passed into, how progressive said passes were and of course their accuracy.
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I agree in principle and using pass completion in isolation doesn't say much about quality.

For me Skipp looks like a really effective pass and move player, mostly short passes, but he has some range and variety to his passing game to.

When I say effective I also mean purposeful, not just quick. He seems to look for and find good options to move the ball on with purpose.

Doing that and having a high completion is very good. Doing that with a low completion will almost certainly be bad as that means frequently giving the ball away in dangerous areas rather than misplacing a long ball into the final third.

Looking at how he plays and the pass completion numbers gives more context and in this case shows a very good thing.
 
Bedfordspurs said:
we should be looking at retaining the ball as a metric which comes from complete passes
And then looking at the failed passes to see why
So Dier hit 13 long accurate passes very Liverpool, but it was also 100% accuracy as everyone made their man. That’s a great measure
Skipp made 96% vs palace which is exceptionally high for any game but we had a lot of ball and it was in their half too (look at the heat maps for that - ball was in their defensive third 33% of the time vs 21% in ours)
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I think you're missing my point a bit. The success rate for the passes themselves might be high, but are those good passes? Are the penetrative passes? Are they passes they cause danger? Just looking at a convention rate alone tell us nothing about the quality of the pass. When and where the pass was was made are of far more important than just a stat that says whether they were completed or not.

Winks is an example of someone who has pretty much always had high completion stats but the vast majority of those were nothing passes that moved the team nowhere, caused no danger and actually hindered the attack, hence his eventual dropping from the side.

You need good pass completion stats but those need to be good passes in the first place.
 
Bishop said:
I think you're missing my point a bit. The success rate for the passes themselves might be high, but are those good passes? Are the penetrative passes? Are they passes they cause danger? Just looking at a convention rate alone tell us nothing about the quality of the pass. When and where the pass was was made are of far more important than just a stat that says whether they were completed or not.

Winks is an example of someone who has pretty much always had high completion stats but the vast majority of those were nothing passes that moved the team nowhere, caused no danger and actually hindered the attack, hence his eventual dropping from the side.

You need good pass completion stats but those need to be good passes in the first place.
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The winks pass maps when I showed them historically showed most passes were forward (60/40 split roughly) to an attacking player but people ignored them at the time as they rarely came to anything arguably as much to do with the player receiving it as the passer

I agree you need context to the data but you also have to recognise the way we play under Conte will include a lot of sideways and backwards passes to bring on the opposition. It’s exactly how he sets his teams up to play. It’s why he needs capable passing defenders and midfielders
 
Bedfordspurs said:
The winks pass maps when I showed them historically showed most passes were forward (60/40 split roughly) to an attacking player but people ignored them at the time as they rarely came to anything arguably as much to do with the player receiving it as the passer

I agree you need context to the data but you also have to recognise the way we play under Conte will include a lot of sideways and backwards passes to bring on the opposition. It’s exactly how he sets his teams up to play. It’s why he needs capable passing defenders and midfielders
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I'll repeat again. The timing of the pass is just as important if not more so than where they went. All those Winks passes were late, passes forward when the opposition were already settled and positioned comfortably. That's why he never got credit for the pass because they were nothing safe passes. It's why he got dropped, it's why he sat on the bench consistently for a year. Completion stats mean nothing if the passes have nothing to them in first place.

This debate isn't really related to Conte, moreso our historically way of playing. With Conte we will see, but no coach does not want penetrative passes, they just want them at the right time.
 
Bedfordspurs said:
The winks pass maps when I showed them historically showed most passes were forward (60/40 split roughly) to an attacking player but people ignored them at the time as they rarely came to anything arguably as much to do with the player receiving it as the passer

I agree you need context to the data but you also have to recognise the way we play under Conte will include a lot of sideways and backwards passes to bring on the opposition. It’s exactly how he sets his teams up to play. It’s why he needs capable passing defenders and midfielders
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It's because when you split passes only in to forward and backward it doesn't account for all the sideways passes that are deemed forwards because they happen to be a couple of degrees forward
 
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