Is This a New Era of Premier League Football?

0:27This podcast has been brought to you by the show. Zach, a 1-0. Unbelievable. Bit of a history pod today as we talk about Premier League football, which was last seen, I don't know, 10 years ago. This is the Arsenal Vision Post-Match Podcast. My name's Eli Smith. You brought me on Twitter, Yankee Gunner. Yeah, I honestly can't remember the last time they played Premier League football. It's a vague recollection from my youth. I hear it's coming back, so that'll be exciting. You know how, like, bell-bottoms came back and things like that. Premier League football is coming back. Who knew? It's actually only been, not even yet, two weeks.

0:56It feels like it's been 10 years, and I am excited for it to come back. Won't they please think of the podcasters? We need something to talk about. We've got something to talk about today. We're going to preview the weekend of football, including and focusing on Arsenal's visit to Craven Cottage to play Fulham. We're also going to talk a little bit about the changing style of Premier League football and what we think of it. And are we entering a new era of the Premier League? Are we in a new cycle? We know that football goes through cycles. Is this a new cycle? Want to discuss that? I think that'll be fun.

1:23I owe you an apology. Because over this international break, which was intended to be a time to step away and refresh we accidentally put out too much stuff okay i know we did it i'm sorry we did it but we had the cup winners cup series which we've been doing we'll complete that the next international break really excited about that but then tim was like oh i've got a history pod for 1930 which is good timing because of the the new you know logo and all that and then tim and clive wanted to do a women's pod one club so we did that and then matt giant cooner was like hey were we going to do our interlal pod that we usually do so we did that and then like before you know it the feed's a bit of a mess so if you've if you've been saying it it's too much it's too much stuff i apologize the good news is uh it'll continue to be too much stuff because now the football's back so you're stuck with us you're stuck with us but we love you for being stuck with us and if you want to be stuck with us over on uh the patreon we'll have an instant reaction saturday full-time if you say i don't want to wait for a pod monday you don't have to get a pod live streamed at full-time then the audio recording clive will be on it so you don't want to miss that but you know where else clive is he's literally here now

2:26Elliot:hello clive hello hello how you doing i'm good i'm looking forward to our football um i definitely need it and it's been a quiet one it's been a really really quiet one and we wanted it we actually said we we need to be boring win games be boring just win games but it was a bit too boring for me and i hope the people in the club have had a decompress um i'll tell you what everyone's ready for saturday night you better play well lads that's all i'm saying they are we'll be breaking down who we saw training whether they're going to play we're going to talk about the lineup because obviously that's clive's first consideration the starting 11 from fulham this is not an advertisement section but i will tell you i have so manscape makes a beard hedger that i like because i don't really have much of a beard usually i shave it but i find it helps shave my face but it has this adjustable length stuff so i'm at an age and if you're not at this age yet, listener, you will get there, where my eyebrows have decided they want to grow at a rate and in a way where they can become parts of other parts of my face.

3:26Okay? Your eyebrows grow, they get bigger. The hair on top of your head, that may not stay there forever, but your ears, your nose, and your eyebrows, well, that hair wants to just stay for the rest of your life. It wants to become more a part of your life. Well, so I trim my eyebrows because you can't just have the eyebrows everywhere. So last night I grabbed this shaver and it has an adjustable length thing. And I have it adjusted to a length that's perfect for just taking off that little bit of extra eyebrow that wants to become part of the eyeball or part of the sideburns or whatever it wants to be.

3:56And, uh, went to my left eyebrow and, uh, had the trimmer set to zero by accident and shaved off most of a chunk of my left eyebrow. Now, if you're not watching the pod, you won't notice, but there's a bit of a missing part of my eyebrow. And I, I was worried because when i heard the sound of it crushing through hair i thought oh what's this gonna look like now thankfully the eyebrow is still somewhat intact but uh yeah i would just say there's a lot of trends a lot of fashion trends that are cyclical one eyebrow not a trend before not going to be a trend now and thankfully i'm not fully on the one eyebrow program but clive very very nearly uh a

4:35Elliot:one eyebrow pod for me today i tend to stay away from hair conversations because i just not included but I do have my eyebrows intact and I tend to get up and down when you're talking rubbish or not to those who watch it on YouTube. So yeah, it's all good. It's all good. They're important. I mean, it's one of the reasons I don't do the Botox thing is you got to be able to make expressions. Expressions are critical to the personality. When you look like me, expressions are important because you don't got much else to rely on. Okay, enough of that nonsense. Look, we can do waffle. See, we can do waffle too.

5:09We can do the banter, the waffle. Tell you all about our lives, all about my part of my missing eyebrow. Clive, you directed me to an article. Ali K wrote it. It's in The Athletic. And it's interesting. It talks about the change in Premier League football and how we may, in fact, be going through a sort of new era of Premier League football in the way the game is being played, the rise of set pieces, the slowing of the game. Let me introduce you to some data. So first of all, we're down to 1.69 open play goals per game, the second lowest rate in any Premier League season since it became the Premier League.

5:51Long throws are back. In 2019, 2020, and 2021, 6 % of throw-ins from the attacking third were set into the penalty area. That number is 27 % this season. Goals from set pieces, corners, free kicks, and throw-ins have risen to 0.7 per game, the highest in any season since 2010-11. Passes per Premier League game have fallen to 858, the lowest since 2010-2011. The proportion of goal kicks taken long has increased to 51.9%, and the proportion of headed goals has risen to 19.8%, the highest since 2000-2001. We also have one of the lowest ball in play times in premier league history and we by the way across our first seven matches have used 40 minutes and six seconds taking corners 11 minutes more than any other team now we take advantage of that by scoring from corners not to mention that we get more corners in part because we dominate i want to be clear about this article for anyone listening it was not written about Arsenal.

6:58It was not focused on Arsenal. It was written, I think, in a very balanced way. I enjoyed the article. I don't think it took a position that was meant to be critical. It was meant to be an observation. So I certainly don't want to throw Ali Kay under the bus here in suggesting that he was targeting anything. But Clive, football eras change. Pep ushered in a new era in football. And I think it's possible that we are seeing a bit of a dynamic change. I'm curious your take on whether football in England is going through a new cycle?

7:28Elliot:I think it is. It's quite clear. It's quite obvious. I think last season, we've said many times, I just felt like I was watching the same game all the time. How can we break down this organized defense? And everyone knows how to stand in a 4-4-2. Everyone knows how to get out to the wingers quickly and double them up and force them outside of their shape. So we end up playing a lot of games outside of team shape. Newcastle were the best I've seen do at the Emirates. So the most recent, they really struck me. But Everton, the last season, I remember Everton came and they had a bit of time off because there was a game cancelled in Liverpool because of the storms.

8:03Elliot:And they came to us, I think they got a 0-0 draw. But we'd normally break them down, but they were rested, they were fresh, and they held on for that 0-0. And you're just watching the same game, hoping you can score. When that happens, you really are looking for a set piece. when that happens i can feel it in me i'm in the ground just to score from a corner it's like a free goal can we just do that now teams are getting better at organizing against set pieces really well they know where the ball's going and and teams are getting more physical and so i think it's just um it's just smart coaching and people looking at who's successful and trying to mimic them if you can score goals from playing out from the back and it works and you've got a pattern of play and you've got sprinty forwards and getting behind once you created the space you'll do that you'll do that right i'm seeing as you were talking going for that data you know i was thinking of i think of kai havertz who's the best who's the best of center forward of that type wait till we get him back okay we've harland obviously that big center forward that can look after it that can run and i can take that first long ball and win it and hold it we've got a strength of all that can do that right so i think it's about playing to your strengths but i also feel it's a form of risk management as well there's so many threads to this i don't want to just summarize it i'm sure you'll put on a few more threads it's a form of risk management again the first manager i see really do this really really well was pochettino funny enough his spurs team i kept looking at defensive record looking at defenders thinking that well they're all right why are they doing so well but he played the game away from his goal you know and he kept it there you know and i think having a ball away from your goal it's only going to have benefits isn't it and we have midfielders that can crunch and tackle intercept and create transitions and so you know when we're talking to john the other day and he was explaining the change in our pattern of play i'm thinking this game is coming towards us and what we do well and there was a period when we we copied a bit you know sinchenko jesus blah blah blah now teams are copying us which is a real compliment isn't it to what we're doing yeah it is um and by the way lest you think that this is just driven by certain clubs i mean i'll just use manchester city during their pomp you know in 2017-18 a title winning season for manchester city they were making 688 passes per game that was their record-breaking first title winning campaign under guardiola this season they're down to 496 passes per game almost 200 passes fewer um one thing though that i do want to ask you is the extent to which this makes sense for us let's make it a little more arsenal focused for a minute a team that should have the most talent and the most capacity to break teams down versus most of the opposition they play so liverpool under klopp hired this guy thomas gronemark okay he was a throw-in coach specialist right and they practiced long throws and apparently like they had all this stuff they did in practice but actually in training but they they didn't apply it.

11:03And so they asked Thomas Garnemark, why didn't you use it? They hired you, you trained on it. He said, the reason why the team didn't use it so much, there's a quote, by the way, was more about playing style. What we have to remember is you can be really successful with long throw-ins, but if you want to score a lot of long throw-ins, you have to take a lot of long throw-ins. It means you have to have breaks in the match. I think Jurgen Klopp felt, and I totally agree, that this would have stopped Liverpool's fast, fluent game and attacking style. It would have affected the game for Liverpool and that wouldn't necessarily have been positive and this echoes something that Billy Carpenter has talked about and I wish he had for this season which hasn't come to fruition despite the fact we are very good anyway which is the more ball in play time there is per match the more the good team should benefit from it right the longer the ball is in play the more chance your extra talent can exert itself on the the lesser talent but we do spend a lot of time over long throws and long and corners and such as the data bears out so are we potentially costing ourself more ball in play time where we can dominate by emphasizing these stoppages it's like anything right do it in moderation you know you don't want to do the

12:13Elliot:only time so all the time sorry i remember last season had some high points for me right so just football in high points. I love the Spurs away game. You know, I love the real injury away game. You know, I thought that was really, really good. The home game was a surprise. You know, the three goals, never going to forget it. But the game where I felt we reached our highest level of Arsenal, the highest level of the season was PSG for the first 25 minutes. At that period of time, I felt we were the best team in Europe for that period of time. We didn't score. We know what happened in the rest of that game.

12:49Elliot:They scored. etc etc but i looked at our play the way we moved it in open play where we created throwing chances set piece chances and we compressed them in they did not move for 20 minutes and i'm looking at this thinking oh my god are we going to do it in that game we played i think it was 11 long throws i remember from that period of time you can check me on that elliot um or fact check me so like um and by the end of it we could barely get over to take the throws we were so knackered and i felt it was too much in that last quarter of that game it's too much they knew what was coming by then they'd adjusted the goalkeeper got involved but it was our highest level and sometimes games stay in your mind and and i thought you know what even though we didn't win that game i thought that was really quite good you know so and it suited our team right so i don't think we need to focus on set pieces per se but it suited us so the game this season that's really shown Arsenal all sides of Arsenal as Newcastle away this season in that first half our open play stuff was just unbelievable upset back around the other side creating chances edge of area chances cutbacks fullback cutbacks as a shot I mean just a lot we won the game with a short corner and a corner in the last minute and people remember that but that game gave us everything so that's my new game now you know that's my new benchmark game because we had open play and we had the set piece goals to be a team that dropped away because we forced them back and so it's all about having the ability to have the tools to chin somebody once you force the game into the areas you want them to do so that game if you want to brilliant absolutely brilliant forest at home brilliant scoring goals at the right time just after half time bang two nil game over but keeping the pressure off the ball creating a set a second phase set piece goal which i think is another key aspect to what we do second phase set pieces so when we might not win the first ball but we keep the area we recycle it back into the box it's almost like um a set piece going open play basically you know and that's what we're really really good at and so we're tuned this way and um i gotta be honest here i i've been more impressed this season with how i felt watching arsenal for the entirety of last season part of those games i mentioned yeah i think there's a few things to not confuse too this isn't route one football agricultural football the ball's still on the ground getting played and getting passed a lot there's a lot of possession what it is is taking the stoppages of play as opportunities to use that extra time you have on the training ground to execute a play i mean we know that Mikel is an admirer of other sports and learns from other sports.

15:38He's done speaking engagements with Steve Kerr from the NBA. He's a huge fan of the coach of the LA Rams, who's also right, exactly. Well done. And, you know, the NFL is a quintessential example of you design plays and you call them and you run them. And those are times when what you work on the training ground can be produced almost exactly as you planned it on the pitch during a game. So you're playing your football. It's just the point that then when there is a stoppage, you're taking an opportunity to try to use it more intelligently. I think there's a balance between letting those stoppages drag on every time and not being able to have flow.

16:17Because if the game doesn't have flow, I do think a game without flow helps the less talented team than a game with flow. So I think there's a concern there.

16:26Elliot:Can I hold you on this thought? because I can remember got me thinking now mate remember the Newcastle the Newcastle games the Newcastle always games that make me think I think Eddie Howell's a really good coach and he knows how to get under our skin but remember when they came to the Emirates it might have been a 1-1 draw and the ball in play time was like 13 minutes or something like that remember we were all moaning and we were I know Arsenal spoke about time wasting and spoke to the league and I know this for a fact right spoke to the league about this and make sure we could take less time over free kicks and keep the ball and we suffer for it kicking the ball away We suffered for it the next season after.

16:59Elliot:Yep. That ball in play time, when we were a team of flow, I'm thinking, oh, I want to keep the ball moving. I want to keep it moving. But I've changed a little bit. And let me tell you why I've changed, Elliot. Please do. That's what we're here for. Well, because we can't control what other teams do. Yeah. How many times do you watch a headed clearance out of a box and then the other, someone goes down and holds their head. Right? Holds their head, game stops, and they can get a rest. you can't control what other teams do other teams gonna manipulate the rules to create injury stoppages you gotta stop the ball gotta stop the players down and so my desire for flow i did them out well i can control some parts of it but i can't control other parts of what i can control is what i do when we have the ball when we have those i'm gonna use not flow but bursts and I see when I watch Arsenal's game and I've been re-watching over the last couple of weeks we play in huge bursts so we had a burst at the start against Newcastle it went flat in the middle we had a burst at the end you see what I mean and we do this consistently we do this a lot we had a burst at the start at Anfield but we did quite well you know against Man City we didn't get a chance I will say the first nine minutes we were sharp we looked good they score we go flat then we have a massive second half burst you know and i under my desire for flow i'm having to put it to one side because other teams know we want to flow they're gonna do everything they power to stop it right so we can't the games that always concerned me chelsea away to 2-2 when the pitch was crap and we couldn't move the ball and i knew we were struggling right and we should have won the game but we get a late equaliser.

18:47Elliot:We were a flow team then. We fed off a flow. We went to go to Odegaard and we flow through, we flow to sack and we're off and running. That team had an Achilles heel. It could be stopped if the conditions weren't right or the other team sat on his backside and took the flow away, took the momentums away. So now we've got Declan Rice in. We want to control momentum, control the second ball, control the uncontrollables. But now I think the key is to be efficient in our bursts. And that's the future of the game because everyone's playing in bursts now because of the evening out of sports science.

19:22Elliot:I think that's a key factor. Yeah. And look, I mean, there's a few things here that I think are important. First of all, more goals from corners or long throws is really just a reflection of teams taking more time to get better at them and executing them better. You see more good deliveries. You see more choreographed set pieces. and so it's no surprise that you're going to get more goals from that versus teams that don't concentrate on them i mean ang famously said he didn't concentrate on set pieces and look at the outcome they were absolute shit at them thomas frank comes in and guess what they're are they're good at set pieces it's the easiest place to have marginal gains to have measurable gains simply from what you do in training so why would you give up that opportunity for a gain the the other thing that's just reality is the amount of money flowing into the premier league the improvement in coaching in the Premier League, and the improvement in data science means that teams are going to get better at knowing what you do well, understanding how to shut it down, being able to counter your strengths.

20:26It is rarer and rarer in the Premier League that you come up against teams that simply cannot repel you at all whatsoever. You get a goal lead and their game plan's out the window, you can get fours and fives. But every team can be difficult. you know, Burnley was nil-nil with Liverpool until a late penalty, right? This season. So I think if it is the case that teams are going to get better at that, then the teams that have the impetus on them and the burden on them to win the game have to find other areas that they can exploit. And set pieces are a way to do that. Now, there is a question of entertainment value, Clive.

21:04And this is where I think things can be a little hypocritical because we started to hear for years oh positional football ticky tack it's so boring spain are boring pep is boring i don't want to watch that what happened to up and down dynamic football well now ticky tacka may be receding a bit maybe there's more relationalism maybe there's more long ball maybe there's more set pieces whatever you want to say is the trend that you're seeing but then all of a sudden you have people pretending like they're pining for peak pep ticky tacka football which i don't think is the case i think it may just be the reality that would it be nice if teams were dumb enough to just play basketball so we could watch basketball every saturday and sunday sure that'd be fun and and you know what ang did it it was fun for us as arsenal supporters it wasn't fun for spurs supporters barcelona does it a bit and they can lose to what was it the other day sevilla 4-1 whatever so they keep a high line right i mean do you want teams to play winning football or do you want teams to play entertaining football and those two things don't always necessarily connect do

22:05Elliot:they yeah they don't and i give a little bit of my sort of life coaching life so when i was really involved in coaching a few years ago everything was about pattern of play playing it to the pass a formal position or play help players and help them comfortable particularly young players it helps them be comfortable when you know they've got three passes with a ball rise at their feet so they can reach a higher level because they've got a pattern they can refer to it's a great framework and i understand it totally i understand how it makes players feel and how it's how you can reach a really high technical level with positional play and then i went into adult non-league football and i heard the shout the first time i heard this shout was kick the ball to areas put it into areas and i thought what we mean put it to areas i've just spent the last five years making sure you pass on someone's feet exactly you know and how many touches they have and i heard they receive it and that shout of areas really stuck with me right so and i wasn't it was foreign to me but sometimes what we're doing right now we're playing to areas i think jockey is his first goal against leeds we curl around the corner that's a pass into an area that he knows it's going there so it's a form of a pattern he knows he's going first time so he's already leaning and he goes into an area and he can win the race in that area and he can do what he does right and so i believe football belongs to both of those styles right so i think it's just about record this is why i have my little shout for zoom and he's been so important because he plays the areas game he thinks it over the top for runners but he also plays the ticker tacker game so what's the skill the skill is knowing exactly what's on offer and can you take it on either foot this but despite what the ball is telling you do you need to settle it down onto your right foot because that's your strong foot by then that chance is gone that moment is gone why do we look so much more direct and offensive and one-on-one because the ball's coming on time to one-on-one duels not three-on-one duels because we got it there once we're in positional shape so that same player can do the same different things areas and he can do to feet but the key is just the elite skill is doing it on time in the right situation the right scenario with the right level of pass appreciation for the players about to receive it and that's where i think we've done exceptionally well so far this season so far yeah well said and i just think it is it is a tricky thing to resolve because arsenal have averaged around 57 58 possession just about every season that we've been good you can go back to arson wanger seasons there were 57 58 possession you can look at our current season's 57 58 possession we have a lot of them um we're using the ball to push teams back we have you know we now have stats like field tilt that can show us we have a lot of touches in the penalty box we have a lot of touches in the attacking third we have a lot of the ball in the right areas this is not a case of playing route one football or you know sitting deep and just trying to counter attack or whatever negative uh tactics you want to imply but it is the case that once you push teams into that compact shape they're very hard to break down um and there are a lot of games clive that i watch especially that involve the big clubs that settle into a bit of attack versus defense dynamic a compact low block shifting from side to side as the yeah as the protagonist goes around the horseshoe and tries to pick and look and poke and pick and interrogate and i get it it's it's a little bit like a boxing match where one guy wants to hold and the other guy wants to box.

25:43And what do you do? Because if you're the guy who's not the puncher, holding and grappling and being on the ropes and stoppages in the fight, that's a good tactic. Try to wear that guy out, right? Try to punch him out, rope-a-dope. So I don't know how you answer that because I don't think it's that the big clubs are not endeavoring to find ways through. It just so happens that against these good low blocks, the way they're finding ways through is we choreograph set pieces rather than seeing eye passes between centre-back and full-back.

26:13Elliot:Yeah, watching England the last couple of games where they've just basically smashed Wells to bits early, so it became a non-event. I think it was the Latvilla second game. They won it five. Nice SA goal? It was a nice little goal, but they weren't good enough. They're not physically enough. They can't stay with us long enough. They're eventually going to wear them down. It was obvious they were going to. But in the Premier League, I'm afraid you're not going to wear people down because they can sprint. They do their sprints. They do their work. They've all got the same gyms, amazing training ground.

26:45Elliot:They're in shape, right? So they can sprint with you. They've got a good coach who can organize themselves, and they can do well. I think what John highlighted in our chat the other week, and I thought was really smart. See, some teams now, because they have more physical confidence, they are coming on to us a bit more. They are moving us on, and that maybe is forcing a longer game. So what we're doing is bringing them on, et cetera, I'm making the piece a bit bigger and going over the top. I just love the fact that the game is evolving, you know, and it's great. So now this season, I'm not sure what I'm going to watch.

27:20Elliot:On Saturday, I know what Fulham do. I've seen their team's last few games, Elliot, because we prepared for the podcast. I know they're playing three at the back. I think they're going to be okay, you know. I like the way some of them infielders drop into the back line and receive the ball. I'm not quite sure the build-up patterns yet. I tell you what, I know they're sharp. I know they've had some good results and could have had better results with a bit more fortune. You know, I know they're sharp. I know they're fit. I know they can make five good substitutes. And I think that's the key. I think the key for elite teams now, and this is, I think, where we may actually be ahead of the game.

27:55Elliot:I'd be so interested to see what happens next transfer windows next summer. The breadth of our squad and the depth of our squad is really providing surprise because we'll talk about later, I'm not sure of the team for Saturday and in midweek next week. And I'm not sure I'm bothered because the quality is quite high. But when you add new players and profiles in, what will be our pattern of play? And I'm not sure. I can't wait to see it. I'm not sure what we're going to focus on, what we're going to emphasize in our game approach for this game on Saturday. So if I'm not sure, and we are nerds, right?

28:34Elliot:We watch all the time. how can Fulham be sure that's got to be our surprise factor in rugby they announced the team three days in advance in football it's an hour and 15 minutes so you've got to use that to your advantage right in everything you have you know and I think this is where the game's going to go it's going to become more squad orientated or so you guys may say roster roster orientated what do you think of our roster Clive I think we're going to have a it's all going to be about your roster and what you can do on any given day and because there's so many games right now you've got to protect players career so i'm not sure big gabby should play on saturday night i'm not sure he should play i'd be really bullish on that if i'd already seen him happy play so i can't quite say that yet in three weeks time we'd have that conversation about resting him do you see what i'm saying and that needs to be okay when we do that yep we'll uh we'll switch switch gears to more of a full-on fulham preview here in a preview of the weekend.

29:32I'll just say, you look at games like PSV 1, Arsenal 7, and you say, how does a game like that happen? Well, they outshot us 6-5 in the first half of that game. They outpossessed us 53%. I think there's a problem. Teams are smart. They can see PSV losing 7-1 at home to Arsenal, and they can see that that PSV team had a good go at us, actually. I feel they had a good go. I think the 1.4 XG they produced is one of the bigger XG numbers we actually allowed last season. But you know what? They lost. seven one when teams want to come have a go at us you see what happens i think the manchester city game is another great example and pep's spoken about it and rogery's spoken about they didn't want to be sitting in a defensive shell two banks of you know four and and two in front of them or whatever it was five five and one you know just defending their box but it was the only way they could try to protect what they had and i do think that this is this is the cycle not of football generally but of teams because city went through this cycle too if you get good enough and you get talented enough and you get dominant enough teams are going to sit back and and defend their box and get compact and try to ride out the storm and that leads to you having to decide how many resources are we willing to commit to that attack how vulnerable are we willing to allow ourselves to be defensively and to Mikel's great credit and Nicholas Jover's great credit and Arsenal's great credit.

30:54They've said there are some other aspects of the game where we have an opportunity to exploit the talent gap and the training gap and the strategic gap that we have versus the opposition when they're not in their shape. And the thing about set pieces is even if you don't score from them directly, we see a lot of our goals come from set pieces where they're sprinting back out because the ball's bouncing around or we recycle it quickly after a set piece and someone's in a position that wasn't accounted for because they're not in that set defense. And so those patterns of play where the opposition can't be as settled, I think become very, very important because they're very, very rare right now.

31:35The only thing that's going to change football generally in the Premier League is if teams decide they're willing to try to go win games 4-3. And right now they haven't decided that. And until teams decide they're willing to win games 4-3, I just don't think it's going to happen. I think guys like Ange Postacoglu, whether you love him or hate him, unfortunately, the lesson of Ange is that teams are going to increasingly not want to try to win games 4-3. Because they watched Tottenham nearly get relegated playing a game that was oriented around just trying to attack all the time. And you see it again at Forest, right?

32:07A Forest team that nearly made the Champions League sitting deep and countering looks like one of the worst teams in the Premier League under Ange's system. So I don't think the incentives are aligned for open attacking football right now. and I don't know what's going to change to make that happen but I think we can enjoy the sort of golden era of coaching and tactics and strategy and talent that we're in right now. I don't think those things are mutually exclusive. There's not one right way to play football, no?

32:31Elliot:There isn't and there's a huge focus on every single Premier League game and every single day. If you lose a game, the world's got to count. We lost at Anfield and look what happened for the next two weeks. We drew against Man City and we were the scum of the earth, right? So we didn't try hard enough. So this is what happens in the game. I think you speak about Ange there and that's a fair sort of story and scenario. But look at Thomas Frank. He's coming to Spurs. What has he done? They lost 22 games last season. What has he done? He's focused on organisation. He's focused on every aspect of the game.

33:06Elliot:He's focused on set pieces, long throws. He's focused on what he does when he's in control of the ball. Organisation. What do I do in turnovers? How can I be more aggressive in turnovers? I'll tell you now Spurs are not playing like Barcelona but they're sitting in the top five of the league and looking far more competitive so step one tick I'm going to be competitive I'm not going to turn my nose up at any part of the game I'm going to be competitive and when we give away a corner like they did against us when Gabriel scored and their fans already crying thinking they're going to score and when we did score he's going to say no that can't happen I've got to organize us to defend set pieces better because when we give a corner away that can't be like a penalty right and that's where they were you don't turn your nose up at the game so Thomas Frank is an example of somebody who has a plan to make a team more competitive and the first phase that plan is to just do the basics really really well and hope your talent will take it to the next level fortunately where we are in our life cycle we do the basics really really well and we have a higher level of talent because we're three years in Champions League now so we can bring in more high quality players on top of players that we have right now we can re-sign them and keep them and add stability to what we're doing so i think it's interesting although our northwest media mafia don't like our manager i'm afraid the other managers do and they like a lot of what he's doing and i think it's a i think it's a good example and look winning lets you set a narrative because people think of klopp's football as dynamic and attacking i think of it that way too you know what Klopp's best teams did really well?

34:42Suppressed shots and defended. The season, they went to 99 points. Off the top of your head, do you think they scored 100 goals, 95 goals? What would you say? The 99-point season, they scored 85 goals on 68 expected goals, fewer than City, fewer than Chelsea. They conceded just 33, okay? Now, if that sounds familiar, Arsenal had more goals than that in the second-place finish against City. Quite a few more, right 91 goals it is the case and and more xg it is the case that while i think of klopp as an attacking manager and he certainly had seasons where they were rampant gold from a goal hall standpoint his best team was defensively sound and scored enough and so because they were a high

35:26Elliot:energy high final turnover team that kept the game away from their area right and and that's it and they had that energy and when they had three work with like centimeters that protected and then they made sure that they could create from wide area to make their front five that way and they kept you in they kept you in and they were very very good at it and a successful seven eight year period so fair play and what's really funny is if we think back to sort of the golden era of arson wanger football and when we were really attacking goals have come up so much in the premier league you don't really realize this but those those great era teams were scoring 75 goals 78 goals 80 goals like football has just changed there's just more goals we normalize to that and maybe it's coming back down to earth a little bit as teams even out and and tactically think differently about the game let's let's shift gears let's get into a full fulham preview and then we can talk about some of the other fixtures in the premier league this weekend because there are some interesting ones and the best way to freshen up for that conversation is with brands thank you agree, Clive?

36:32I know I do. Do I have a choice? You do not. You know you do if you're on Patreon or Apple subscriptions. You're not going to hear about any brands. But then, you know, how would you enrich your life? I guess you could just switch over and listen. Hey, World Cup fans. If you want proper analysis, honest opinions, and plenty of laughs along the way, give The Rest is Football a listen. Gary Lineker is joined by Alan Shearer and Micah Richards throughout the tournament as they break down all the big games, the biggest moments, and everything happening on and off the pitch. They'll also be chatting with some brilliant guests along the way.

37:06Whether you've watched soccer your whole life or you're just getting into it, they'll help make sense of the drama, the tactics, the joy, and the heartbreak of the World Cup. Listen to The Rest is Football wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, NordVPN. I mean, it goes without saying you need to have a VPN at this point. If you want to watch videos related to football, you need to be able to watch videos that are not available in your location. It might be games you need to be able to watch. It might be analysis clips you need to be able to watch. It might be goal clips. And the only way to do it's with a VPN and it couldn't be easier.