Tension or limited capabilities.. Why does Mohamed Elneny pass to the back?
Well, we have a lot to tell you, so we'll start right away, and the first thing we'll do is, as usual, provoke you by saying that Mohamed Elneny doesn't pass backwards. At least not to the degree you might imagine, and not in the usual sense of scrolling backwards; It's a little more complicated than an arrow on a map of a stadium.
Why do we provoke you? Why does everyone think you've gone blind? Why do the advocates of sophistication insist on demolishing everything that it considers to be axioms? When did football become so complicated? This is what we promise to answer.
Negative swabs
Let us first tell you that there is no conflict between all of the above; The distress that Muhammad Al-Neni's passes cause you is really justified, and the matter is more complicated than just the direction of the pass, and at the same time, Al-Neni does not pass backwards to the degree that you actually imagine. All of the above is true.
Digitally, Mohamed Elneny has a very high percentage of forward passes out of his total passes, and let us note that “front” does not necessarily mean “vertical”, but in the final match against Senegal, for example, the Egyptian Axis player launched 27 forward passes out of 40 in total, And 32 out of 48 in front of Cameroon, and 30 out of 51 in front of the Ivory Coast, and most of these passes - with the exception of the Ivory Coast match - came in half of the Egyptian national team’s stadium and around the center circle, while the percentage of his forward passes ranged between 59-68% - a very high percentage for the players of this position - The shouts of disapproval that erupted in Egyptian cafes whenever Muhammad Al-Nini passed were seeing what was behind the statistics. So we told you it's more complicated than just an arrow pointing forward on a stadium map.
One of the clearest examples of this came in the Cameroon match. Usually, when a player is criticized for always passing backwards, the first thing performance specialists review is his exploratory behavior, meaning the times a player looks outside his normal field of vision before Receiving the ball, to be aware of his surroundings and the passing options available to him, and to gather as much information as possible about the context of the game before he acts with the ball. For convenience, performance analysts call this activity "pitch scans." (1) (2)
The best football players have great awareness of their surroundings, even before receiving the ball. I started studying SCANNING in 1997. Since then, we have filmed & analyzed more than 250 professional players and 200 elite youth players. What have we learned? Thread1/15. pic.twitter.com/sO3AugCmP9
— Geir Jordet (@GeirJordet) October 14, 2021
This is the secret that made the likes of Pirlo, Xavi, Iniesta, Messi, Alonso, Modric, Kimmich and Lampard at least one step ahead of their opponents whenever they received the ball; They spend the precious seconds before receiving the ball watching and absorbing the surrounding context and trying to search for answers: How many opponents are in this space? Which of his teammates is under pressure and is not allowed to pass? What is the distance between him and the nearest player from the opponent? Does the position of his body suggest that he will move to put pressure on him as soon as he receives it, or not? Information whose value is evident once the ball is received.
Have we found the answer, then? Does the problem of the Nani lie in the fact that he does not perform these anointings in sufficient numbers? Not exactly, the problem of neni is divided into two parts; The first is that he performs these swabs all the time, but most of them happen in safe situations, that is, situations in which it is theoretically impossible for Al-Nani to be a direct pass option, or defensive situations when the ball is in possession of the opponent.
This brings us to the next logical question; Any player can easily look around if they are not part of the game, how about the other way around? The opposite is when the problem occurs, and the opposite is what makes Al-Nani an easy target for criticism with every new match for the Egyptian national team or Arsenal. With situations of receiving under pressure, and the need to act accurately and quickly, Al-Nani's basic flaws appear.
In the next section, for example, the first defect appears; For nine seconds, Al-Nani moves to the ball carrier as the only passing option, and for nine seconds, Al-Nani is unable to clear what is behind or beside him, and therefore does not discover the obvious gap in Cameroon’s pressure pattern, and the wide spaces behind his back, and thus returns the ball to where it came from despite the difficulty of Fatouh’s position On the line, who finds no solution but to return it to Al-Nani again, and only then does Al-Nani raise his eye for the first time to discover that he could have turned and passed to Mohamed Abdel Moneim from the first time, which would have broken Cameroon's pressure and put his colleagues in a real advantage position, but he also discovers That time has passed due to Vincent Abu Bakr moving and closing the passing path, so he decides to return the ball to the back, and then the Cameroonian players reorganize their ranks by closing the passing corners and the gap disappears.
El Neny scanning issue (1) pic.twitter.com/4aCl8V4lVr
— Peak x2 (@STActics3) February 8, 2022
The second defect appears minutes after that game; Another throw-in for Cameroon, and Al-Neni is not in a position to participate in the first touch, so he carries out a lot of sweeps in different directions, and as soon as the throw-in is played, Al-Neni stops exploring what is around him for a full five or six seconds, and thus when Omar Kamal’s pressure succeeds in extracting the ball, and as soon as When it reaches Al-Neni, he makes the worst possible decision to return the ball back and implicate Mohamed Abdel Moneim on the line, who behaves much better than his colleague, getting rid of his marker by camouflaging and then launching a long pass that ends the situation.
El Neny scanning a lot with no better decisions, that reflects a lot about his habits and cognitive capacity levels, especially under pressure pic.twitter.com/7GQ0o92YYA
— Peak x2 (@STActics3) February 8, 2022
An emergency escape
These shots catch the eye because they are the most impressive; When an empty space appears and clear passing options allow a way out of similar predicaments, spectators and analysts expect the midfielder to exploit them, which is what Al-Nani always fails to do under pressure, and for this reason these scenes stick to the minds of others; Simply because it is the situations in which the greatest possible advantage is created if the player can deal with them effectively.
The problem, then, is not that Al-Nani passes backwards all the time, but rather that he passes backwards in specific situations that prevent his team from achieving qualitative or tactical superiority in favorable opportunities. On his decisions afterwards, as if they were not.
In fact, the nene often manages to escape the pressure in another way. To land far away from the opponent's players or go out to the sides to be able to receive the ball comfortably, and then rotate and make these sweeps in the direction of the opponent's goal without worry, which explains his success in completing a relatively large number of forward passes despite the previous defects.
What does this have to do with Al-Nani, the African Cup of Nations, and situations of receiving under pressure? In recent years, neuroscientists have entered the field of developing the performance of football players, specifically the breadth and quality of the field of vision, which helps football players, specifically midfielders, to better understand their visual surroundings, and quickly capture its details and distances in fractions of a second, thus giving their brains A better opportunity to process and act on the information learned. This is what made visual field training an important part of current training science.
German Daniel Memmert, Professor of Neurology at the University of Cologne, succeeded, with the help of his team, in designing a number of exercises to improve peripheral vision in soccer players, and to raise the brain's ability to perceive details of what lies at the borders of sight, and the trick in these exercises is very simple, and it is practiced with primitive tools In an atmosphere free of tension and pressure, with the aim of strengthening the link between the brain and the visual periphery, the link that the brain automatically retrieves in subsequent stressful situations to recall the correct behaviors from memory easily. (4)
In the next section, one of these exercises appears, and it includes bouncing the ball with the feet or hands while looking forward, and this puts the movement of the ball in the periphery of the visual field instead of the center, and gradually accustoms the brain to a better awareness of what is happening in it.
There are other exercises that force the player to perform optical scans under constant pressure, such as training the German Footbonaut machine that Dortmund has been using for years, and is credited with Goetze's goal against Argentina in the 2014 World Cup final; A machine that launches successive balls from multiple previously unknown directions, then gives the player a light or sound signal to shoot or pass them in a different direction with accuracy and speed. (5)
In fact, similar training was the reason for Trent Alexander-Arnold, the Liverpool back, to regain his level after a bad start to last season. As part of the contract agreement with Nabi Keita from Leipzig, Liverpool players could send their players to train under the leadership of Daniel Lippi, an ophthalmologist at the University of Leipzig. Harvard, and in what was called the "Trent's Vision" project, the English fullback received weeks of similar tests to improve his ability to navigate between long and close range, and track multiple moving goals, all of which are training available to footballers in most of Europe's big clubs. (6) (7)
Well, what if we were talking about an Arab or African club that does not have the financial means to buy a multimillion-pound machine or contract with an ophthalmologist from Harvard? In addition to Memmert's exercises, there are a few exercises that can be carried out using very primitive tools, one of which is proposed by "You Coach" using only three players and two training badges, as follows; Two players pass the ball between themselves, while the third runs from the first badge to the second in a perpendicular path to the pass path, then returns, and once he returns, he moves to take the place of one of the players, to be replaced by the other in running between the two badges, and so on. This training teaches the passers to anticipate the moment of entry of the third player from the side, and forces them to follow what is happening in the peripheral visual field and adapt to it. (8)
Another exercise that appears in the next section using four players, four balls, and a rectangular area of the field, in which each player starts the ball from the corner of the rectangle, provided that they meet in the middle and each completes his path without colliding with the other, and this requires following the paths of the rest who move in front of him and on Both sides, for the same previous goal.
Lucy
Now you understand the idea, and with a little reflection you realize that it is simpler than you imagine; Do you look directly at the doorknob while opening it? Do you look at your feet while walking? Didn't you stop looking at the keyboard after a while typing on your first smartphone? All of this has become done around the center of your sight, but you do it efficiently and with rare mistakes just because you are used to it, and if a nanny or someone else can write on a keyboard that does not exceed a millimeter or two between letters without looking at it directly, then he certainly can do anything else similar .
The Austrian Red Bull Group, which owns Leipzig, Salzburg and others, is one of the most important pioneers in this field today, and the specialists there say that footballers must treat their eyes exactly as they treat their muscles; With continuous training and maintaining the sharpness of the connection between the brain, the eye and the muscles. (9)
One of the most important tips that Red Bull specialists give to footballers is to constantly perform the Toothpick & Straw test, which involves focusing your eyes on a target - any goal - and then placing a cup on the border of your field of view, and inside it you put a straw Or an aspirator, and then you try to drop a toothpick inside it while looking at the central target, and the faster you succeed, the more evidence of your peripheral vision.
On a radio show in 2018, Gary Neville spoke about Gayle Stephenson, a specialist Sir Alex Ferguson contracted to coach players' eyes for two decades during his coaching tenure, and in 2017, researchers at Liverpool John Moores University discovered that the best defenders are those who can Move quickly between the near and far vision center (10) (11), or what is known as "Near-Far Quickness".
There are also a number of smart applications designed specifically to train the eye on different vision skills, and if all this is not available, many studies believe that the practice of table tennis helps significantly to improve the quality of peripheral vision, and helps to speed up reactions and mental muscle compatibility. Between the eye and the hands, and even table tennis may be the most effective method in this regard, as the player does not feel that he is actually training while practicing. (9)
Is all of this sufficient to answer the question? maybe. What we do know is that Al-Nani gets anxious in stressful situations, and tries to escape from them whenever possible, and what we also know is that his vision is not sufficiently developed, and that the problem is a mixture of tension on the one hand and limited capabilities on the other.
Despite all this, we would not be fair if we decided to hold Al-Nani solely responsible, as such knowledge was not available to him during his formation in the youth teams of the “Arab Contractors” club, and he did not come into contact with it until later in his career after leaving for Europe, which is It is definitely not available to 100% of football players in Egypt, which makes the talented ones even more valuable.
In "Lucy", Professor Norman Morgan Freeman cannot imagine what a person might achieve if he succeeded in exploiting the full capacity of his brain, and in fact, European football puts the same question to the eye and is already exploring the answer. We hope things change quickly before our players turn out to be blind compared to their peers. (12)
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