Buildup Brawl

A chess match within the battle

One of the questions Alan and I fielded on our inaugural Zoom chat with Founding Member subscribers Saturday was whether or not Philippe Clement was being underestimated. Our answers were similar - while there was ample room for reasonable people to have criticisms of some of his decision making, the problems at Rangers were far bigger than Clement, and that he should NOT be underestimated.

That view proved prescient, unfortunately, as Rangers arrived for the League Cup Final with a well planned and executed defensive structure and strategy, in my opinion. Screenshots are less than ideal given how dynamic structure and movement is, so saddle up for a LOT of screenshots! The first is just 10 seconds (pyro smoke!) into the game and offers a window into the gameplan Clement appeared to have - a sort of 4-4-1-1 with McGregor man marked, our CB’s left on the ball, and a pseudo-Brugge strategy to jump passing lanes in buildup. Note the positioning of Bajrami vs Igamane:

I await Alan’s Stat Pack anxiously, as his packing data and related timeline within the game should be very interesting. My guess is that Celtic’s packing data will have been quite poor for most of the first half, as we appeared to really struggle with Rangers’ gameplan. Wyscout has a metric called “progressive passes” which is an inferior cousin to Alan’s pass packing data, and it showed just a 60% accuracy rate for Celtic for the entire game. To put that into some perspective, it was 68% vs Club Brugge and 65% vs Dortmund, and 82% vs RB Leipzig.