DonAndres
Wild Man of Borneo
These comments make it sound as if he played a terrible game. I disagree, I think he was pretty good overall. Some great runs, some great combination plays, and generally very involved and threatening.
However, it'd be wrong to dismiss his poor finishing today as 'bad luck'. There is a very clear difference between the Neymar of say the 14/15 season who looked like a very clinical finisher and the Neymar of now. He's direct and effective when dribbling down the wing, that's where a majority of his assists have come from and his most impressive dribbles. However, he is insanely indirect when he's trying to play up the more central areas of the pitch. His path to goal is often filled with very complicated maneuvers, crosses, passes and trying to draw fouls from the man at his back. His sideways/backwards dribbles play right into the objectives of the defense, just trying to crowding Neymar and shepherding him away from vulnerable areas and thus neutralizing his threat. All of these tendencies make him much less effective attacking through traffic than a player of his skillset should be. I doubt it'll be done, but I'd be very interested to see someone make a statistical breakdown of Neymar's effectiveness with passing/crossing/dribbling/goals/chance creation through plays in the middle vs on the wing. I think the disparity in the success of his actions between the two areas would be VERY staggering.
I don't know what this means for Neymar's future. I think one of the main conclusions is that, unless he can reinvent himself (which is entirely possible), we'll never build around Neymar playing centrally in attack during the post-Messi (or deep midfield Messi) era. The idea of Neymar playing as a CAM or as a false 9 or any central tending role seems entirely incompatible with the way he plays at the moment. If Messi doesn't end up moving to a 3 man midfield and doesn't play at RW (I doubt playing Messi on the wings be feasible even 1-2 years from now) then maybe we'll end up with some sort of 4-4-2 with Neymar as LM. Whatever it is, the next managers will have a big issue of finding a system that gets the best out of Neymar when he is the primary threat and the opposition start to shift most of their focus to defending him.
However, it'd be wrong to dismiss his poor finishing today as 'bad luck'. There is a very clear difference between the Neymar of say the 14/15 season who looked like a very clinical finisher and the Neymar of now. He's direct and effective when dribbling down the wing, that's where a majority of his assists have come from and his most impressive dribbles. However, he is insanely indirect when he's trying to play up the more central areas of the pitch. His path to goal is often filled with very complicated maneuvers, crosses, passes and trying to draw fouls from the man at his back. His sideways/backwards dribbles play right into the objectives of the defense, just trying to crowding Neymar and shepherding him away from vulnerable areas and thus neutralizing his threat. All of these tendencies make him much less effective attacking through traffic than a player of his skillset should be. I doubt it'll be done, but I'd be very interested to see someone make a statistical breakdown of Neymar's effectiveness with passing/crossing/dribbling/goals/chance creation through plays in the middle vs on the wing. I think the disparity in the success of his actions between the two areas would be VERY staggering.
I don't know what this means for Neymar's future. I think one of the main conclusions is that, unless he can reinvent himself (which is entirely possible), we'll never build around Neymar playing centrally in attack during the post-Messi (or deep midfield Messi) era. The idea of Neymar playing as a CAM or as a false 9 or any central tending role seems entirely incompatible with the way he plays at the moment. If Messi doesn't end up moving to a 3 man midfield and doesn't play at RW (I doubt playing Messi on the wings be feasible even 1-2 years from now) then maybe we'll end up with some sort of 4-4-2 with Neymar as LM. Whatever it is, the next managers will have a big issue of finding a system that gets the best out of Neymar when he is the primary threat and the opposition start to shift most of their focus to defending him.
