A whole season of picks

This is ultimately trivial, but purely as an exercise in persistence I finished a whole season of making picks for every single league game in the top 5 leagues. These were the results:

Premier League — 191/380 (50.26%)

La Liga — 182/380 (47.89%)

Serie A — 172/380 (45.26%)

Bundesliga — 137/306 (44.77%)

Ligue 1 — 161/380 (42.3 %)

Turns out my best effort was just barely above 50%. Goes to show predictions are a mugs game. As I said, this was an exercise in persistence, but I want this microblog to be about passion. Hence, we won’t be seeing picks anymore. 

One of my fears at the beginning of the pandemic when it seemed like sports won’t come back for a long time was that we will miss out on watching generational talents like David Silva and Kevin De Bruyne. What a pleasure it is to watch them both sooner than expected.

Missed the Premier League as much as anyone else. I am happy that the first game back between Villa and Sheffield United reminded me of one of the simple pleasures - the ability of football to put one to sleep.

Haven’t been active recently because of some situations in my personal life. But on top of that, a season with many interesting stories is now being overriden by a dominant one — coronavirus. I love football passionately, but closed door sport is not for me. Lets hope against hope that normalcy returns for the tail-end of the season.

Midfields in the Champions League

Arsene Wenger speaking on Bein Sports during Chelsea vs Bayern:

They make you run too much and you cannot survive for 90 minutes. In the Champions League, if you lose the midfield, you’re in trouble. That’s rule number one because you play against such good teams. If they can feed their strikers, you will pay for it. We’ve all gone through that.

I agree with Wenger, which makes the last five years of the Champions League a fascinating exercise in analysis. Why have midfield dominant teams not been winning as much as they should have in the knockout stages? It just goes to show that the competition is so difficult and random, that even having the most important core ingredient can’t guarantee you success in it.

Julian Weigl to Benfica

One of the earliest moves of the winter transfer window saw Weigl move from Dortmund to Benfica. I still remember Euro 2016, when observers and fans were perplexed that Weigl wasn’t starting for Germany following an excellent debut season under Thomas Tuchel at Dortmund. Weigl looked set to be one of the finest central midfielders of the next generation thanks to his ability to orchestrate play with his meticulous passing. But the constant managerial upheaval at BVB hasn’t been kind to Weigl’s development, culminating with Lucien Favre using him as a centre back in the last season and a half. Considering Dortmund’s defensive shambles under Favre, we all know how that has turned out.

Weigl clearly needed a change of scenery. Back playing in the deep midfield position he so loves, Weigl has started the last four league games for Benfica and already feels like a crucial player for the Portuguese champions. While it's still early days in Lisbon, Weigl is already averaging a 90% pass success rate, enabling his new team to control games better. 

There is a bigger picture to this transfer that I really like. Over the course of his nascent career, Weigl had been linked to many big clubs. When he was playing really well, even Pep’s City were interested in him, while Tuchel fancied a reunion with him just last summer. The fact that he chose to move to Portugal instead, tells me that Weigl thought a lot about this decision. While playing for Benfica has its own set of pressures, Weigl has joined a team where he will play consistently and where the manager Bruno Lage already considers him an integral part of the team. Pertinently, it's also a reminder that there is plenty of opportunity outside Europe’s top five leagues. After all, Liga NOS has been the breeding ground for many players that have gone on to great things elsewhere. It sure is nice to see a transfer happening the other way round for once.

The January Transfer Window 2020

Since transfer windows always end on a Friday, its hard for independent writers like me to react as soon as business is done. After all, I am looking forward to a weekend of football. Given a choice, I will always consider on-pitch action the real story. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t intrigued by the transfer window. In fact, for the first time in a long time, I have started to enjoy transfer windows again because it's easy to tune out the nonsensical gossip and clubs are increasingly becoming smart rather than simply throwing money at a wall to see what sticks. Over the course of the week, I think I would like to do some short posts on the transfers that were slightly less talked about. After all, Minamino, Zlatan, Haaland, Bruno Fernandes, Ighalo and others have been analyzed to death.