goon wrote:
100%. Plus Xhaka's problem isn't playing progressive passes anyway, that's the one thing he's actually decent it, it's everything else. Watching Elneny in the last couple of games and it's notable how much more fluid he is than both Xhaka and Ceballos, gets the ball out of his feet quickly and plays a crisp and accurate short/sideways pass.
I think Elneny gets a lot of unfair criticism actually. He usually pokes the ball forward even when he's under pressure, which he tends to be a lot because he presses much higher up than Xhaka does whenever he plays due to having a better engine. I think it was Gilberto who pointed out that Elneny was the only one of our midfielders who played more like he and Vieira did (before we signed Partey). Press resistance is one of those things that is hard to quantify in statistics but I think it's vital to anyone who's supposed to play a mobile role in midfield, and that's what we need going forward.
I think everyone who has watched us play this season is aware on some level that opponents go up in press against us as soon as Xhaka and Ceballos get the ball. You see it every time we play against a half decent team. As soon as those two get the ball in the buildup the other team starts to move up. It's the flag they've set on the pitch. That's why Ceballos has fucked up so much with lacklustre backpasses and dispossessions leading to goals. He's being targeted and it pays off. Our solution for a while was to let Luiz handle the distribution instead and it made us horrible to watch. With little effort we had been tricked into bypassing the midfield altogether with his pointless balls over the top.
This is why we need someone like Bissouma basically, who will do unto the opponents before they have a chance to do it to us. It's why I think academy products like Willock and Maitland-Niles are more worthwhile spending time on too than a lot of the players we've given chances to in recent years. They've been brought up to cope with the reality of Premier League. They have enough about them to escape pressure and they aren't being held back by being agonizingly slow (like Ceballos) or too narrow in their vision (Guendouzi, Torreira, et al). I watched Maitland-Niles holding the ball against three Chelsea players who couldn't get it off him the other week and thought to myself that all the other options we currently have would have either gotten dispossessed or been stressed into making a mistake.
