Tanguy Ndombele

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Let us know IF it happens and I'm sure the matter will get discussed.

I would but I don't look deep into meaningless stats like sprints. Surprisingly.

Pirlo didnt even need to sprint. I wonder how many times he got abused because of it. Or perhaps he didn't because people knew his game?
 
I would but I don't look deep into meaningless stats like sprints. Surprisingly.

Seems pretty pointless making the previous post then really.... Especially as there's still a perfectly reasonable question left on the table for you to answer instead.

The sprints stats is a relatively small sidestory; I shant pretend otherwise.
 
Seems pretty pointless making the previous post then really.... Especially as there's still a perfectly reasonable question left on the table for you to answer instead.

The sprints stats is a relatively small sidestory; I shant pretend otherwise.

What was the question, sorry?
 
I do agree with your post. I challenged it, this is what it looks like.

He has been highly impressive for most of the time he's played. The middle ground is that he's been woefully unfit. Due to injury and or poor conditioning. Neither have been fully explained so only left to conjecture. It would have been great to have seen his fitness incrementally improve with each game and thus his contribution would have had even greater influence.

:mourglasses::mourglasses::mourglasses:

Have a day off mate.
 
So, we parked the bus; fine.... but somehow everyone else managed at least one sprint.

Thus TN clocked up a damning (worst!) stat (and was also seen literally strolling about for good measure).

Maybe it's 'just' a coincidence but he managed to reach a mere 10th in terms of speeds clocked too.

This with players regularly lambasted for their lack of pace and mobility in the team.

Context for days mate.
We parked the bus!

The sprints were from those chasing the hoof, the hoof that completly by-passed the midfield. So the ONE sprint more than him was from one of our poor bastard attackers chasing an aimless lump up the pitch all on their own.

This is the context.
 
What was the question, sorry?
We parked the bus!

The sprints were from those chasing the hoof, the hoof that completly by-passed the midfield. So the ONE sprint more than him was from one of our poor bastard attackers chasing an aimless lump up the pitch all on their own.

This is the context.

What on earth are you on about????

Ndombele: 0
Everyone else: Some.

Bored. It's hardly central to my view anyway.
 
:mourglasses::mourglasses::mourglasses:

Have a day off mate.
For the mins he's been on the pitch 100% YES! He's largely been impressive, when not set up to park the bus the ONLY time we've had anything that looks like control in the middle of the park is when he's playing. It's worked both ways, when he's come off gassed after 60min we lose control. Or when he's come on as a sub we've gained control.

The disappointment is that these are the only mins we got out of him.
 
Highly, highly recommend following/reading Tom Worvill who’s use of data to write and frame a good article that doesn't send you to sleep is a real difference maker.



You able to copy paste the body of the article for those of us without Atlantic subscription?
 
When Mousa Dembele left Tottenham in January 2019, it took Tottenham just six months to find the man they thought could fill the void. Tanguy Ndombele became Spurs’ record signing last summer and was billed as the new midfield powerhouse the club’s fans were yearning for.

Sadly, things haven’t quite turned out that way so far. Ndombele, still only 23, has played far less than expected of a marquee signing. Even when he has played, performances have been hit and miss. His struggles have been such that he has been linked with a move away from Spurs when the transfer window reopens — though The Athletic understands Tottenham have no intention of selling him. Having only joined last summer, there is a desire for the player to make good on their substantial investment.

A move to Paris Saint-Germain is thought to be of interest at some stage in his career to Ndombele, but for the moment he is expected to stay and fight for his place.

What can we expect from Ndombele when football resumes? Here, The Athletic provides some context to debates regarding his fitness, looks at the reasons he was signed in the first place, and considers what his future at the club looks like based on his Tottenham appearances so far…

After a disappointing display against Burnley in March when Ndombele was hooked at half-time, head coach Jose Mourinho unleashed weeks of pent-up frustration. “In the first half, we didn’t have a midfield,” he said. “I have to say that Tanguy had enough time to come to a different level. A player with this potential and responsibility has to give us more than he is giving us.” The Athletic was told at the time that Ndombele’s lack of conditioning had become a “big concern” at the club.

A couple of days later, Jamie Carragher highlighted Ndombele’s apparent laziness on Sky’s Monday Night Football. “He either can’t run or doesn’t want to run. Neither of them are good things,” Carragher said.

When considering Ndombele’s performances, the implication of “can’t” or “won’t” is a strong starting point. If a player has too many “can’ts”, then there’s little coaching that can improve his game. Think about Lionel Messi winning headers for instance — you can’t teach height.

While physical data is tough to come by for some leagues, we can look to Ndombele’s appearance data in France to get an understanding of whether he had the legs to play regularly or not. Looking at his minutes, appearances and a few other stats over the past two years of his career, there’s nothing that really screams “fitness issues” here:

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In his first year in the French top flight, Ndombele appeared in 35 of 38 Ligue 1 games (three for Amiens before a move to Lyon on deadline day), completing 14. Featuring so frequently in his first season at a big team looks pretty positive for Ndombele, and again there’s nothing here that signals fitness issues. However, it should be noted that, in the early stages of his career, there were concerns about his conditioning. In 2016, he had to devise a weight-loss plan after Amiens coaches told him he was “not really fit, overweight”.

The following season, he completed nearly double the amount of games and only missed out on the match-day squad for one game. Again, little evidence to show he can’t handle the physical side of the game. That year, he showed sufficiently impressive form to earn a move to Tottenham. However, the stats in his first season in England paint a different story.

So far this season, Ndombele has played a third of the minutes of his previous league seasons and has only completed three games. His availability has also dropped through the floor, missing eight match-day squads — more than his prior two seasons combined, with nine games of the season still unplayed. According to Ben Dinnery, an injury analyst at Premier Injuries, part of this could be due to the increased intensity of the Premier League.

“Coming from Ligue 1 is a huge physical step up,” Dinnery says. “Acclimatising to the Premier League is tough. The demands on the body are different, and all these changes could be going against the grain of some traits he’s been brought up with. Suddenly there are differences and it’s about being able to tolerate and cope with those.”

Woolwich’s Nicolas Pepe is another to have found the physical gap between the two leagues a hard one to bridge this season.

In line with this, it’s interesting to note that, despite Ndombele not missing many games at Lyon, there were fitness concerns at Tottenham as early as pre-season. “For him it’s difficult. We cannot expect too much,” Mauricio Pochettino said in early August.

Given he’s played under two managers at Tottenham already, it’s best to consider this season’s appearance numbers in context. Ndombele was granted more starts, minutes and finished more games under Pochettino — even though Mourinho has been in charge for more matches this season (12 vs 17).

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Up until Pochettino left in November, Ndombele also saw minutes each time he made the match-day squad, whereas under Mourinho there have been two such occasions where he’s not seen any time on the field — at home to Norwich in January and away to Aston Villa in February.

But it wasn’t just the switch in manager that precipitated a change in Ndombele’s fortunes this season. Pochettino’s departure also coincided with Ndombele’s injury issues deteriorating. In Pochettino’s last match in charge — against Sheffield United — Ndombele was forced off at half-time with a groin problem that hampered him for weeks.

A month later, having made just one start under Mourinho, Ndombele declared himself unfit for the Boxing Day win against Brighton, prompting Mourinho to say: “He was not injured, but not feeling in a condition to play.”

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Six days later, Mourinho said Ndombele was “always injured” after he limped off 25 minutes into Spurs’ 1-0 defeat at Southampton. At around this time, Ndombele was placed on a fitness programme, encompassing nutrition, physiotherapy and individual training work. That individual training work even continued during the lockdown, with Mourinho arranging an ill-advised one-on-one session with the player on Hadley Common last month. Mourinho accepted doing so was wrong, but his view is that he is simply determined to get the best out of Ndombele — even if many questioned him going public with his criticisms.

Either way, when Ndombele joined Spurs, he appeared to have resolved the fitness issues that afflicted him at Amiens. He grew year-on-year at Lyon, finishing more games and playing more minutes.

It’s a very different picture at Spurs. Whether that’s down to the difficulties of joining a new league or, as some in the dressing room believe, down to a failure of application, these issues need to be resolved. If and when they do, the numbers suggest that those Dembele comparisons will start to look excitingly accurate.

Before his move to Spurs, Ndombele was a favourite in analytics circles for some time. In 2018, a blog by Analytics FC noted how he could be an apt replacement for Dembele, detailing how his “overall profile is extremely similar to Dembele’s, especially his dribbling, his stand-out feature”.

Ndombele’s ability to beat his man using an Woolwich of feints, jukes and stepovers is something that was picked up in the numbers, and it’s not just Analytics FC who spotted it. According to player-evaluation tool Smarterscout, Ndombele and Dembele both have a dribble rating of 99 out of 99 in each of the last three seasons when playing in defensive midfield, based on their ability to beat a man and carry the ball upfield.

That is a valued skill for a few reasons. First, it means that the player can act as a pressure-reliever to break the opposition’s press. Second, it’s an extremely useful skill to dislodge opposition shape, attracting opponent players towards you like a magnet and opening up spaces for team-mates to move into. Losing Dembele’s ability to do this when he joined Guangzhou R&F was a major reason why Spurs did not win a Premier League away game from the end last January until November 22.

Happily for Spurs, Ndombele does not appear to have left this skill behind in Lyon, which is part of the reason he is such a wonderfully entertaining player to watch. Looking at the numbers, compared to other central midfielders in the Premier League, he sits first for attempted dribbles per 90 minutes played (4.7) and second for completed dribbles (3.6) just behind Mateo Kovacic (3.7).

Ndombele is not just a dribbling machine, though. He’s also an extremely underrated passer.

Thanks to data from Sportlogiq, we can now accurately quantify when and where a player breaks a line with a pass. These line-breaking passes are defined as a pass that goes through a defensive line of the opposing team’s formation. The series of stills below shows one of Ndombele’s many such passes:

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These passes are a good indicator of a player’s ability to progress the ball forward and start attacks, and can help distinguish between those passes that are forwards but don’t necessarily penetrate opposition shape and those that do.

Looking at the table below of midfielders in the Premier League who complete the most line-breaking passes per 90 minutes played, we see that Ndombele sits third in the list.

There are plenty of names here that potentially go under the radar when looking at more traditional metrics (Brighton’s pair of Davy Propper and Dale Stephens for example), but on the whole, Ndombele is among some strong company:

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Of this group, he’s also attempting the second-most passes that look to break a line, behind Chelsea’s Jorginho — a player often labelled as a sideways passer. Ndombele’s Tottenham team-mate Harry Winks is seventh on the list, and his 80 per cent completion rate shows his ability to progress the ball forwards with greater efficiency, but lower volume.

Nemanja Matic’s inclusion is intriguing, the player whom Mourinho brought back to Chelsea, and then signed at Manchester United. There’s an argument to say that potentially in Ndombele, he has a player now who can offer similar ball progression in the base of the midfield.

When just looking at Spurs’ central midfielders, Ndombele and Winks sit at the top, with the rest of the midfield a fair way behind.

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Looking at the location of Ndombele’s completed line-breaking passes shows that he’s not making easier passes out to the wings. He’s completing plenty within the penalty box-width of the pitch, allowing Spurs to progress upfield centrally. The assists for Erik Lamela and Son Heung-min in games against Manchester City are highlighted, the latter being a lovely reverse ball that bypassed a number of City bodies.

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Plenty of the passes in the graphic above take place in the opponent’s half. These could be explained by Ndombele’s driving runs into the opposition half, or a lack of available options to make a penetrative pass when in possession of the ball deeper in midfield.

Boasting this skill set, Ndombele has the ability to be an extremely effective progressive central midfield for Spurs. But their ability to get the most out of him relies not only on getting him in the right condition to play regularly in the Premier League, but also effectively partnering him in midfield. To learn more about that, let’s investigate his partners at Lyon, where he often played in a midfield three.
 
Surely bollocks. They already have similarly struggling player in Naby Keita, why would they want another one?

Even if it were true, loaning out our most expensive signing in history after half a season would be a humiliation for Levy, he would never do it. We can't afford to do it anyway, we invested a lot of money in the player and either we get money for him that can be spent on a replacement or we swap him (if he's to be moved on). A loan with an option to buy is just not a goer.
 
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