The Curious Case of Maurice Edu and Cognitive Dissonance (and dodgy statistics)

Every football team has at least one player that polarises opinion; Darren Fletcher was the archetype for the trope for years at Manchester United, although in recent years he appears to have become more universally accepted among their support. At Rangers, numerous players have divided the denomination over the last few seasons, from Alan Hutton and Charlie Adam, through to current incumbents Kyle Lafferty and Maurice Edu.

Edu, a Californian-born graduate of the University of Maryland, came to Rangers in 2008 from Major League Soccer side Toronto, with whom he had won the previous season’s MLS Rookie of the Year award. In his first season at Ibrox, he featured sparingly until the Spring of 2009, after which he enjoyed a run in the team as Rangers secured their first league title in four years. However, during the 3-0 victory over Dundee United that sealed the Championship, Edu suffered a knee injury that would rule him out for six months. His injury problems continued throughout the 2009-10 season, restricting him to only ten starts in all competitions.

2010-11 was more encouraging for the American. After a strong showing at the World Cup with the USA, he started 40 of Rangers’ 55 games in all competitions, and recorded five goals and two assists. However, there were perhaps some lingering doubts about the midfielder’s performances and overall form, particularly in the third quarter of the season. He didn’t look comfortable in possession, or going into tackles and appeared to have developed an unfortunate habit of slipping and tripping over the ball. Perhaps his season could be summed up by his performance against Valencia in the Champions League in October; some thirteen minutes after giving Rangers the lead with a header (during which he took a goalkeeper’s fist to the face), he sent a second header into his own net to equalise for the Spaniards.

At this point, it could be suggested that Edu’s hesitant performances were exasperating the Ibrox crowds, and their exasperation was further affecting Edu’s performances. A vicious circle that showed every sign of continuing in Rangers’ first eight or so games of the 2011-2012 campaign. However, it should be noted that for five of those matches, Edu was partnered in central midfield by Lee McCulloch, a pairing that has never been particularly effective for Rangers, as illustrated by the following table:

2009/10 Edu/McCulloch central midfield conundrum

Presence	No. of Matches	Win Rate
Neither starting	2	100%
McCulloch only	13	69.2%
Edu only	28	64.3%
Both	12	58.3%
Overall	55	65.5%

When Rangers play McCulloch and Edu together in midfield, Steven Davis, the more creative of the three is often fielded on the right, where his influence is diminished. Additionally, McCulloch and Edu are very similar in how they play within the Rangers midfield. They’re supposed to break up the opponent’s possession, close down, ferry the ball to the more creative players. However, Rangers’ system in the last two seasons (when playing either 4-4-2 or the 4-4-1-1) doesn’t allow for two sitting midfielders. As a result the counter-attacking threat the team have developed over the years (by accident or design) is tempered by having two midfielders that aren’t particularly adept at playing fast and direct passing football.

Of course, the above data should not be taken as gospel, and I’m certainly not a statistician, but it does appear to bear witness to the grumblings coming from the Ibrox terraces and cyberspace. Subjectively speaking, I don’t like the Edu/McCulloch partnership, for the reasons I delineated in the preceding paragraph. Whether coincidence or not, the five games Rangers have played this season with Edu and McCulloch starting in midfield saw some pretty turgid displays. Rangers won one league game and drew one; lost and drew against Malmo in the Champions League qualifier; lost and drew against Maribor in the Europa League play-off.

Of course, it’s not simply that McCulloch and Edu are incompatible as players; there’s the additional problem that neither is in a particularly rich vein of form. McCulloch has struggled for most of 2011 with knee problems, and hasn’t looked nearly fit enough this season. Edu, as I have previously intimated has been struggling with what appear to be confidence issues, culminating in the game against Malmo where he appeared to be taking up positions where his team-mates wouldn’t have been able to pass to him. However, since Rangers’ exit from both European competitions, Edu seems to be playing more adeptly. It could be argued that the fact Lee McCulloch has been struggling with injury and hasn’t started any of the last six matches has been a key factor in Edu, and Rangers’ renaissance.

However, this brings us to cognitive dissonance. A poster on a Rangers’ forum coined the phrase to explain the reluctance of some other members to give Edu credit for his improved performances, arguing that they’d already decided Edu wasn’t a good player and wouldn’t give him credit, even begrudgingly. He does have a point; the adoption of favoured players and scapegoats has long been a breeding ground for contradictory attitudes among football fans where an unfancied player will be criticised for his on-pitch failings while a more popular colleague will be exempted from similar chiding for identical, or worse, failings.

Maurice Edu may well now be the victim of adaptive preference formation, as well as the boo-boys. But he might equally be the beneficiary of cognitive dissonance. While the fans that were scapegoating him might be slow to give him credit for his recent improved performances, it appears to me that defenders of the player’s abilities and potential are now over-stating his current form. Evidence of this might include the denigration of Lee McCulloch; his appearance in the League Cup loss against Falkirk resulted in claims that the club wouldn’t have lost ‘if Edu were playing’. I’ve also read comments online suggesting Edu’s quieter performances are due to him playing a similar role to Sergio Busquets at Barcelona and that his anticipation “borders on telepathy”. I also remain to be convinced that his goal against Dunfermline today was quite as well executed as some are suggesting.

A poll for today’s man of the match on the aforementioned supporters’ website, as of 7pm, sees Edu with 8.16% of the vote, 1.02% behind Steven Naismith, who scored two goals. Contrastingly, in the vote on Rangers’ official Facebook page, Edu has 3.46% and Naismith 11.2%. This disparity could be due to a number of factors; posters on the fan’s forum have more in-depth knowledge of football perhaps. Maybe more people on Facebook were at the game.

Whichever poll is correct, most people seem to think that Maurice Edu was the third best player in a Rangers shirt today. They might well be right, but I haven’t been convinced by even Edu’s better performances this season. Perhaps that’s due to me choosing not to see what is readily apparent to everyone else. I have suspected that the people raving about Edu after the last two league matches have simply had such reduced expectations of the player due to his performances over the past two seasons. Therefore, in a match where he plays competently by other players’ standards, by his own he will appear to have had a terrific game.

I do suspect that’s simply me being churlish however. is it a coincidence that Rangers have won 83% of the matches that Edu has started, without McCulloch, this season? I’ll be quite honest; I don’t rate Edu as a player, and I’m not sure he has the ability or the tools to be anything more than a 7/10 player for Rangers. I can’t see this terrific form he’s in that others see. But if Rangers keep winning while he’s in the side, that’s good enough for me.

Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that’s even remotely true.

On the way home from 5-a-side football the other night, I turned on the car radio to listen to the live League Cup commentary, a bit of background noise to keep me entertained during the trip. I initially tuned to Radio 5 Live, as if Rangers are playing, I don’t tend to listen to Radio Scotland’s Sportsound programme (but more on that later). Shortly afterwards, I had retuned to Radio Scotland because Radio 5, in their wisdom, had selected Craig Burley as co-commentator on the evening’s featured game.

In theory I shouldn’t mind Burley; he’s fairly even-handed, will call things as he seems them with no concession as to whether the players are ex-colleagues or not (see Ray Wilkins for a sugar-coated contrast), and is reasonably intelligent. But the man is so lugubrious, it becomes difficult to listen to him for longer than ten minutes without feeling the urge to contact the Samaritans. While his fellow BBC analyst Mark Lawrenson can sound unenthusiastic and miserable if he’s not interested in either team playing (International tournaments) or if England are losing, Burley sounds like he’s bearing the weight of the world in every game he watches. I’d almost swear the man doesn’t like football.

So, I ended up on Sportsound’s ‘Open All Mics’ coverage of the Scottish Communities League Cup. Said programme is hosted by one presenter, in this case Richard Gordon, and instead of featuring one full commentary as its English counterparts, it instead has correspondents despatched to each game being played, who will then exclaim loudly and inarticulately to draw Gordon and the listener’s attention to the fact something’s happening in their game. This may have been an interesting idea, but in practice it sounds like live radio coverage of an orgy. In between climaxes, the panel chat about stuff and nonsense, generally loosely connected to what’s happening on the pitch, and last night one of them brought up Davie Cooper’s memorable goal in the Drybrough Cup final of August 1979.

They talked quite happily about the goal for 30 seconds or so before Chick Young pipes up that he doesn’t think it was the Drybrough Cup, but the Glasgow Cup. Richard Gordon pauses for a beat, then agrees with Young. In under a minute, Chick Young’s inexplicably enduring and pervasive influence on BBC and Radio Scotland has once again ensured that all facts and thus any chance at informed debate have gone out of the window.

Back at the house, I found myself watching a fairly run-of-the-mill programme on ITV4 entitled ‘20 Goals that Shook the World’ featuring, as you might expect, 20 goals that were reasonably controversial or impressive at the time they were scored. A succession of talking heads gave their opinion on why they thought each goal was controversial or impressive, and this is all fine until we reach Andy Townsend and his lack of knowledge of any adjective other than ‘stunning’. Most mainstream journalists tend to over-use the word ‘stun’ and its variants, existing in a semi-permanent state of incredulity it appears, but Townsend takes the biscuit. Stunningly.

I’ve harboured a crackpot theory for the last couple of years now that the simply appalling standard of football commentators, pundits and reporters in the UK is partly responsible for British players being so limited technically and in terms of imagination compared to their compatriots around the world. I have, of course, no way of proving this. My language skills are not good enough to allow me to comprehend first hand what insights European commentators and analysts bestow on their audiences, and so I can only base my theory on my observations of the British game.

We have media that covers football on television, on radio and in print. Almost to a man (and the occasional woman), the individuals in this sector are prone the hyperbole, cliché, stereotype, jingoism. They don’t know the laws of the game. They don’t appear to be familiar with the English language for the most part. Most, if not all of them haven’t been involved in professional football for 10+ years and so haven’t kept up do date with modern developments. Almost all foreign players and teams are dismissed with ‘we don’t know much about them/him’.

It’s only been in recent years, perhaps as a reaction to the poor quality fare offered by the BBC and ITV, and certainly as a result of the growing blogosphere and Twitter, that more in-depth analyses of football have become available to the fan that wants to learn about such things. But for the average punter, the suggestible type, exposed only to the mainstream media? Hopefully at some point we’ll all become tired of inaccuracy and cliché, commentators talking about players being ‘denied by the woodwork’, analysts absolving a player of making a violent, dangerous tackle because ‘he got the ball’. At some point we’ll realise that it’s not actually that impressive when our British midfielder plays a 40 yard cross-field pass or controls the ball with one touch because almost every decent footballer in the world can do that. But I’m not going to hold my breath.

The World Has Changed and Left Me Here

On my way to the supermarket to fulfil my late-night 21^st century consumerist desires I listened to Radio 5’s retrospective broadcast of their contemporary reporting of 9/11. Their New York correspondent Stephen Evans was recalling his experiences on the day, and the programme featured archive recordings of Evans being asked live by Simon Mayo if he could confirm whether a plane had crashed into the North tower. He didn’t know for certain, he’d said. Looking back ten years later he commented the attack made him realise that journalism had changed when London knew more about what was happening in New York than he did, on the ground in the city.

The radio was my companion on the longer but less travelled back road to the shop. It circuits the shoulders of the strath and back down the other side and I’d taken it mainly because the moon, hanging full and low in the sky, bewitched me. From the road’s highest point you can see the whole of the Clyde valley, street-lights twinkling, with the airport and the Campsie Fells beyond in the distance. I pulled up here, where the routes of the railway line and road are at their closest, got out and stood on the road, looking at the moon and the cityscape, feeling the win buffet my hair. Hurricane Katia is supposed to be heading the way of the UK and I wondered if this was the first signs of the oncoming storm.

I found myself thinking about the Glasgow of my childhood, the words of the BBC correspondent reverberating in my mind. Where I was currently standing was a space almost untouched by time. It’s remained almost unaffected by progress, green belt encroachment, economics, global warfare…the location and view is almost exactly the same as it was 25 years ago. For all intents and purposes, standing in that place is a form of time travel. I can connect with the Jay whose age was measured in single figures and remember how mysterious the world used to appear to me. My life has changed immeasurably over the last ten years, but that’s not due to 9/11. The attacks on New York City instead form my generation’s ‘Kennedy’ moment, a singular point in time where we will all remember where we were when we first discovered the news. For what it’s worth, I was preparing to return to university for my second year, and on the Tuesday in question I was collecting my gran’s shopping for her. She phoned to tell me “a plane has crashed, and the World Trade Centre is on fire”. I didn’t realise the two were connected at the time.

The more we know, the less we understand. I know little and understand less. This never used to be a problem when I was young. A driving licence, the internet and years of painful experience have stripped this city (and life) of its mystery, leaving me cynical and emotionally withdrawn. I left here at 20 to go to university; now eleven years later my peers are all married or parents and I’m stuck in a satellite town of a satellite town that doesn’t remember me.

But right here, right now, I recall feelings and sensations. Being able to just make out the floodlights of the old Hampden from the living room of my gran’s council flat. The abrasiveness of my father’s five o’clock shadow whenever he hugged me. Having a bedtime to be up past. Rusting street lamps and grass growing between kerbstones in parts of the city I didn’t have the foresight to learn the names of. The dull green glow of a Ford Capri’s internal illumination. Listening to longwave Francophone radio transmissions on my personal stereo under my bedclothes in a house without double glazing or central heating.

I long for a simpler time because I mourn the loss of my innocence. I can drive to the gaudily-illuminated supermarket at 9pm on a Saturday night and browse Twitter on my smart phone while I’m selecting my trans fat loaded items, but I know I can’t afford to buy too much because I have a mobile phone bill to pay and the car needs MOTd and taxed within the next two weeks. Being an adult in this time of increasingly clever technology, and perhaps finally having a career to show for twenty-seven years of study is exciting, but the responsibility of being an adult terrifies me.

I find myself longing to reconnect with elements of my youth, less because it was a simpler time, or there was less of a terror threat (I grew up during the tail end of the Cold War, the Northern Irish troubles and at age 8, a passenger jet exploded less than a hundred miles from my house, something that would cause me to dream about aviation disasters for decades); I just wish I could reconnect with the innocence and naivety and wonder I used to possess. When I used to have to work to find out information, rather than have it served to me by wireless and 3G technology.

It’s not healthy to dwell on the past, I know. But I think my nostalgia is also telling me that I’ve outgrown this place, and it’s challenging me to do something about it. I’m not sure that I can.

Hail Mary Doll

You can emerge from behind the sofa now; Scotland’s international footballing endeavours are over for another month. After a draw against the Czech Republic and narrow victory over Lithuania, reaching the play-off stages of the Euro 2004 qualifiers is still mathematically possible, but it looks increasing less likely to happen.

It’s perhaps a sign of increased expectations under Levein’s stewardship that a two-all draw with the Czech Republic is met with wailing and national gnashing of teeth; said result would probably have been a highlight under his predecessor. But that’s not to say there aren’t still lingering concerns regarding Levein’s management and coaching skills.

In both matches of the double header, Scotland lined up 4-5-1, a formation guaranteed to instantly set Scottish fans’ teeth on edge due to its perceived negativity. Of course, 4-5-1 isn’t necessarily defensive as evidenced by Manchester United and Barcelona playing  variations of it. It depends on the personnel. On Saturday, Scotland started with Charlie Adam as a deep-lying playmaker, with Scott Brown and Darren Fletcher in front of him.  James Morrison and Steven Naismith were the wide players, presumably charged with drifting infield to allow full backs Phil Bardsley and Alan Hutton to advance down the wings. This is fine in theory, but as usual with Scotland, fluency in passing and movement was notable by its absence.

Charlie Adam is renowned for his range of passing, but he’s also infamous for over-ambitious Hollywood balls (or long diagonals to give them their technical name) and generally ceding possession more than a player of his status should. Against the Czechs, his distribution unfortunately belonged more in the latter category, but he wasn’t alone; the whole of the midfield struggled to find players wearing a same coloured shirt, which was at least partly due to being denied space by the Czechs and partly due to their own paucity of movement and apparent lack of motivation. Scotland’s main tactic for getting into the attacking third of the pitch was the long diagonal by Adam or Caldwell, an approach long favoured by Scottish coaches, but an approach whose impreciseness leads to surrendering possession.

Scotland’s two goals each came from rare moments of calm in possession in the offensive third; the first saw a clearly unfit Darren Fletcher outmuscle his opponent and slip an intelligent pass to Kenny Miller, whose weak shot squirmed undeneath the foot of Jan Laštůvka and looped into the net. In the second half, Miller returned the favour. Allan McGregor’s long throw found Danny Wilson down the left flank; his ball down the wing towards Miller should have been dealt with by the Czechs, but Miller scampered onto the loose ball, drove into the penalty area and rolled a perfectly weighted pass across the six yard box for Darren Fletcher to coolly roll into the net.

Conversely, the Czech Republic’s two goals arrived due to a lack of due diligence by Scotland. The first equaliser came in the 78th minute when Brown and Naismith conspired to lose possession to the Czechs in their half; they then broke with pace and Scotland passed up several invitations to deal with the danger before Jan Rezek’s cross was deflected past Allan McGregor by Jaroslav Plašil. The second equliser came from the penalty spot after Rezek went down easily under the attentions of the naive Danny Wilson, Michal Kadlec converting.

While Saturday’s performance offered some positives and a whole lot more negatives, Tuesday’s meeting with Lithuania simply served up more of the latter. With Scott Brown and Kenny Miller suspended and Charlie Adam injured, Don Cowie and Barry Bannan came into midfield with Goodwillie replacing Miller as the lone striker. While I had expected the midfield changes to be like-for-like, Scotland instead started with Darren Fletcher in the defensive role…and that’s where everything stopped being clear cut. What was evident was that Bannan and Naismith were playing as inverted wide midfielders, with Don Cowie as a centre-half and James Morrison as something between a right wing-half and a Ponta de Lança. If that sounds like a mess, that’s probably because it was, with the result being Scotland’s midfield looked even more disjointed than it had during the previous game. Bannan looked enthusiastic and inventive, but he couldn’t seem to adjust his passing to compensate for the wet surface. Similarly, Phil Bardsley was determined and incisive in breaking forward from left-back, but on each occasion after getting in behind the Lithuanian defence, he had to cut back inside onto his favoured right foot, removing the gathered momentum.

Scotland eventually took the lead early in the second half when Bannan’s cute chipped pass picked out Naismith whose excellent movement had allowed him to break the Lithuanians’ offside trap and steal unmarked into the area to half-volley past Žydrūnas Karčemarskas. Sadly, that was about the sole highlight of a dreadful game, underlined by Darren Fletcher’s penalty miss shortly before half-time, his power-puff effort easily saved by Karčemarskas and Scotland desperately holding out for their 1-0 against a Lithuanian side featuring players that struggle to get a game for Hearts.

Scotland may have gained four points in the qualifying group and scored three goals in the process, but I think questions remain about where Scotland and Scottish football are going. I have my doubts about Levein’s team-selection, tactics and use of substitutes, while the ongoing terror of Scottish players when presented with a small white globe remains a concern. Our national football team appears to have been ploughing a furrow of negative football for 25 years now, under Roxburgh, Brown et al, to the point where our players don’t know how to do anything else. When we score a goal, our immediate instinct is to retreat to our penalty area and shut up shop, a tactic which might have its merits if it ever worked. Our main offensive approach is to propel the football at 70 miles an hour in the general direction of the one slightly built man we’ve fielded as a striker. We expect him to win the ball, hold off four defenders and bring the midfield into the game, which would be an effective tactic if the midfielders ever ventured beyond the halfway line. What American Football and other soccer teams consider to be a desperate last gasp method of getting the ball towards the opposition’s penalty area, we have adopted as our main strategy from kick off. Bizarre and sickening.

It remains unclear to me whether Scotland’s performance in the last two games is purely down to the way Levein sets out his team, or simply the neglect of the Scottish game in general over the decades. The tactics adopted by Levein (and Ally McCoist for that matter) seem gauche and unsophisticated, but is he not a member of the so-called Largs Mafia, those who earned their coaching badges under the auspices of the SFA on the Firth of Clyde, along with the likes of Jose Mourinho and André Villas-Boas? Of course, they have better players at their disposal, but surely coaches aren’t taught that aimless lumping of the football towards your opponent’s penalty area is a viable tactic?  I also remain to be convinced about the efficacy of inverted wingers, or inverted wide midfielders as we seem to specialise in in Scotland. Fielding a player on the right when they’re left footed and vice versa may work when the players in question are Franck Ribéry and Arjen Robben, direct and out-and-out wingers, but when the players you pick are slower, less direct and more inclined to drift and cut inside, you run the risk of compressing the midfield and removing impetus from attacks.

I do think Scotland have progressed under Levein, although that may be because it was almost impossible to get any worse than we’d been under George Burley. However, there are lessons to be learned about turning our game around in the short-term, and I’m not sure if Levein can or will take these lessons on board. As things stand, a win in Liechtenstein and a point or more against Spain (unlikely, yes) may be enough to see Scotland into the play-offs, so there is still hope.

It’s just a shame that Scotland are at their most deadly when there is hope to be crushed.