The Transfer Thread (Rumours and Confirmed)

Riddy, the fact you said Alves had a season better than other would've been a good point to make if Alves had in fact been the successful one and the others unsuccessful...

What Eds said was perfectly valid and made sense.

 

yep. we went there.

 

You're saying you're unsure on a player with 1 assist and going on a purely statistical basis rather than watching him and passing the judgement there. How are you certain he had a poor league season? I'm not going to go in and say I've watched him extensively because I certainly haven't and in the limited time I saw him in CL he was far from a standout, but to judge someone on their lack of assists is ridiculous. If you watched him and said he lacks the vision to put in good passes, isn't capable of taking on and beating his man etc etc, then that's fine but to write him off for having the single assist is ludicrous. Dani Alves had 6 assists in La Liga. Does that make him more creative or more likely to set up a goal? obviously not, it just means that his pass was last in the lead up to a goal. End of the day Isco was their leading scorer and was working with old ass guys like Santa Cruz and Saviola who aren't even good anymore and there's every chance in the world that Isco was putting in good final passes and that either the keeper made great saves or the shot fucked up. He could've beaten 5 players, laid it off to someone in a good spot who then flicked it off onto another. This may have happened, may not have happened and probably didn't given you'd think there'd be a higher total. Irrespective though, assists are a flawed stat in measuring someone's performance, in particular comparing it to goals for a striker given that a goal is more or less the completion of a striker's job whereas an assist is obviously important but not essential in measuring a midfielder's play and added to this, is a volatile stat which is influenced by a number of factors that the player providing passes can't control.