Why Sandro Tonali Solves Newcastle United's Biggest Problem
Sandro Tonali's transfer to Newcastle could end up costing the Magpies £70m, and that's a figure that has several pundits asking questions about whether it's a smart move given his lack of a clear way to impact his new club. But the Italian's diverse skillset is actually what Eddie Howe has been crying out for...
Transcript
00:00 [INTRO]
00:03 Buongiorno amici miei, Adam Clearer here from 442, literally in Italy right now, Honest
00:09 and Yucatel United have signed Sandro Ternali.
00:12 And that has led to what we here in Italy call "Noi ha so discorso su internet".
00:17 He's massively overpriced, he's massively overhyped, his passing's not that good, his stats are weirdly inflated,
00:23 he wasn't even that important to Milan in the first place, he can't play the number 6 role,
00:27 he's just showing long stuff with nicer hair, yada yada yada, stai zitto!
00:32 Sandro Ternali is an absolutely sensational bit of business for Yucatel United,
00:37 and the fact that there isn't one singular obvious thing he's going to bring to this team is not a problem,
00:42 it's precisely why they've bought him.
00:45 [DING]
00:47 For some reason everything's just a bigger deal and demands more scrutiny when it's Yucatel United,
00:51 and because people can't quite figure out exactly what it is Ternali's going to bring to this team,
00:56 all of a sudden it's a bad buy.
00:58 So who is Sandro Ternali?
01:00 Well you probably know already by now he's 23 year old vice captain of AC Milan,
01:03 devilishly good looking, he's won Serie A, he's played in the Champions League,
01:07 he dragged the Italian youth side, kicking and screaming to the midpoint of most competitions,
01:12 and he was supposed to be the new Andrea Pielo.
01:15 But one of the main criticisms he gets in Italy, which you're going to start hearing over here,
01:18 is that he's already not reaching his obvious potential, because he isn't the new Andrea Pielo,
01:23 he hasn't got the passing range to be him.
01:25 And the reason people say he's not the new Andrea Pielo, the reason his passing's not as good,
01:29 is because his numbers, frankly, suck.
01:31 Like for Milan, Ternali either plays as one of two double pivots in a 4-2-3-1 system,
01:36 or he plays as either the right or left hand side eight in a 4-3-3.
01:40 And what you would expect for a player in either of those two positions,
01:43 like think of Bruno at Newcastle, is really high pass completion percentages.
01:47 But Ternali, if we look at the numbers, has incredibly, incredibly low pass completion percentages.
01:52 Like on the face of that, he's one of the worst passers in European football.
01:56 But the reason for this is Ternali does not do the bulk of his passing in these sort of areas.
02:00 He prefers to progress the ball up the pitch with his running.
02:04 He's one of the best progressive carriers in Serie A.
02:07 That means when he gets on the ball, when he's looking to make passes,
02:09 they're normally in the final third, where naturally, they're of a much lower percentage.
02:13 Like if we just take those passing stats, and then we combine them with his goal creating actions
02:17 and his shot creating actions, you can see that he contributes an awful lot
02:21 to the chances Milan are creating, despite completing very few passes.
02:25 And what that means is his passing numbers are far more similar to an attacking player
02:29 than they are to a midfield player, because his job is to hit killer balls,
02:33 to hit final passes, which by their very nature, come off far less.
02:36 Like in particular here, one of the key things about playing a number six role,
02:39 which people have talked about him potentially doing for Newcastle,
02:41 is you probably need quite good long passes.
02:43 You want to be able to switch the play, or to just make things happen out of nowhere.
02:47 And he attempts an awful lot of them, and makes almost none.
02:50 And this is a good example actually of how statistics can paint a slightly misleading picture,
02:54 because you've been in a football match, I'm willing to bet, you've seen this happen.
02:58 A player gets on the ball in this sort of bit of space, he spots his teammate making a brilliant run
03:03 in one of the channels, and he plays a sensational 80-yard pass right into this tiny little area of space
03:09 that just, for whatever reason, skips up off the turf and goes out on a goal,
03:13 he scrambles out and puts out for a throw-in.
03:15 And what does the entire stadium do? What do you do?
03:18 You applaud the hell out of that ball. What a pass that nearly was.
03:23 But from a purely statistical standpoint, it's just another incomplete pass.
03:27 It's a mark against him. It's as worthwhile as if he just booted it out near the corner flag,
03:31 slicing it with his weaker foot.
03:34 Tonali is attempting so many of these long passes because he has excellent vision to spot them.
03:38 He's just not making a high percentage of them because, A, they're really hard to make,
03:42 and B, he's 23. That's a part of a game he's still developing.
03:46 You see, this is at the very heart of why Newcastle have bought Sandro Tonali
03:49 because the whole conversation so far has been, "Well, he's not a natural number six,
03:52 so Bruno's definitely going to still play there.
03:54 He'll just end up replacing Longstaff in that number eight role."
03:57 And don't get me wrong, I wouldn't play him ahead of Bruno in that number six role,
04:01 but to say he can't play there isn't accurate.
04:03 And likewise, to say he's just like a luxury version of Sean Longstaff,
04:06 that he's an improvement in that position, yeah, that is probably accurate,
04:09 but he's a very different player to Sean Longstaff at the same time.
04:13 I probably would start him there ahead of Sean Longstaff,
04:16 but there are games where Longstaff's skill set will be more important.
04:19 Like, as every Newcastle fan discovered last year,
04:21 Longstaff is incredibly important to the way this system functions.
04:24 The way he finds the spaces, the way he makes overlapping runs,
04:26 the way he just basically makes every other player's job so much easier
04:30 is vital to how they play.
04:32 The one sort of remaining criticism of Longstaff is that for all his good movement
04:35 and all his good work, there are frequently times where he finds himself
04:38 in a very dangerous position and, for whatever reason, doesn't turn that into a chance.
04:42 He doesn't maximise the potential of that situation.
04:44 And if we look at his numbers here, first shot creating actions and goal creating actions,
04:48 it's the one part of his game that's majorly lacking.
04:50 And it's in this pocket of space here that he so often finds himself as the spare man,
04:55 but just isn't able to do anything with it.
04:57 Like, if you cast your minds back to the Fulham game,
04:59 he puts in a great cross to the back post because the movement around him
05:03 has left him loads and loads of room, but we just didn't see that enough.
05:06 Far more common was him getting the ball in this area, being a bit indecisive,
05:09 or just moving it sideways.
05:11 But you get Tanali in this area with a bit of space, and that, my friends, is a spicy meatball.
05:16 And that brings me nicely to the ultimate point with all of this, right?
05:19 That was quite a fortunate goal Newcastle scored in that game against Fulham.
05:22 That looked like being just another example, and there were many across the season,
05:25 where teams were able to frustrate them, where they refused to play them,
05:28 and they ground out some kind of result.
05:31 Newcastle were great at playing teams that wanted to play them.
05:34 They were less good at playing teams that didn't want to play them.
05:37 And the reason for that is because they are still punching so far above their actual weight.
05:42 Like, this team, this team that got into the Champions League places,
05:46 still has so many players that looked like they were sliding down into the Championship
05:50 not two seasons ago.
05:52 They do not have the luxury that a lot of clubs around them do
05:55 of sometimes turning up, not being at the races, getting your tactics wrong,
05:59 and still winning games of football because the overall quality of your players just tells.
06:04 Newcastle United, under Eddie Howe, win games because they get things absolutely spot on,
06:09 and when they don't get things absolutely spot on, they just don't win games.
06:13 And the main problem Eddie Howe has in that regard is it's very difficult for him to change things mid-game.
06:19 If you think back to last season, every time they had a bad run of form,
06:21 we'd get them on the training ground, and over a number of weeks,
06:24 he would figure that out, and he would turn it around.
06:26 I did a video on the channel, I'll link it somewhere,
06:28 where they stopped pressing as high to try and encourage teams to come out of it,
06:31 because that was just how people were playing again.
06:33 Anyway, I digress. Basically, he's very good at doing things on the training ground.
06:37 He does not have the luxury of changing things on the pitch.
06:41 That's because the basic rule of football is the most effective place to make changes in a game
06:44 is in your midfield, but Newcastle's midfielders play such important, specific roles,
06:49 you can't really remove one of them without the entire system sort of falling away.
06:53 And for this whole system to work as effectively as it does,
06:55 you need the direct running of Joe Willock to be able to carry the ball out of deep areas
06:58 and move it into the attacking third.
07:00 You need Bruno to be able to get on the ball, dictate the play,
07:03 and take other players out of the equation, either by beating them themselves
07:06 or playing passes that take them out of the game.
07:08 And Longstaff, his ability to cover the space, to recognise the gaps,
07:12 keeps the whole thing really solid.
07:14 Obviously, occasionally you will see Joe Linton in that role,
07:16 instead of on the left-hand side, and he provides a bit of steel,
07:18 makes things a little bit more solid, but he's not a dramatic change
07:22 to anything else that's going on.
07:23 He's still going to occupy those positions Willock does when he gets in the final third.
07:26 And this is exactly why Tenale was Eddie Howe's number one target,
07:30 because he has the work rate and the energy and the ability to recognise space
07:35 that Sean Longstaff does, but he also adds a far more creative element
07:39 in those areas of the pitch.
07:41 He has the direct running and the ball-carrying abilities of Joe Willock.
07:44 He can turn defence into attack the same way he does,
07:47 but again, he can be more creative around the edge of the box if he needs to.
07:51 He is not going to start ahead of Bruno in the sixth position so that he can play in the eighth,
07:55 but he's good enough there that you can make that change mid-game.
07:59 If Bruno's getting marked out, if he's not very effective,
08:01 you can swap them round and allow him to get into more dangerous areas,
08:05 to evade markers, to surprise teams, to pop up in different positions,
08:09 to impact the game and the attacking third more than he normally does.
08:12 Think about how good he was when he first signed,
08:14 it's because he was playing in those advanced positions,
08:16 because we had John Joe Shelby there who could keep all that ticking over.
08:20 Tenale will allow you that degree of flexibility without costing you
08:23 what Bruno gives that position, and also, arguably, he's better in the tackle,
08:27 so there will even be phases when you're defending where it's better to have him there.
08:30 I've even seen people making the point that, "Oh, he's really good at set-pieces,
08:33 but what's the point in getting him, because Kieran Trippier's going to take all of those."
08:37 It's not in Kieran Trippier's contract that he would take every single corner and free-kick.
08:41 Newcastle have worked on so many really clever set-piece routines.
08:45 Having another player over the ball who you conceivably believe will be putting this cross in
08:50 gives them so many options. He will take a really high number of those dead balls.
08:55 So why have they spent so much money on him? Why did Eddie Howe want him so badly?
08:59 Well, it's not because he's Sean Longstaff, because he's not, and he's not Joe Willock either,
09:03 and he's not Bruno, and he's not Kieran Trippier,
09:05 but he has really important attributes that all of these players possess,
09:10 meaning that Newcastle will, for the first time, be able to be really tactically flexible mid-game.
09:16 Think about it this way, right? Just like last season,
09:18 teams are going to turn up at St. James' Park and they're going to have all the answers, right?
09:22 But what Tonali enables you to do for the very first time is change the questions.
09:28 And just as one quick final point, I think it's going to be really worthwhile keeping in mind across the season,
09:32 these criticisms of him are valid. He's nowhere near the finished article yet,
09:37 but if Newcastle want to add world-class players to their squad,
09:40 they can't go and buy the finished articles. FFP stops them doing that.
09:44 Instead, what they have to do is identify players they think can be world-class,
09:47 but that for whatever reason other clubs just aren't convinced on yet,
09:50 and bring them in and develop them, just like they've done with Botman,
09:53 just like they've done with Bruno, just like they've done with Isak.
09:56 Tonali is in that kind of bracket.
09:58 So yes, anyway, if you think he's just come in to replace Sean Longstaff, then no.
10:02 And if you think he can't play the number six so Bruno's stuck there forever, then also no.
10:06 But I mean, far more important than that, what do you make of him?
10:09 Like, I'm not an AC Milan season ticket holder. I just have BT Sport and no girlfriend.
10:13 So yeah, in the comments, please.
10:15 And of course, while you're here, whoosh, the new 442, available now from all good retailers
10:19 and the crap ones too, with the Lionesses special ahead of the Women Euros.
10:22 It's really, really good.
10:24 In the meantime, though, thank you very much for watching.
10:26 Please do get me on Twitter @adamcleary, C-L-E-R-Y, Howie the lads, etc, etc.
10:31 I have not been this excited about a transfer in a very long time, so please don't embarrass me, will you?
10:38 You're not real. Anyway, ciao!
10:40 (upbeat music)
10:42 (upbeat music)