Moyes' substitution taboo

[Azza]

Oh what's happened in here.


Right another stat blast for you all...


Naismith and Oviedo have both made 13 sub appearances this season so far.

Naismith average sub time is 69.38 minutes including a first half sub time of 30 minutes, not including that means it's 72.66 minutes. Oviedo has a average sub time of 72.66 minutes.

 

[Seamus Colemole]

And this from somebody who cant stand Moyes.

The defence rests.

I can stand Moyes, i just moan about him a lot.

But the match ahs just finished and Mirallas 100% played through the middle as a striker for the 15 mins he was on the pitch, even after they scored.

But i think he touched the ball about twice because none of our hoofs upfield were anywhere near him.

 

[kenada_blue]

It's already Bry, I have a few more hundred thousand links to link;

Ooof.

Have to applaud that one

 

[chicoazul]

Loving this. It's a close contest. The massive [Poor language removed] off arrows are swaying it for me though.

Carry on.

 

[Jamo Martinez]

Why do we play him there then?

Coz Moyes is negative of course.

 

[tasslehoff]

When in Rome

 

[chicoazul]

@grandoldteam's arrows are ace.

Can we have more of these arrows please?

 

[Azzurri]

And Danny knocks out Goat via dropkick.

 

[Jamo Martinez]

Davie Proven said at half time in a recent match that Moyes wouldn't hang around when it came to changing things and that he was pro-active. The utter weapon. I wonder what these commentators and so called experts are drinking sometimes

 

[Azza]

Andre Villas-Boas - 71 subs, average sub time of 72.76 minutes, 26 subs (36.61%) 80+ minutes into game.

 

[samcdavies94]

Why do we play him there then?

simply because he's our fastest player and he can dribble

 

[Eggs]

.....generally on the Mirallas front we don't know what is going on behind the scenes. I'm a huge fan of the player but the rumours coming out of Finch Farm is that he's not the greatest pro. Some have compared him to Saha in that he wont play with the slightest niggle whilst the likes of Baines is saying to him that he's been turning out with his ankle strapped for months.

 

[CardinalSin]

Yeah but two strikers are always better than one. He should have taken a midfielder off or something. Like Fergie did against Spurs, proceeding to concede in injury time.

Disagree. Jelavic needed to come off yesterday and I'd have pulled him sooner. I was lucky enough to be there yesterday and that was the worst performance I have seen from Jelavic.

In games where he hasn't looked like scoring, he has at least put a good shift in. Not yesterday he didn't. A total couldn't be arsed performance from him yesterday.

Trouble was we didn't have many attacking options from the bench. Only Mirallas really.

Quick point about Oviedo. This lad riles me more than Neville! The amount of times this bloke ****s out of 50-50 headers is incredible! He's more worried about messing up his pretty **** hairstyle.

Grow a pair lad FFS

 

[Black Belt Jones]

Good effort putting some meat on the bones of how Moyes's makes his subs. Must say I'm a bit sceptical as it is the classic complaint of any fan, that the manager is poor at changing the game - go on any teams forum after a loss and you will hear this. Conversely, what manager's are known for being consistently superb with their substitutions? None that I've ever heard (although they may exist). It's the clearest mechanism the manager has to change the game, but remains relatively limited (swap 3 from 10), so it's easy to over-interpret. It can be the only data-point we have to judge a manager's in-game management but that doesn't mean it has to be a useful one.

A positive or negative substitution is going to be hard to quantify a lot of the time, and may be counter-intuitive in any case (e.g. bringing a defender on to free up a midfielder to get forward), so I think it's still going to be subjective (one way judging from the Moyes-fatigue around here atm). It's good to see the numbers on when he makes them though which do seem cautious relative to the two other managers.

 

[billycopper]

Good thread. Fergie would risk losing a game by going out to win it. They've only drawn two games, one because of a late equaliser by Spurs and the other when it wouldn't go in against Swansea. We've taken 12 points from 12 drawn games. If we'd been more positive and won 6 and lost 6 of those matches we'd have 18 points, which is 50% more!

If you look at the bench yesterday we had Mucha, Duffy, Heitinga, Neville, Hitzlsperger, Oviedo and Mirallas. Oviedo is more of an attacking fullback than a winger, so the only game-changing option that Moyes gave himself was Mirallas. Why four defenders and no Barkley, Kennedy or Vellios? I'm not sure whether the manager picks his squad based purely on seniority, (which would explain the lack of variety), whether he really doesn't trust the youngsters or whether he doesn't expect to use his subs and they're there just because he's required to put 7 names down. Very often though, he limits himself to negative substitutions before the game even starts.

Moyes appears to play the percentages as a manager. He'll persevere with what he knows and just hope that something drops our way rather than take one of his trusted soldiers off more often than not. By about 85 minutes the chance of someone he sends on costing us the game becomes more acceptable to him and they might just pop up with something unexpected and make him look like a genius.