Analysing Tom Cleverley at Watford
He's good but is he good?
When looking at Cleverley this season, It’s important to factor in the work environment he’s been put in. Yes he’s a rookie coach who’s been given an opportunity, but an opportunity doesn’t always come with the correct tools. Not just him, but almost every head coach that comes through the conveyor belt of the Gino Pozzo empire of guesswork almost has no say in transfers regardless if the line from the club is we’re going to listen — long story short, they don’t. Every head coach appointment we’ve had says what every head coach does, and they do plan to play the way they say, but ultimately they can’t because of the squad given to them — It’s no different here. Secondly we have to factor in purchase value of the current squad; which has us around 12th with £16.6m spent, which seems a lot, but then you realise £8.5m was spent on Louza, £4m on Kayembe and £2.5m on Chakvetadze, so exactly £15m was spent on three players and the rest were frees or minimal cost. Scott Duxbury also came out in an interview with DNSYE saying Watford have the lowest wage budget in the entire league at £17m. However there’s no proof of that currently and the man has Pinocchio syndrome so let’s say for arguments sake it’s a bottom 5 wage budget to go with the not heavily invested squad. Finally, both transfer windows were quite frankly appalling to put it politely. We signed 12 players in that summer window, Jebbison who gets accredited as his signing (it wasn’t) was a disaster and sent back in January. Ebosele was sold to a Turkish club in January, Ogbonna picked up a mysterious injury after playing like 4 games to never be seen again, Tikvic he didn’t even want and was loaned to a bottom of the league club in Austria, Doumbia an 18 year old Mali international who to be fair, does look promising, same with Rocco Vata and Dwomoh who are also 19 at the time of signing. Larouci who just isn’t good ability wise anyway despite some good games, Kevin Keben who was signed with a significant knee injury, Bond a backup keeper who left a few months ago, Kayky Almeida who we spent money on to be released 3 months later and finally Sissoko who’s on his death bed and had to be moved to a winger because we had no depth and he has the defensive awareness of a sloth. Fast forward to Jan, and whilst we did bring in clear upgrades in Wiley (had to wait 2 months because he was injured) Abankwah and Selvik, we didn’t adress the clear weaknesses in forward areas of the number 9 position and depth in wide areas as the only out n out winger we had was Baah who picked up two significant injuries. Many would say our best three behind the striker are Vata, Chakvetadze and Baah. How many games did they start together? 2/46. Now this is the conflicting bit for me, because all season I’ve said we’ve got a bottom three squad, but looking at it I do think I’ve over exaggerated because can you be a bottom three squad which contains four top six level players in Selvik, Louza, Chakvetadze and Baah? probably not, but profile wise and depth wise it’s absolutely lower mid-table. No speed, no defensive awareness, no striker up to the level and what I’ve already mentioned, depth. You don’t have depth, you get killed in this league.
I think you have to breakdown this season from pre season until Jan 1st and then Jan 1st until end of the season because it’s two different teams. In pre season the aim from the fans and many betting odds, publications, podcasters etc was that a good season for Watford would be to survive from relegation due to players left, players that came in, current squad and the interest from the owner — we did that comfortably mainly from the first half of the season. But I do want to flag up what Cleverley said about the way he wants to play in the summer, to what he ended up compromising due to what he believed a personnel issue. He said he wants to dominate the ball, have a high line, have a high press and to be intense out of possession — only thing that happened in the entire season was we dominated the ball. He also said his preferred system is a back four, but we didn’t play that consistently until January because the players we had weren’t suited to it, so we played a 343 more or less. Whilst we racked up a lot of points and the games were so chaotic, but performances were on the downside despite the effort levels clearly being there; you overperform for a reason and that’s earning your luck and being on the right side of variance, those two things can co-exist. TC’s mentality was to get playoffs, or the bare minimum improve on last season, and we did that.
Style of play.
I’m going to discount the entire first half of the season, because of the comments he made and that I’ve outlined above about wanting to play his way. I won’t go too deep into because he’s not wedded to one way and If he get’s another job, it’ll be a different variation. But with us, it was very much mid/low block — 442 press out of possession, 3331 in possession shape with the holding midfielder dropping into make a back three, two wingers coming inside, and the 10 always operating centrally with the spare midfielder floating ball side with the full backs supplying the width. We never went direct because we couldn’t. He said himself I’d like to play direct into the 9 sometimes but Doumbia and Bayo aren’t that type of forward so I choose to keep it on the floor with short passes (11% of passes were short, 5th highest in the league).
No player at Watford has a bad word to say about Cleverley. Dele-Bashiru said he’s the best manager he’s ever worked under, same with Pollock. Vata said he always kept his word and never let him or the players down, Baah also said he’s the best manager he’s ever had. He improved younger players and got the experienced heads onside with him. The criticisms against him were too loyal to the older players but the counter point is who else would you pick with such a thin squad?
My concerns and what I was told by somebody too is that the senior figures at the club were concerned by the trajectory (picked up the fewest points in the league from January 1st) and the numbers behind it. For example (1 being the best in the league, 24th being the worst) Watford ranked in the bottom six for:
Expected points (20th)
Open play xG (19th)
Open play xGA (20th)
High recoveries (23rd)
High recoveries against (20th)
Line height (23rd)
Add that to the form from the second half of the season and you can see why the higher ups weren’t convinced despite the points overperformance in the fans eyes. The question will be at his next club, will he be able to get the players onside as quickly as he did here and he had the advantage of playing with some of them too, so the transitional process was quick. Are those metrics above leaning towards because of the squad or because of him? Despite what I’ve said previously I think it’s hard to properly judge his true level here because it was a siege mentality kinda thing and that worked in our favour for the most part, but there’s no doubt the season was a good one with the squad profile we had. I’ll be watching his next job with intrigue to see if those numbers improve or if us fans were slightly blinded by who he is.