Sultan Al Ali (Dubai)
When Al Wahda announced the appointment of the French Gregory as coach of Al Annabi, to succeed the Dutchman Tin Cat, the most optimistic people did not expect the team to compete for the ADNOC Professional League title, and reach the President’s Cup final and the League Cup semi-finals.
In fact, Gregory was able to do more than that, it is enough to create a method that is a tireless “machine and pressure machine”, not only at the level of “Dorina” but also in the region and the “Yellow Continent”!
If we want to talk about the technical and digital aspect of the “happy owners” style last season, the method of pressure and physical fighting emerged on the team led by Gregory, and the statistics of “pressure intensity”, which shows the number of attempts to pressure the opponent per minute, shows that Al Wahda is the most pressured team on His rivals with 7.2 attempts every minute! This number makes him the highest team in the top 7 leagues in the continent, surpassing Saudi Arabia’s Al Hilal and Japan’s Yokohama F Marinos “7 pressure attempts every minute”, and in “Our League” Shabab Al-Ahly comes after him with 6.6 attempts. Compression per minute and then the rest of the difference.
The strength of “Al Annabi” is also evident from the criterion of the rate of application of pressure, which shows the number of passes that the team allows to the opponent, before pressing him to recover the ball, as the unit allows only 7.75 passes to the opponent before pressing.
These numbers alone are not enough to prove the benefit of pressure, the team may press, but without success or coordination between the players, but the numbers show that the unit succeeded in 47% of its attempts to pressure the opponent, which is a large number compared to the number of attempts, and its percentage comes in second place after Union Kalba, which succeeded in 49% of the attempts.
But is this enough to prove the method works? In fact, the previous criteria are not sufficient, and many statistics analysts link two important criteria to determine the extent of the benefit of pressure, the first is the rate of application of pressure, and the second is the rate of shots received by the team’s goal.
In the case of unity, we find that the team actually benefits from being the highest team in applying pressure, being the second least team that received shots on its own goal in the season, with an average of 9 shots per game, and a total of 237 shots, and this led to the “Honest People” obtaining the second The strongest defense with Sharjah, receiving 25 goals, behind Al Ain, which received only 17 goals.
Without a doubt, this high pressure requires great physical strength, and this is evident in the Annabi team achieving the highest extraction accuracy in the league, with a success rate of 64%, and it is the second most defensive team with 1,765 contacts, and at the same time, this led to the occupation of Al-Wahda First place in taking yellow cards with a total of 62 yellow cards in addition to 3 red cards.
Because of this method, we find that the unit does not think about the aesthetic technical performance of football, but rather in the physical combat performance, and at the level of passes, the team passed 15,711 passes, and it is in fifth place among the league clubs, with an accuracy of 83%, and until the picture becomes clearer, the higher “Wahdawy” player in the “List of Passers”, comes in 34th place “only the Al Orouba, Al Dhafra and Emirates clubs have the highest passer in a lower position”, and the player is Adrian Silva, who played only half of the season’s matches with a total of 686 passes!
Al Annabi focused on long passes, which made him fifth in the league, after Al Dhafra clubs, Ittihad Kalba, Emirates and Baniyas with 1,368 long passes.
On the other hand, Al-Wahda is the sixth-lowest team in the number of dribbles with only 209 correct dribbles, as the dribbles are concentrated in only two players, Joao Pedro and Fabio Martins.
Speaking of goals, this approach, which tends to the physical aspects, did not prevent the team from scoring at all, and it is the second strongest attack with 51 goals, and it also has the second and third top scorers in the league, Omar Kharbin and Joao Pedro.
Al-Wahda was able to use more than one advantage in its players, including lengths by scoring 14 vertical goals, to be the most team in the league, scored by 6 different players, which is the highest, part of which is due to the accuracy of crosses, as “Al Annabi” has the highest percentage in the league with 38 The unit also has the advantage of shooting from outside the area with 13 goals, which is also the highest. These high numbers are formed in two cases, either the players in the team are distinguished, or the players are forced to do so, due to the lack of opportunities created, or the absence of a real playmaker. And in Al-Wahda, it seems that both sides are present simultaneously, and if we look at more than creating opportunities in the team, we find that Ismail Matar is the highest with 40 chances, although he played only 16 matches, but he is characterized by “efficiency”, as he scored 31% Of the total chances, Al Wahda becomes the highest team in the league.
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