In the Juventus@Lazio game we argue that in order to avoid Lazio’s trap on the flanks, Juventus made several adjustments in their build-up. 1, instead of passing to the flanks, both Chiellini and Benatia sent more balls to the middle. 2, in order to provide more passing options for the center backs, all three Juventus midfielders, Asamoah, Lemina and Khedira operated a lot more in the middle and stayed close to each other. Lets use the passing data from www.fourfourtwo.com to see if these tactical changes were reflected by the changes of passing patterns.

For center-backs passing in the middle third,

Chiellini 1st halfChiellini 2nd half

Benatia 1st halfBenatia 2nd half

You can see from the above passes data that both Chiellini and Benatia sent a lot less passes along their flanks. And they also sent relatively more passes via the middle of the pitch, mainly around the half-line. This is in consistent with the first adjustment we observed.

For Juventus midfielders received the passes:

Asamoah 1st halfAsamoah 2nd half

Khedira 1st halfKhedira 2nd half

Lemina 1st halfLemina 2nd half

The overall pattern is that all three midfielder received a lot more passes in the middle in the 2nd half compared to the 1st half. For Asamoah and Khedira, they also received a lot less passes next to the side-lines. These are in consistent with the idea that they all operated a lot more often around the half-line to provide more passing options for the center-backs. Lemina’s passes received pattern is also interesting. In the first half he seems to be everywhere in the middle to receive the passes. In the 2nd half, he actually received as much passes as that of Asamoah and Khedira combined. And most of these passes clustered around the half-line. Also, like many of us observed, Khedira is EVERYWHERE.

So both passes and passes received data are in consistent with our observations. I think combing these data will be a very useful tool to test our observations on teams’ tactics in the future analysis.

Please let me know what you think!

PS. all stats used in the analysis are downloaded from www.fourfourtwo.com

Oh so I also add a twitter account. Hope that it makes it easier for you to know that when I updated the blog. I never use twitter before so I don’t know if people post it this way.

https://twitter.com/FobsterHo