Jamie Hamilton

And it seems very counterintuitive, right?

It's like, why are you doing this kind of close combination stuff on your own penalty spot, but yet you just want to pass it around the side when you get to the opponent's penalty area?

And I think there's a couple of things there.

Like the goal, first thing is to

identify that the goal kick or the restart is a set piece itself which allows coaches to plan the positioning of their players and the pattern of where the ball is going to go and the big part of that as well in a goal kick set piece is that you essentially have

almost always a plus one like you were talking about the free player because you have the goalkeeper so when you have this combination of let's say the the ability to create positional advantages i.e you know telling your players where to stand at a restart and then having that numerical advantage and built into it and this is very appealing to the logic of modern coaches right this um

plus one, free man, and we get to structure where the players stand.

So they feel more comfortable, right?

But yeah, I mean, there's other types of advantages in football.

And yeah, we're mentioning that the actual characteristics of the players are very important.

And yeah, Donnarumma maybe doesn't have the particular qualities that allow him to be that effective plus one in that situation.

So yeah, Nunes is like, okay, find a free man.

That's what I'm essentially saying.

That's what my perception of the game has been conditioned into doing all the time.

But is it the best to do it in that?

Especially from a throw-in, it's not particularly easy for Donnarumma.

So yeah, there's all that going on.

In terms of how Arsenal scored the goal and how teams are choosing to go long, we talked about this before as well.

there is this development or tendency now, as Arsenal were doing yesterday, to press man-to-man, and that's to negate this positional and numerical advantage, right, that teams could generate from build-ups with their routines.

So, yeah, and this is what coaches have been referring to, like, you know, Arteta himself has been explicit.