Tag: nunez

Big and fast

In football, normally we see two kinds of strikers – small and quick or big and slow. About twenty years ago, when 4-4-2 was the dominant formation, it was common for teams to deploy a strike partnership with one of each. Liverpool, for example, played with Michael Owen (small and quick) and Emile Heskey (bit and slow).

While strike partnerships have gone out of fashion, you still see these two kinds of strikers in modern football. The small and quick striker usually “plays on the shoulder of the last defender”, looking to beat the offside trap and score. The big and slow striker holds up the ball in an advanced position, waiting for teammates to go past, so that the team can then attack in numbers. The big and slow striker is also usually good in the air and can convert crosses.

For a long time, I was wondering why there were no “big and fast” strikers in football. It isn’t as if bulk / size is negatively correlated with speed – there surely must exist big guys who are also quick, and I was wondering why there weren’t so many strikers like this.

That, of course changed last year, with the arrival of Erling Haaland, a striker who is both incredibly quick and incredibly big, and who has dominated the Premier League like nobody’s business. Similarly, there is also Darwin Nuñez, who can both play off the last defender, and head crosses towards goal, and hold up the ball. Then again, I can’t think of too many others in contemporary football.

This morning, I got a hypothesis on why this is so – the big and fast guys are all in rugby! I was watching highlights of the quarter finals (England beating Fiji and South Africa beating France), and what I noticed was that the rugby guys are all both big and fast.

You need to be fast (and agile) to skip past the opponents to do a touchdown. And then you need tremendous upper body strength to be able to take down an opponent, or resist when an opponent tries to take you down. From that perspective, being big and being fast are both non negotiable for you to be a top rugby player.

I know there is a class difference in places like England between those who take up football and those who take up rugby (football is working class, rugby is upper class), but could it be that most people who are big and fast, and want to take up professional sport, choose rugby rather than football? And is this why you find few big and fast players from countries traditionally good at both games – such as England and France (and maybe Argentina)?

Haaland is from Norway, which doesn’t really play rugby (again, his father was a footballer). Nuñez is from Uruguay, which is a massive football nation, but not much in rugby (they made their rugby debut at this world cup, i think). And so despite their physique and speed, they chose football.

Had they been from England or France, it’s likely they would’ve played rugby instead!

New blood joins this team

I intended to write this a year ago, when Sadio Mane left Liverpool after six brilliant years at the club. There was much heartbreak among the club fan base about Mane leaving, and a lot of people saw it as a failure on the part of the management and ownership in terms of not being able to keep him.

Now, a year on, I admit that Darwin Nunez hasn’t quite set the club on fire (though I personally quite like him), but as a general principle, this kind of “freshening up” is a highly necessary process in a team, if you need to avoid stagnation.

A month or two back, I was watching some YouTube video on “Liverpool’s greatest Premier League goals against Manchester City” (this was just before the 4-1 hammering at the Etihad). As the goals were shown one by one, I kept trying to guess which season and game it was in.

There were important clues – whether Firmino wore 9 or 11, whether Mane wore 19 or 10, the identity of some players, the length of Trent Alexander Arnold’s hair, my memory of the scoreline from that game, etc. (Liverpool always wear the home Red at the Etihad, so the colour of the away kit wasn’t a clue).

However, for one goal I simply wasn’t able to figure out which season it was. There was TAA wearing 66, Fabinho, Henderson, the fab front three (Firmino-Mane-Salah, wearing 9-10-11 respectively) and Robertson. That’s when it hit me that for a fairly long time, a large part of Liverpool’s team had stayed constant! There was very little change at the club.

Now, there are benefits to having a consistently settled team (as the fabulous 2021-22 season showed), but there is also the danger of stasis. In something like football where careers are short, you don’t want the whole team “getting old together”. In the corporate world, people can get into too much of a comfort zone. And cynicism can set in.

Good new employees are always buzzing with ideas, fearless about what has been rejected before and who thinks how. As people spend longer in the organisation, though, colleagues become predictable and certain ways of doing things become institutionalised. Sooner than you know it, you would have become a “company man”, (figuratively) wearing the same white shirt and blue suits as your fellow company men, and socialising with your colleagues at the (figurative) company club.

There can be different kinds of companies here – some companies allow people to retain a lot of their individuality; and there the “decay” into company-manhood is slower. In this kind of a place, the same set of people can stay together for longer and still continue to innovate and add significant value to one another.

Other companies are less forgiving, and you very quickly assimilate, and lose part of your idiosyncrasy. Insofar as innovation comes out of fresh ideas and thinking and unusual connections, these companies are not very good at it. And in such companies, pretty much the only way to keep the innovative wheel going and continue to add value is by bringing in fresh blood well-at-a-faster-rate.

Putting it another way, if you are a cohesive kind of company, some attrition may not actually be a bad thing (unless you are growing rapidly enough to expand your team rapidly). To grow and innovate, you need people to think different.

And you get there either by having the sort of superior culture where existing employees continue to think different long after they’ve been exposed to one another’s thoughts; or by continuing to bring in fresh employees.

There is no other way.