A closer look at Gael Clichy « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News. Supporting the Lord Wenger; coach of the decade
By Wrenny
While recently perusing the excellent football stats site whoscored.com I came across some numbers concerning Arsenal’s much-maligned left back Gael Clichy which I found intriguing. And I thought Untold readers might be intrigued by them too.
Before I begin though I would like to make one thing clear – I did not set out to write an article to defend Clichy before looking through his statistics. This really came about by chance; a quick glance at his numbers piqued my interest to investigate further, and as I dug deeper into the stats and put together a few comparison tables I found the strength of them convincing and felt compelled to share my surprising findings.
So as I was saying, while casting my beady eye over some stats my attention was drawn to a particular table on the Arsenal page of the WhoScored site – the top 5 Arsenal players for the 2010/2011 season, according to their average match ratings. While there were no surprises on the leaders with Van Persie in first place, Cesc in second, and Nasri in third, I was very surprised indeed to see that Clichy had sneaked into fifth place, just behind Alex Song.
Now, I suspect many of you will be rather sceptical of the worth of these ‘match ratings’ and I don’t blame you. So was I at first, but having looked at the wealth of information collected on individual players that forms the basis of these ratings, I believe there is plenty of clout behind these figures. Nevertheless, I am not attempting to prove anything with these ratings alone; they were simply a jumping-off point which lead me to look at ‘the numbers behind the numbers’. Below you will find the table for Arsenal players’ individual ratings for the season, which I expanded from the site’s top 5 to include the top 10 performers.
| Season Rating | Season Rating | ||
| Van Persie | 7.53 | Vermaelen | 7.00 |
| Fabregas | 7.46 | Sagna | 6.98 |
| Nasri | 7.28 | Arshavin | 6.91 |
| Song | 7.12 | Diaby | 6.91 |
| Clichy | 7.03 | Wilshere | 6.91 |
I thought it interesting that Clichy actually came above fellow full-back Bacary Sagna in these figures (although their ratings are not very far apart) when Sagna is widely perceived to be a far superior defender to Clichy and was of course voted into the PFA Team of the Year while Clichy is often spoken of as a liability. For the purpose of my analysis however, I will be focusing on Clichy and comparing him to his fellow Premier League left-backs. So for my next task I put together the season ratings for the most-played LB of each Premier League club, to see where Clichy would end up when compared to his peers such as Ashley Cole, Patrice Evra and the on-form Leighton Baines. From there I could select the top performers and look more closely at their numbers.
| Season Rating | Season Rating | ||
| Baines | 7.09 | Warnock | 6.60 |
| Clichy | 7.03 | Robinson | 6.58 |
| Assou-Ekotto | 6.93 | Elokobi | 6.55 |
| Evra | 6.85 | Figueroa | 6.54 |
| A. Cole | 6.82 | Collins | 6.50 |
| Bardsley | 6.80 | Givet | 6.48 |
| Enrique | 6.79 | Konchesky | 6.46 |
| Crainey | 6.67 | Bridge | 6.46 |
| Kolarov | 6.65 | Ridgewell | 6.42 |
| Salcido | 6.65 | Shorey | 6.34 |
Surprised? I certainly was. According to the WhoScored ratings, Gael Clichy was only out-performed in his position by Everton’s Leighton Baines, and only then by a small margin. The ‘Best Left-Back in the World’ Ashley Cole came a disappointing fifth.
From there I decided to take the 5 highest-rated players in the table and have a much closer look at their statistics, hoping to discover how their overall ratings might have come about. As much of the criticism aimed at Clichy seems to be of his defensive ability, I deemed it best to compare the players’ attacking prowess first. My thinking behind this was to find out whether Clichy’s high rating of 7.03 could have been ‘inflated’ due to him contributing more in attack than other left-backs, therefore disguising a relative weakness in his defending. If anything, the opposite was true:
| Goals | Assists | |
| Baines | 5 | 11 |
| Clichy | 0 | 1 |
| Assou-Ekotto | 0 | 0 |
| Evra | 1 | 1 |
| A. Cole | 0 | 3 |
As you can see, Spurs’ Assou-Ekotto is the only one of the five to made fewer goal-scoring contributions to his team last season than Gael Clichy. Looking at this table it also becomes apparent how Leighton Baines has topped the left-back charts – by virtue of taking many of Everton’s set pieces and delivering plenty of teasing crosses he amassed an incredible 5 goals and 11 assists. Where might he have placed if judged purely on his defensive work? Lower than Clichy, that is without doubt. Cole and Evra also made bigger goal-scoring contributions than Clichy, though to a much smaller degree than Baines, yet find themselves with a lower overall rating than Gael.
So by now I’m itching to analyse Clichy’s defensive stats; if he has rated above the highly-regarded Evra and Cole and got so close to assist-machine Leighton Baines on the season’s average ratings, despite a low offensive contribution, his defensive numbers must be strong. I wasn’t disappointed.
The following table shows each player’s average number of successful tackles, successful interceptions and clearances per game in the 2010/2011 season, providing a very strong indicator of each left-back’s defensive contribution to his team.
| Tackles p/g | Interceptions p/g | Clearances p/g | |
| Baines | 2.2 | 1.3 | 2.7 |
| Clichy | 3.4 | 3.2 | 4.5 |
| Assou-Ekotto | 2.7 | 3.5 | 3.8 |
| Evra | 2.3 | 2.3 | 2.7 |
| A. Cole | 2.6 | 1.3 | 1.2 |
Once again, Clichy’s numbers throw up a big surprise. He is well ahead of all his peers in the number of tackles and clearances he makes per game, and by a large margin. He only failed to top the chart on the number of interceptions he makes per game, which went to Assou-Ekotto, yet he still makes far more interceptions than the three other defenders in the table.
I also took the liberty of combining the players’ numbers of tackles, interceptions and clearances into one total figure, to get a feel for how many critical contributions they are making in defence in an average game.
| Tackles + Interceptions + Clearances p/g | |
| Baines | 6.2 |
| Clichy | 11.1 |
| Assou-Ekotto | 10.0 |
| Evra | 7.3 |
| A. Cole | 5.1 |
Overall, this paints a picture of Clichy as a player who is defensively very busy, much more so than other defenders at the big clubs. Perhaps the question should be not whether we could find a better left-back, but if we are capable of offering the left-back we have greater protection so that he is not forced into getting through quite so much defensive work. It might also be worth pointing out that, although he is not lacking experience, at 25 Clichy is the youngest of the five left-backs in this analysis.
The last stat I will be looking at concerns losing the ball. Clichy has often been criticised for losing possession in dangerous areas, and although I cannot show where exactly on the pitch the ball is being lost, I do have the stats for the average number of dispossessions and turnovers each player suffered per game last season. Is this where Clichy finally lets himself down?
| Dispossessed p/g | Turnovers p/g | |
| Baines | 1.3 | 0.8 |
| Clichy | 0.7 | 0.4 |
| Assou-Ekotto | 1.0 | 0.6 |
| Evra | 1.3 | 0.8 |
| A. Cole | 1.2 | 0.9 |
No. Yet again, he comes out on top. Baines and Evra are dispossessed of the ball almost twice as often as Gael, and the numbers for turnovers tell a similar story. This is not a player who appears to be careless or sloppy with the ball.
I would like to finish by saying that I believe statistics can only tell us so much, and this piece is not meant as any kind of conclusive proof of Clichy’s quality. But I hope that the numbers here can help us better understand his performance levels and inform any discussions regarding him. Thank you for reading and I’ll see you in the comments.