Cesc Fàbregas
- Thread starter KhaledBarca
- Start date
Ode to Django
You're not even a real journalism
He was great today
KyletheMuslim
Guardiolista
Always fades in the second half of the season, always....
Aryagorn
Improvin' Perfection!!
Seriously doubt Arsene is capable of some thing like that
B
beautifulgame
Guest
footyfan
Calma, calma
A big part is that he's just played in the second best/third best teams. I'd understand if he was the only one who was shitting all over the team, but all his teammates seem to suffer from the same disease that he did.
I didn't see this 2nd half BS when he was winning titles with Spain in 08,10 and 12 in the summers.
CatalinR10
Senior Member
antonnn
Blue Blooded Aussie
The Spaniard has struggled to recapture his early-season form in recent weeks and the dip is part of a worrying pattern that dates back to his time at Arsenal
By Alex Hess
The announcement, when it came, was odd to say the least. Barcelona had just struck a €38 million deal with Chelsea for the transfer of Cesc Fabregas and the statement released by the Catalan club to pronounce their midfielder's departure went well beyond the usual formalities.
"There has been a downward trend in his stats every season at the club," Barcelona's official website read. "He slipped right back into the FCB system as if he'd never been away but, despite glowing starts to each campaign, Cesc's contributions to the cause gradually decreased as each season drew to a close.
"From being someone who joined in with the attack, supplying and scoring goals, the magic tended to fade later on in each season."
As official statements go, it was certainly curious, and it is difficult not to sense a strong whiff of behind-the-scenes tension between player and club but, regardless of the internal politics that may have been at work, the club made a fair point.
Even more damningly, they provided the figures to back it up. "He only scored one, six and one goals in the last 24 games of each season," the statement said.
Over in north London, Arsene Wenger might have afforded himself a wry smile. The pattern would have been little surprise to the Frenchman, who saw Fabregas, in his penultimate season at the Emirates Stadium, score 15 of his 19 goals before the New Year. The following season, all three of his league goals came in the same period.
Unfortunately for Chelsea, history looks to be repeating itself. The club's elimination from the Champions League by 10-man Paris Saint-Germain and a rather tepid display at home to Southampton four days later confirmed what many onlookers had been noting for some time now: the Blues of 2015 are a far cry from the side who looked near-undefeatable throughout the first half of the season. And the starkest difference between the two incarnations has been the form of their Catalan playmaker.
As with his time in La Liga, this dip is easily quantified.
Fabregas wasted little time, after returning to England, in zooming to the top of the Premier League's assists chart – totting up six in his first four games alone – and he remains the division's clear leader in that regard with 15. However, only one of those have come from his last 12 outings in all competitions .
The assist can tend to be a rather crude statistic but such a steep drop-off is not a case of mere coincidence, nor is the fact that it has occurred in almost perfect tandem with his team's similarly underwhelming performances. Since their chief creator last laid on a goal, on January 17 against Swansea City, Chelsea's win rate has plummeted from 75 per cent to 42.
The Spaniard would likely argue that the team's strikers should also bear some responsibility. A creator, after all, is only as good as his goalscorers and Diego Costa is another whose output has taken a dramatic dive of late. Since that same game against Swansea, the striker has scored once in just under 13 hours of football, having averaged just over a goal a game before then. Although separating chicken from egg is no easy task, it is clear that both players – as with their team as a whole – have been struggling, with each likely to be accentuating the other's struggles.
A closer look at Fabregas's play offers a better illustration of how his early-season incision has started to elude him. Since Christmas, he has been making key passes with less and less regularity – their frequency dropping from once every 26 minutes to once every 46.
Crucially, Fabregas's overall number of touches per game has lessened by only the finest margin in that time (from 104 to 100). So it is not the degree of his involvement which is the problem but more the level of ambition and penetration with which he imbues it.
One reason behind the Spaniard's worrying dint is surely the almost non-existent rotation policy imposed by Jose Mourinho this term. The logic behind Mourinho's thinking is obvious – surge into an early lead and build from there – and to an extent it is vindicated by Chelsea's six-point lead at the top of the Premier League. But his methods have a flip-side: in the knock-out rounds of the Champions League, sparkling early-season form counts for nothing.
It is something that Chelsea discovered to their cost against PSG. Fabregas was far from alone in appearing both physically and mentally fatigued but was perhaps the most obvious, clocking up fewer passes than each of his central-midfield opponents and less than half the number of tackles (three) as waif-like playmaker Marco Verratti (seven), who dominated for his side.
Fabregas has never been an especially explosive player but one only needs to have seen a handful of his recent outings to notice that his capacity to surge forwards with the ball and to inject an instantaneous urgency into his team's play, as he was doing effortlessly only a few months ago, seems to have been somewhat extinguished.
Witness, for example, the way he drives towards the penalty box, leaving defenders in his wake, to lay on Oscar's opener against QPR in November. It is a facet of his game that has rarely been seen since the turn of the year. That pace has since given way to ponderousness.
That he has not been able to add to his pre-Christmas tally of four goals simply reinforces the notion that a player who tends to tire early – and who has become accustomed to putting his feet up over the Christmas period – is lapsing once again into a familiar pattern.
It is not as though Fabregas's invention has been replaced by defensive input. His combined tally of tackles and interceptions in his 18 league outings before the turn of the year stood at 55, or 3.1 per game. In 2015, this has wilted to 2.9.
Result-driven pragmatism might have replaced Chelsea's early-season exuberance as Mourinho has started gearing his side towards the business end of the season but his playmaker appears to have sacrificed the latter without intensifying the former.
Every player, of course, is entitled to their barren spells. The problem with Fabregas is that his current form speaks to something broader and more ominous: a career-long habit of petering out when it matters most.
Again, it is Barcelona's summer statement which explains things in the bluntest terms. "For some reason, he was never as good in the second half of a season as in the first," it concluded.
After three years, Barcelona were clearly at a loss as to why this was. Mourinho, if he wants this season's likely domestic success to translate more readily into European glory, cannot afford to remain similarly clueless.
By Alex Hess
The announcement, when it came, was odd to say the least. Barcelona had just struck a €38 million deal with Chelsea for the transfer of Cesc Fabregas and the statement released by the Catalan club to pronounce their midfielder's departure went well beyond the usual formalities.
"There has been a downward trend in his stats every season at the club," Barcelona's official website read. "He slipped right back into the FCB system as if he'd never been away but, despite glowing starts to each campaign, Cesc's contributions to the cause gradually decreased as each season drew to a close.
"From being someone who joined in with the attack, supplying and scoring goals, the magic tended to fade later on in each season."
As official statements go, it was certainly curious, and it is difficult not to sense a strong whiff of behind-the-scenes tension between player and club but, regardless of the internal politics that may have been at work, the club made a fair point.
Even more damningly, they provided the figures to back it up. "He only scored one, six and one goals in the last 24 games of each season," the statement said.
Over in north London, Arsene Wenger might have afforded himself a wry smile. The pattern would have been little surprise to the Frenchman, who saw Fabregas, in his penultimate season at the Emirates Stadium, score 15 of his 19 goals before the New Year. The following season, all three of his league goals came in the same period.
Unfortunately for Chelsea, history looks to be repeating itself. The club's elimination from the Champions League by 10-man Paris Saint-Germain and a rather tepid display at home to Southampton four days later confirmed what many onlookers had been noting for some time now: the Blues of 2015 are a far cry from the side who looked near-undefeatable throughout the first half of the season. And the starkest difference between the two incarnations has been the form of their Catalan playmaker.
As with his time in La Liga, this dip is easily quantified.
Fabregas wasted little time, after returning to England, in zooming to the top of the Premier League's assists chart – totting up six in his first four games alone – and he remains the division's clear leader in that regard with 15. However, only one of those have come from his last 12 outings in all competitions .
The assist can tend to be a rather crude statistic but such a steep drop-off is not a case of mere coincidence, nor is the fact that it has occurred in almost perfect tandem with his team's similarly underwhelming performances. Since their chief creator last laid on a goal, on January 17 against Swansea City, Chelsea's win rate has plummeted from 75 per cent to 42.
The Spaniard would likely argue that the team's strikers should also bear some responsibility. A creator, after all, is only as good as his goalscorers and Diego Costa is another whose output has taken a dramatic dive of late. Since that same game against Swansea, the striker has scored once in just under 13 hours of football, having averaged just over a goal a game before then. Although separating chicken from egg is no easy task, it is clear that both players – as with their team as a whole – have been struggling, with each likely to be accentuating the other's struggles.
A closer look at Fabregas's play offers a better illustration of how his early-season incision has started to elude him. Since Christmas, he has been making key passes with less and less regularity – their frequency dropping from once every 26 minutes to once every 46.
Crucially, Fabregas's overall number of touches per game has lessened by only the finest margin in that time (from 104 to 100). So it is not the degree of his involvement which is the problem but more the level of ambition and penetration with which he imbues it.
One reason behind the Spaniard's worrying dint is surely the almost non-existent rotation policy imposed by Jose Mourinho this term. The logic behind Mourinho's thinking is obvious – surge into an early lead and build from there – and to an extent it is vindicated by Chelsea's six-point lead at the top of the Premier League. But his methods have a flip-side: in the knock-out rounds of the Champions League, sparkling early-season form counts for nothing.
It is something that Chelsea discovered to their cost against PSG. Fabregas was far from alone in appearing both physically and mentally fatigued but was perhaps the most obvious, clocking up fewer passes than each of his central-midfield opponents and less than half the number of tackles (three) as waif-like playmaker Marco Verratti (seven), who dominated for his side.
Fabregas has never been an especially explosive player but one only needs to have seen a handful of his recent outings to notice that his capacity to surge forwards with the ball and to inject an instantaneous urgency into his team's play, as he was doing effortlessly only a few months ago, seems to have been somewhat extinguished.
Witness, for example, the way he drives towards the penalty box, leaving defenders in his wake, to lay on Oscar's opener against QPR in November. It is a facet of his game that has rarely been seen since the turn of the year. That pace has since given way to ponderousness.
That he has not been able to add to his pre-Christmas tally of four goals simply reinforces the notion that a player who tends to tire early – and who has become accustomed to putting his feet up over the Christmas period – is lapsing once again into a familiar pattern.
It is not as though Fabregas's invention has been replaced by defensive input. His combined tally of tackles and interceptions in his 18 league outings before the turn of the year stood at 55, or 3.1 per game. In 2015, this has wilted to 2.9.
Result-driven pragmatism might have replaced Chelsea's early-season exuberance as Mourinho has started gearing his side towards the business end of the season but his playmaker appears to have sacrificed the latter without intensifying the former.
Every player, of course, is entitled to their barren spells. The problem with Fabregas is that his current form speaks to something broader and more ominous: a career-long habit of petering out when it matters most.
Again, it is Barcelona's summer statement which explains things in the bluntest terms. "For some reason, he was never as good in the second half of a season as in the first," it concluded.
After three years, Barcelona were clearly at a loss as to why this was. Mourinho, if he wants this season's likely domestic success to translate more readily into European glory, cannot afford to remain similarly clueless.
KyletheMuslim
Guardiolista
Mou will probably just sell him, or rotate alot more next season
barcanuck
New member
LOL Mou and Rotate don't jive.
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