Mark Noble and the burden of responsibility
After raking the West Ham board across the coals on Twitter for selling Grady Diangana, Mark Noble’s getting a free pass for his on-pitch performances from me for a while:
But while I was re-watching stuff for the Felipe Anderson piece, I stumbled across quite a good example of something that has bugged me about Noble’s game for ages.
In the first half of this Newcastle match from March 2019, there are quite a few instances like this where we’re trying to play out from the back and Issa Diop gets a bit stuck on the ball:
Some of this is down to Diop’s own indecisiveness and lack of passing range — occasionally there’s a pass on over the top of the opposition defence, but Diop either doesn’t spot it or doesn’t back himself to execute it.
Some of it is down to the lack of movement ahead of him — there are very few off-the-ball runs being made to create options for the player on the ball and very few players seeking to find space in midfield. This kind of static possession football was a hallmark of Pellegrini’s time in charge.
Mark Noble decides to take matters into his own hands for the final part of the first half and starts getting on the ball in the areas that Diop had previously been occupying:
As they come off the pitch at half-time, Noble trots over to Diop and has a word with him:
I’m not a lip reader but, from the way Nobes is gesticulating, it’s pretty clear he’s talking about organisation and movement with his centre back. It’s not quite a full-on bollocking, but it’s obvious that Noble is frustrated with something.
At the start of the second half, the situation with Diop rears its head again:
Apparently they didn’t manage to sort the issue out during the break, so Noble starts doing Diop’s job again:
Central midfielders dropping into the backline to help circulate the ball is nothing new, but when that happens, the midfielder usually splits the two CBS who spread wider (you can see Rice do exactly that in the 2nd vid).
That’s not the only way of doing it, of course. During Mikel Arteta’s first few months in charge, Arsenal’s build-up play involved Granit Xhaka filling in on the left side of temporary back 3 so the LB could push forward and provide width as Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang moved more centrally:
But the reason this worked for Arsenal was that the other central defenders fanned out to create equal spacing across the pitch (plus it had David Luíz as the central player in that 3 which suited his ball distribution ability).
That’s not the case with what Noble does. He sits almost literally on top of Diop when he drops back to collect the ball; it’s like he’s coming back to hold his defender’s hand:
And it’s not like Noble actually fares much better with the ball than Diop does — he ends up either playing a square pass or dribbling it out of play.
Noble’s movement here completely clogs up the team’s shape and all he really does is remove a passing option ahead of the ball for the player in possession. He’d be much better served by making a run to drag his marker away from the middle of the pitch to help open a passing lane for Diop. His other midfielders, who are mostly standing still in position, are the ones who need the most help, not the central defender.
Although Diop and Pellegrini’s shortcomings have a part to play, this scenario is one Noble has repeated over the years across a variety of different managers with a variety of different defenders playing behind him. It’s not like this is a specific instruction he’s been given to hide the limitations of Issa Diop. It’s just something that he does at this point.
These things are usually ghostwritten, so who knows how much input he actually had, but in this Evening Standard column from last December, Noble is critical of the way many Premier League teams play out from the back:
Teams in the Premier League now seem to be obsessed with playing out from their six-yard box and asking players to do something they are not comfortable with. Defending your goal has become uncool.
I love playing expansive football but if you sat in a room with Martin Keown, Tony Adams, Lee Dixon and Nigel Winterburn and said to them, “You get the ball and play out from the back,” they would laugh at you. Their reply would be, “Get up the other end of the pitch, we play in their half, not ours.”
Football has become so complicated. Arsenal, for example, had double the amount of passes to us in the first half on Monday, yet we should have scored three goals from them trying to play out.
That line about “asking players to do something they are not comfortable with” is interesting considering Noble’s tendency to play in his defender’s space — maybe that behaviour is a product of Noble imposing his own beliefs on the team?
It might seem a bit odd to link this habit to the Diangana tweet, but I think they both come from the same place: the overwhelming weight of responsibility that Mark Noble feels for West Ham.
Noble’s spoken plenty of times about how much easier his life is when West Ham are doing well, how much he worries about the club, and how much man management he ends up doing:
It has to be part of my job to help pick the players up but when you’ve been doing that for so long, it is draining. I am always worrying about everyone else.
His actions on the pitch feel like an extension of that.
He’s been in so many shit, dysfunctional West Ham teams that he doesn’t trust people to do their jobs any more and feels the need to shoulder the responsibility for those jobs by taking them on himself. The irony is that, by doing so, he fails to do his own job properly and ends up being more of a hindrance to the team than a help.
He needs to learn to let this go and to let the side figure out how to live without him. Sooner rather than later, too. He’s 33 and his contract is up next summer; how much longer is he going to play for?
Noble’s acknowledged that himself. In that TalkSport interview after the WBA FA Cup defeat in January, he said:
At a club at this level with the money we’ve spent, you can’t rely on me. You can’t rely on me to come on at half-time during an FA Cup game — that shouldn’t be like that.
I think that Noble’s frustration over the Diangana sale is related to that line of thinking.
Armchair psychoanalysis is a mug’s game, but unfortunately I am a mug and West Ham United Football Club evidently causes Mark Noble so much stress, so much shag and hassle, so much emotional turmoil that he’d probably quite like to be able to pack it all in next summer. But he’s not going to do that if he feels like he’s abandoning the club or leaving them in a bad state.
Noble presumably knows that Declan Rice is off in the foreseeable future, so perhaps he saw Diangana — who, on top of being a talented young player in his own right, is someone who came through the academy system at West Ham and is therefore someone for the fans to cling onto — as a safe pair of hands to leave the club in and a shoot of hope for a brighter future.
Now that possibility has been removed, it’s harder to Noble to walk away from it all.
And that’s a shame. He’s earned the right to ride off into the sunset on his own terms. But we’ve been better without him on the pitch than on it for a while now and figuring out how to play without him should be one of our main objectives for this season.
But equally important is for Noble to stop insisting on every single passing move going through him when he does play. He needs to let his defenders sink or swim on the ball and focus on doing his own job properly.
He’s earned an enormous amount of credit for kicking off on Twitter, but there’s only so long I can watch Noble playing centre back when we’ve got possession before I start to get frustrated with him once again.
