The Anti-Snodgrass Agenda: Tangible Selflessness and Why Working Hard Means Nothing By Itself
Robert Snodgrass is flavour of the month for West Ham fans and I’m not here for it at all.
After a season on loan in the Championship with Aston Villa, Snodgrass has been salvaged from the scrap heap, working himself back into contention at West Ham to the point that he’s clearly become a favourite of Manuel Pellegrini. The new manager has regularly used him as an option from the bench and has recently slotted him into a central midfield role in the absence of Pedro Obiang and Mark Noble due to injury and suspension respectively.
The Scotsman has become a favourite with the majority of West Ham fans too, with his manic bursts forward to close the opposition down by himself regularly drawing supporters at the London Stadium to their feet. His relentless energy is infectious and he undeniably works extremely hard. The issue is that it’s largely pointless; energy expended in service of nothing useful.
It’s all well and good to praise him for working hard, but the question is: working hard doing what? What does he actually do well? What benefit does the hard work bring to the side as whole? Does his hard work result in him performing his role well?
I’d go as far to say that the way that he’s been playing recently as a central midfielder actively makes the team worse.
At least once per game, you’ll see Snodgrass go chasing crisp packets, aggressively closing down the ball and following it as the opposition circulate the ball around their midfield, back to their defenders and their goalkeeper. This is the sort of thing that’s been causing the ripples of applause from the home fans and has been at the root of his recent acclaim. But in the context of West Ham’s tactical set up, it serves no purpose.
All Snodgrass achieves with pressing like this is disrupting the shape of the team out of possession because he does it by himself. Having one player, especially from a deeper area, press while the others fail to follow him is a fruitless endeavour; it doesn’t help the team recover possession in dangerous areas and the lack of co-ordination with the rest of his team-mates ruins West Ham’s organisation.
To illustrate just how at odds Snodgrass’ performances are with West Ham’s general defensive approach, Ashwin Raman’s graph shows what is immediately apparent with the eye test: West Ham are not a high-pressing team.
West Ham are comfortably below league average for Passes Conceded per Defensive Action (that is, the number of passes opposition teams are able to complete before they are tackled, intercepted, or fouled by a West Ham player; a rough proxy for pressing) and they have the lowest percentage of possession regains in the attacking third (that is, they win back possession of the ball in the final third less effectively than any other team in the league). You can see how having one player aggressively closing down the ball in the opposition half doesn’t align with the way other West Ham players are playing out of possession.
Instead, it leaves Snodgrass’ hugely out of position and leaves Declan Rice in the lurch as he’s overwhelmed by opposition players in our defensive third. Likewise, the blossoming central defensive partnership of Fabian Balbuena and Issa Diop are rendered vulnerable by the lack of protection from midfield and have bailed us out numerous times recently by stepping forward out of the defensive line to make a block or to win the ball back. Snodgrass’ aimless, headless chicken pressing from central midfield has already started to cost the team, as we can see from Burnley’s first goal at the weekend:
This is a rare occasion where West Ham actually do apply some pressure in the opposition defensive third: Charlie Taylor rolls the ball back to Ben Mee, Grady Diangana closes him down and then chases the defender’s pass back to Joe Hart. Diangana, along with Arnautović, ends up in the Burnley box as Hart kicks long.
While that’s happening, Snodgrass pushes so far forward that he’s practically level with the rest of the Burnley back four when Hart kicks the ball. The ‘keeper goes long and although Diop wins the initial header, he loses out to Vydra when he contests the second challenge. The ball drops to Ashley Westwood, who Snodgrass has failed to track. He can’t get back in time to apply pressure on Westwood, who slips a through ball to Gudmundsson who finishes past Fabianski. Had Snodgrass not been so wildly out of position, he could have made that pass much more difficult, or even snuffed out the threat of the goal entirely.
A less extreme example of this was on show in the build-up to Erik Lamela’s goal in Tottenham’s 1–0 league win a few weeks ago:
Rather than marking Tottenham’s right-sided central midfielder, Moussa Sissoko, Snodgrass leaves the midfield line to half-heartedly press first Harry Winks, then Davinson Sánchez. The Spurs defender shifts it out to Trippier, who exchanges a one-two with Sissoko, before sending the ball in behind for him to chase. Felipe Anderson is the one who has to track this run and he was widely criticised for his failure to prevent Sissoko from crossing. Had West Ham been better organised in the build-up, Anderson could have been the one applying pressure to the Tottenham player in possession and Snodgrass, supposedly the more diligent player, could have been tracking his opposition number into his own defensive third and the situation could have been avoided.
There have been a number of other instances where this sort of situation has been repeated, only for the back four to make a crucial intervention to ensure that the haphazard midfield shape hasn’t cost us more dearly.
Those are the just the issues without the ball. For a player so vaunted for his set piece delivery, Snodgrass’ technical prowess has left a lot of be desired. He consistently leaves his team-mates in trouble with under-hit or mis-hit passes and regularly turns the ball over with those passes, gets dispossessed due to heavy first touches, and gives away needless fouls.
His lack of ability on the ball causes problems elsewhere for the team. Due Snodgrass’ inability to progress the ball forward from deep with his passing, Felipe Anderson is forced to drop deep to pick up the ball from the back four when West Ham are building up down their left, while Snodgrass pushes forward ahead of the opposition midfield. The same issue exists on the other side of the pitch when Noble isn’t playing, with Obiang doing the same thing, but for a player who is supposed to be technically sound, Snodgrass doesn’t go any way to solving that issue. It means Anderson is involved in play much earlier and much deeper than he should be, receiving the ball in less dangerous areas than he could if there were better passing from deep in the team.
The caveat to all of this is that Snodgrass is playing out of position. Therefore, should his performances should be judged with that in mind? Does he deserves credit for trying his best in an unfamiliar situation? Those are fair points, but even taking that into consideration, I don’t think you could argue that he’s even played well, let alone worthy of the plaudits he’s been getting from large section of the fanbase.
As a point of comparison, I always thought that Michail Antonio tried his best and performed as well as he could given his limitations when he was playing as a right-back, but no-one can seriously suggest that he played well in that role. The same applies here — Snodgrass tries exceptionally hard but the way he’s been playing has been detrimental to the shape of the team.
To his credit, the one game where he’s played well was against Leiceister, when Noble’s reckless challenge meant that Snodgrass had to sit alongside Rice in a 4–4–1 shape for the last hour of the game. Playing in a midfield two forced Snodgrass to be more disciplined and it curtailed his aimless solo excursions, meaning he worked to hassle and win the ball back within the team’s shape in our own defensive third. That he’s capable of playing in that way perhaps suggests that his pressing is a result of an instruction from his manager, or at the very least that the manager isn’t actively discouraging it. If that’s the case, then Pellegrini is partly responsible for the problems that Snodgrass has caused West Ham’s midfield and it makes Snodgrass’ performances more understandable. What it doesn’t do is make those performances any better or any more worthy of praise.
It’s not entirely dissimilar to that clip of 7 Leeds players tracking back to close down one Wigan forward from this weekend:
It’s certainly a brilliant display of work ethic and stamina, but ultimately it doesn’t achieve much — in fact, it’s inefficient and unnecessary, as half the team now has to expend loads of energy to get back up the pitch in a situation that could have been dealt with by 3 players rather than 7. It’s almost of form of showboating, in its own way. It’s all texture, no substance; the defensive equivalent of doing a bunch of stepovers on the halfway unchallenged and then playing a rabona pass to a team-mate in space two yards away. Snodgrass’ pressing is the complete inverse of this (one man pressing a team rather than a whole team pressing one man) but it’s cut from the same cloth.
At the end of the day, football supporters are always going to be enamoured with players who leave it all out on the pitch and put in a lot of tangible effort. There’s nothing wrong with that, provided that that hard work is applied properly — in service of the team, helping them to execute their game plan in order to improve the side’s chance of getting a positive result.
Snodgrass isn’t doing that right now. His positional naivety disrupts the midfield’s shape out of possession and his tendency to go and aggressively press by himself is incongruous with West Ham’s broader approach to winning the ball back. It’s self-indulgent, the epitome of effort without effectiveness.
The Huddersfield match this weekend is the last game of Noble’s ban, so it’ll be interesting to see whether he immediately slots back into the starting XI, and who makes way for him if that’s the case. It’s entirely plausible that the Snodgrass CM experiment will be consigned to the bin after Saturday and this will all be rendered moot. Pellegrini has definitely taken a shine to Snodgrass though, and with Jack Wilshere injured without a definite return date (to the suprise of absolutely no-one), it seems likely that we’ll see more of the Scotsman in a central role. If he continues to play in the manner he has recently, it’ll be to the team’s detriment. Hopefully it won’t prove to be too costly.
