Physical development and decline (Part 1).

Pre-season.

All six players reported back for training with no injuries or specific cause for concern. As you would expect after an end of season break the profiles of each player were largely full of red arrows indicating a losses in many of their attributes (the exception to this being Rogério who had maintained the vast majority of his attributes and even improved on three of them). However, due to the break being a relatively short one (approximately four or five weeks) five of the six players had returned for pre-season training ‘Match fit’ while Héverton, the fringe player, was listed as ‘Needing match practise’ before the new season. As promised this post will largely be an introduction to the players and an opportunity to view their attributes at the point they returned for pre-season training, so let’s get started.

Goalkeeper – Bruno Cardoso.

What does this show us? Quite simply that the majority of Cardoso’s attribute losses were in categories that directly affect his ability as a goalkeeper. This is most noticeable in the column headed Goalkeeping Attributes, but can also be seen in the Mental Attribute column where his anticipation, decision making and positioning attributes have all suffered. Curiously his Physical attributes are untouched, more on this later in the General Conclusions section.

Defender – Pablo Pachón.

Pachón appears to have suffered a much more general decline in his attributes over the close season with only 13 of his 36 categories remaining untouched. A quick look at Pachón’s history from last season reveals that he missed the last two games with a minor injury. While it’s difficult to draw any real conclusions at this stage, there is a suggestion that the close season affects players in different ways, perhaps based on the number of games they played in the previous season, whether they were involved in matches right up to the end of the season and any small injuries they took into/picked up during the break.

Defender – Héverton.

Héverton is the only non-regular among the six and his lack of match action towards the end of the previous campaign appears to backup the theories proposed in the analysis of Pachón in so far as he made just three substitute appearances in the final few months of that season and went into the break lacking fitness. He fared slightly worse than Pachón too, with only 12 of his attributes remaining untouched.

Midfielder – Rogério.

Rogério fared better than the rest of the test subjects over the close season with just four attributes decreasing and three actually increasing (which confuses me to say the least). The lack of change gives some credence to a theory that will be discussed later but suggests that there is another factor involved in this player’s case.

Winger – Joel.

Joel experienced attribute decline in a similar manner to Cardoso (i.e. largely centred around his Technical Attributes), though he declined slightly more in a physical sense than the goalkeeper did.

Striker – Silva.

Silva’s close season decline follows the pattern of Cardoso and Joel’s with regard to the Technical Attributes. He fared marginally worse on the Mental Attributes but experienced no decline at all in terms of his Physical Attributes.

General Conclusions.

The first and perhaps most striking trend that I have noticed is that Natural Fitness plays a big part in attribute loss, especially when looking at Physical Attributes. The players with higher Natural Fitness levels (Silva and Rogério) returned for training unaffected by a month’s rest. Conversely Joel, who has the worst level of Natural Fitness, Pachón and Hévereton (who went into the break carrying an injury and unfit respectively) lost the most in this area.

In terms of Technical and Mental Attributes it would seem that decline is inevitable regardless of Determination, Work Rate and fitness level. This can be seen clearly in the cases of Joel and Silva who, despite scoring well in these three categories, still lost attribute points across most of the categories under these headings.

Rogério appears to be the exception to every rule and hypothesis, his complete lack of decline in ability is puzzling to say the least. He went into the close season having played in approximately the same number of games as both Joel and Silva and all three were ever-present during the final month of the season. Neither was he called up for any international squads (which would provide match practise and training) over the close season. His Natural Fitness, Work Rate and Determination are comparable to both Silva’s and Joel’s and offer no insight as to why he should return for training in better shape than the rest of the squad. Likewise, age cannot be the deciding factor as there is only one year difference between him and Joel.