CRIMHEAD
Player Valuation: £40m
Just getting a chance to read this properly, as you say interesting reading.
Quick question as haven't seen this k-means clusting before. He says that the data has been taken from the last two years but in that time we haven't really had anyone who is a natural #10 in the squad, so wonder how much of an influence that was in this assessment "Nominally, Sigurdsson is more of a 10 than Barkley. Actually, however, the difference between the two is pretty small with both lying on the edge of their clusters about to overlap. Do they play in the same position? Most of the time, yes".
Wonder if Ross felt he had to move up higher on the pitch than he would naturally prefer, both to avoid stepping on the toes of more defensive minded players like Barry and because otherwise we'd have a gap. Just wondering how that would affect the results, especially as he already seems to win back the ball in deeper areas anyway so a deeper role might well suit him better anyway.
It says that Ross holds the ball a ton more, really.
Ross does love to hold the ball and usually does it too far from goal to be a threat.
Sigurdsson is nothing like that. He plays higher, plays killer passes, is amazing on crosses, corners, and free kicks. And he need very little space to score. He doesn't hold the ball much, either.
Ross would be fine playing deeper if he was a true box to box guy. He just doesn't seem to be much in the tackle and his defensive positioning is far from good enough.
Honestly, I think he should be better than Klassen as they can play similar roles. But Koeman is right. Ross needs to play farther up the pitch and be more dangerous. But man, it would be NICE if he had some support around his besides Rom. Put Sigurdsson on one side in a 4-3-3 who commands attention, someone like Traore with some pace on the other, or even Sandro, with Rom in the middle, Ross might be more effective.
But again, I keep him and not bother with Klassen.