Technology takes on Warriors show

Sunday has a lot more at stake for Warriors’ coach Norman Mapeza than just winning the match.
The Warriors, who had slid down the rankings on the Fifa ladder, have – under his watch – improved to 74th place, just two places below Group leaders Cape Verde, the side that is playing away in Bamako to Mali, a day before this must-win match for Zimbabwe, at a time science and data has been crucial to the success or failure of teams.
Mapeza, a committed former Warriors’ captain who played European football for many years before the call of nature forced him to call time on playing, is a man who needs everyone’s assistance to succeed.
It is unfortunate that some of his paymasters at Zifa are more preoccupied with politics than the bread and butter issues of the game.
He is a man who understands the importance of the numbers game in football, but he does not have the finances to build such an important laboratory team around him.
A lot of people have been surprised by South Africa’s improvement, now ranked 47th under the watch of Pitso Mosimane.
The reason is that he has gone scientific and uses the data to call and drop players in the national team.
In the last two matches the Warriors played at home against Mali and Zambia, we have been able to gather every detail about the match and the results have made some startling revelations about what we see and what the figures tell.
An expert performance analysis of both matches show that Zimbabwe could have done much better in both performance and approach, had the coach knew a few statistics about the players.
I will touch on the most compelling suites of data such as passes (complete and incomplete), possession, territory, and tackles to just illustrate how often we judge coaches or get excited by players whose contribution maybe key.
On average, in both matches, Zimbabwe had a better success rate of passing of 69 percent, which looks good and could be pleasing on the eye, but available data on national teams since 2006, indicate that teams that had an 80 percent success rate of passing won 95 percent of their matches.
This prompted performance analysts to use that data to judge how much of that correlates to winning matches because that statistic alone is not good enough for coaches to use – it does not tell the whole story.
Gavin Fleig, Manchester City’s head of Performance Analysis said: “It is more important to use statistics that truly matter because it does not always follow that as team with a higher percentage of pass completion is guaranteed success. It has to be a team that has a higher percentage in the final third of the pitch and there is no argument about that”.
City has all statistics for every player in the English Premiership.
But Zimbabwe stats against Mali indicate that the Warriors had possession of 45 percent of the time, in the second third of the pitch, at which the passing rate rose to 82 percent.
However, that was not good enough to force goal-scoring opportunities.
Zimbabwe’s central midfielders on the day (Tinashe Nengomasha and Justice Majabvi) passed the ball either backwards (defensive third) or sideways, thus remaining in the less dangerous zone of the field with Majabvi completing 19 of the 27 passes backwards.
He made five forward passes in the 67 minutes he was on the pitch with three going sideways.
On the few occasions the ball was passed wide, there were no good resultant crosses into the box because either Khama Billiat was tagged to the touchline so much or kept possession of the ball for too long while the opponents regrouped to close down or simply let him have possession while limiting Zimbabwe’s options in the crucial final third.
For all the joy that the young Ajax Cape Town midfielder brought to the fans, with his searing pace and dribble, he never put a good cross into the area between a centre back and wingback which, in any match, is a passport.
When one such ball came to Ovidy Karuru, it was from Willard Katsande, 15 metres from the D-zone, it resulted in the foul inside the box that led to a penalty by Knowledge Musona.
This kind of data will help Mapeza to coach his team to keep possession of the ball in the final third, from where they can move good balls into the box.
Zimbabwe do not have a stand-out playmaker and, therefore, should try to play a virtual flawless passing game.
But possession and passing alone will not be what Mapeza needs. He clearly needs a midfielder who can play the Makelele role effectively and so far, Nengomasha, has done well. And the numbers show that too.
Nengomasha has 84 percent of the time, done high intensity work (when the opposition has the ball) twice as much as anyone in the team and has crucially passed better without Majabvi (in the match against Zambia), who he started alongside in the match against Mali.
The defence for Mapeza has been excellent, according to stats, with Vusa Nyoni on the left, the most effective with or without the ball.
He has delivered more and better crosses into the box than any other player, while Gilbert Mapemba, in the match against Mali, gave the defensive grit, albeit conceding opportunities with tackling in wrong areas of the field.
Captain Method Mwanjali completed 70 percent of his passes and made only nine tackles in the two games, a very crucial statistic for Mapeza.
What this shows is that Mwanjali is a unique defender, who does not need to tackle because he positions himself well. Opta statistics will show you that former AC Milan and Italy captain Paulo Maldini, a defensive stalwart of the game tackled only once in two games and Mapeza can shore his defence by drilling Thomas Sweswe, who was guilty for the goal Mali scored, into making more calculated passes and movement.
l Tomorrow, Hope Chizuzu, a certified performance analyst, writes about the Warriors’ frontline and don’t miss his analysis.