Explaining Kepa’s decline: Technical flaws, poor coaching and eroding trust
https://theathletic.com/1999625/2020/08/17/kepa-lampard-chelsea-transfer-technical-flaws-coaching-trust/?source=dailyemail
Kepa Arrizabalaga will return to England from his post-season holiday this week under a cloud of uncertainty.
By dropping him for Chelsea’s potentially decisive match against Wolverhampton Wanderers on the final day of the Premier League season and then also sticking with 38-year-old Willy Caballero for the FA Cup final six days later, head coach Frank Lampard made his position abundantly clear: he wants a new goalkeeper in this window.
Chelsea, however, have expensive transfer targets in several other positions and don’t yet know what kind of resources they will be able to throw at a Kepa replacement, which is part of the reason the names on their list of potential candidates range in price and pedigree, from Jan Oblak to Nick Pope.
That issue becomes a lot more simple if a suitable destination can be found for Kepa. But in a pandemic-conditioned transfer market much more amenable to buying than selling, which club is going to step forward to try to revive the career of a 25-year-old who, two years after Chelsea paid £71 million — still the highest fee for a goalkeeper — to bring him to Stamford Bridge, now looks to be at a crossroads in his career with a little under five years to run on a very lucrative contract?
It’s a huge problem for Chelsea and a horrible situation for Kepa, who has always been defined by and measured against his gargantuan price tag despite enjoying a reasonable first season in English football.
To understand what has gone so badly awry for him on the pitch in the last 12 months and how he might get back on track, it’s worth digging a little deeper.
First, some brutal context: Kepa was the worst goalkeeper in the Premier League by a distance in 2019-20, according to Opta’s advanced metrics.
His overall save percentage of 53.47 per cent — bottom of the Premier League among goalkeepers with at least 1,000 minutes to their name and almost 10 per cent lower than the next worst, Aston Villa’s January loanee Pepe Reina — is often pointed to as proof of his unreliability, but as retired goalkeeper Richard Lee explains, it’s not the most useful metric.
“It isn’t an accurate way to measure a goalkeeper’s performance,” he tells The Athletic. “Don’t get me wrong, it is too low, but this is more so an indictment of Chelsea than an indictment of Kepa. When you’re playing for a team like Liverpool and Man City and there are a lot of shots from distance, naturally your save percentage is going to be higher — even if you’re letting in bad goals.
“We still see some goalkeepers who let in a lot of bad goals with save percentages of 70-plus per cent. But if you’re getting carved open over and over and a lot of shots are from good positions, your save percentage is going to be lower.”
Kepa’s problem is that the better metrics make for equally ugly reading.
Using expected goals on target (xGOT) — a relatively new variation of expected goals (xG) that takes into account the placement of every shot on target — it’s more feasible than ever to isolate and accurately measure goalkeeper performance in what remains the most fundamental aspect of their job: saving shots.
The way to do this is to subtract a goalkeeper’s xGOT value from the number of goals they actually conceded. Positive numbers indicate a goalkeeper saving more shots than expected and negative numbers indicate fewer shots saved than the average goalkeeper would have managed.
When we do this for all Premier League goalkeepers with at least 1,000 minutes played last season, the results don’t look good for Kepa:
Kepa's shot-stopping season from hell
According to the most advanced publicly-available goalkeeping metric we have, Kepa conceded 12 goals more than the average goalkeeper would have conceded — and a full six goals more than Aston Villa’s Tom Heaton, who the raw numbers would suggest was the second-worst performing shot-stopper in the Premier League last season.
When we level the playing field a little more by looking at goals prevented per 90 minutes, the picture changes but only slightly; Reina’s performance looks much worse but Kepa is still close to the bottom:
Nothing happens in a vacuum, of course.
Chelsea were a bad defensive team overall in 2019-20 and a shambolic one in a couple of key areas. No side in the Premier League let in more than the eight goals they gave up on the counter-attack, and as of the start of July only Amiens — who were relegated from France’s Ligue 1 — had conceded goals from a higher proportion of their defensive corners than Lampard’s team in Europe’s top five leagues.
In addition, 10 per cent of the total shots Chelsea gave up last season were from inside their six-yard box — only Crystal Palace, Newcastle and Sheffield United (11 per cent) allowed a higher proportion.
The xGOT numbers above indicate that Kepa is regularly letting in shots that he should be keeping out, but it’s also clear that he’s too often being left exposed by those in front of him.
Kepa wasn’t a liability to Chelsea in his 2018-19 debut season, though the numbers suggest he was a slight negative (he conceded 3.35 goals more than expected). There weren’t anywhere near as many obvious examples of him failing to save shots he should be keeping out. His form wasn’t a story and when he did finally make headlines in February 2019, it was for insubordination rather than incompetence, refusing to be substituted by Maurizio Sarri in the Carabao Cup final at Wembley.
That proved only a spot of mild turbulence and Kepa finished the season strongly, making two vital saves in a penalty shootout against Eintracht Frankfurt at Stamford Bridge to help send Chelsea through to a Europa League final they won. He also ended the campaign having displaced David de Gea as Spain’s No 1 goalkeeper.
So were there any signs that a collapse like this was coming?
In professional goalkeeping circles, many have pointed out that Kepa has a significant flaw in his shot-stopping technique: as he prepares to make a save, he tends to swing his arms back behind his body before springing to try to intercept the ball.
The theory might be that this motion gives him momentum for the dive, but in reality, it means he needs a split-second longer than other goalkeepers to bring his arms forward again into position to make a save.
“There’s an argument that you can have a slightly bigger arm swing when the shot is from further out, but the closer it is, there’s always going to be a slight lack of coordination,” Lee says. “There have been a couple of times, with headers or shots close in, that he’s still doing quite a big arm swing, and then to execute the save is quite difficult.”
Over the past two seasons, there have been several goals that Kepa has conceded despite getting one or both hands to the ball, and it’s hard not to conclude this might be connected to the fact his arm swing is costing him vital time to react to attempts from close range.
One of the clearest examples of this is the header Paul Pogba scored to double the lead in Manchester United’s 2-0 win at Stamford Bridge in the FA Cup in February last year. At the precise moment the leaping midfielder meets Marcus Rashford’s floated cross from the right, Kepa swings his arms behind his body as he prepares to dive to his right.
Pogba’s header, while powerful, isn’t going right in the corner, but Kepa can only parry it into his net despite getting two hands to the ball.
Close-range attempts on Kepa’s goal this season have also beaten his outstretched fingers by centimetres after a prominent arm swing.
Here, as Aaron Cresswell cuts inside Reece James onto his right foot to score West Ham United’s winner at Stamford Bridge in November, Kepa has his body in a good position to try to make the save.
But then a split-second later, just after the ball has left Cresswell’s foot, we can see that he has swung his arms behind his back as he prepares to dive.
Cresswell’s shot is a good one, firm and precise towards the bottom far corner — even without the arm swing, it’s very possible Kepa simply can’t get there to save it — but considering how close he does get to reaching it, it’s reasonable to wonder if having his arms in position a split-second earlier might have been the difference between a goal conceded and a shot brilliantly tipped onto the far post.
Another example can be found in the 2-1 loss away to Manchester City a week earlier. Riyad Mahrez jinks in from the right flank to the penalty area between Mateo Kovacic and Emerson and shapes for a left-footed shot, making it obvious from his body position that he is aiming for the far post. Kepa’s arms are in a good position…
…but then, with the ball already on its way from Mahrez, we can see he has swung his arms behind his back before diving to his right.
Once again, the shot just creeps past his outstretched right hand into the net.
These are far from the worst goals that Kepa has conceded at Chelsea. In fact, the Cresswell and Mahrez shots would have been great saves if he could have kept them out. He has made more egregious mistakes and allowed tamer, less precise efforts around or through him. But they do highlight a technical issue that, according to many goalkeeping experts, should be relatively easy to coach out of him — and in truth, probably should have been coached out of him already.
The other persistent criticism often levelled at the 6ft 1in (186cm), 194lb (13st 12lb or 88kg) Kepa is that he doesn’t command his penalty area forcefully enough, particularly at set-pieces.
One unflattering clip of him watching an Andy Robertson wide free-kick flash across his six-yard box straight to an unmarked Virgil van Dijk at the far post while being screamed at by his team-mates went viral during last month’s 5-3 loss at Anfield.
“I don’t think his size is an issue at all,” insists Lee, who played for Watford and Brentford among others from 2002-15, and for England Under-20s. “A lot comes down to the starting position you take up and how aggressive you are, and there’s an argument that he could be a little more aggressive. From what I’ve seen, Kepa is a little bit safer, a little bit deeper, and on crosses, he doesn’t look to affect things as much. This is something that’s quite a small tweak — if he adopted a slightly more aggressive stance and mindset, he could come for more.”
Kepa has, at times, shown willingness to be more aggressive in coming off his line, but not always to the greatest effect.
Tomas Soucek’s goal for West Ham in a 3-2 win over Chelsea last month featured the Spaniard venturing forward, only to collide with a crowd of bodies as the ball sailed over him, then fail to stop the midfielder’s header as he backpedalled towards his net.
De Gea endured much of the same criticism when he first arrived in English football from La Liga.
He is still not the most imposing goalkeeper at set-pieces, but successive Manchester United managers Jose Mourinho and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer have compensated for that limitation by improving the aerial pedigree of the team around him as well as maintaining good organisation. Chelsea are often both small and disorganised when facing corners and free kicks — a combination always likely to make Kepa look worse.
“Often, a goalkeeper will get blamed but a lot of the set-pieces should be down to the coaches — the attention to detail,” Lee says. “Chelsea haven’t been particularly good at set-pieces and it doesn’t look good on him, but I do also feel sorry for him. He is a young goalkeeper and it should be more the responsibility of the coaching staff to organise players and make sure they’re switched on.
“The amount of free kicks that have gone in (around the Premier League) over the last few weeks (of the season) hasn’t been great, and there’s a realisation that despite the great football that a lot of these teams play, set-pieces are still a huge part and account for a lot of goals. I wouldn’t personally blame Kepa for a lot of that — I think it’s down to the coaching staff.”
Some of Kepa’s issues seem eminently fixable, and the 2018-19 season provides recent evidence that he is not as bad a goalkeeper as we have seen under Lampard in the most recent one. The problem, however, is that once trust is eroded with the club’s fans, the manager (in this case, one who inherited him from predecessor Sarri) and perhaps even his team-mates, it’s incredibly difficult for a goalkeeper to regain it — largely due to the specific challenges of the position.
“Goalkeeping is so much more about the mental side,” Lee says. “It’s not so much about being physically fit or strong enough, it’s about, ‘Is your head clear? Are you excited about the game you’re going to play? Are you focused and calm?’ If you’re going into a game doubtful about whether or not the manager rates you, or you have got things going on elsewhere that are on your mind, that can affect a goalkeeper more than players in other positions.
“You can’t just work harder and play through it. Your game is based on intricate details, key decisions in key moments, so it doesn’t take a lot for a goalkeeper to go off-track. And then to regain that confidence and regain the positivity as a goalkeeper is hard.
“We’ve seen with David de Gea that it’s hard to turn back. How many good performances do you need before people say you’re a great goalkeeper again? Kepa probably needs 20, 25 solid games, including a few key saves, a few penalty saves, before we get to that point, and the problem for a goalkeeper is you can’t guarantee those opportunities. You can only play the game that comes to you, and sometimes you just won’t make the saves.
“He is in a very precarious position now. If they choose to keep him and he chooses to stay, it may take him a long time to win over a lot of the fans. It’s not the kind of thing that a good game or two can change. It only takes one mistake to go back to the start.”
If things go to plan for Lampard in this transfer window, Kepa’s chance to redeem his battered reputation is likely to come with a club other than Chelsea.
