Three Games In

THREE GAMES IN – SOME QUESTIONS

By Ajit Chaudhuri

It’s back! The football lover’s equivalent of a long and lonely winter, extending from the whistle that ends the Champions League final in end-May to the ‘here comes the sun’ moment when the EPL kicks off in mid-August, is finally over.

And it’s three games in! What are my thoughts, from three weekends spent doing my favourite thing – putting on a TV, lying on a couch, and switching off from the world?

Here are the six top questions that have come to mind thus far –

1. Will transfer spend translate into trophies?

This has been a record-breaking transfer window in the EPL – GBP 3 billion plus spent (up from GBP 2.36 billion two summers ago), with Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea, Man U and Newcastle all spending more than GBP 200 million.

Liverpool is an interesting case because it is rare for a defending champion to revamp its roster to such an extent, but probably necessitated by outwards movements (Alexander-Arnold, Diaz, Nunez) and a death (Jota). Most of its GBP 400 million outlay is on attacking talent (Isak, Wirtz, Ekitike) and flying wingbacks (Kerkez, Frimpong) and, despite the only all-win record thus far, two questions remain unanswered. One, how will Coach Slot adjust Wirtz (who cost GBP 100 million plus, i.e., not the sort of money a club spends for someone destined to warm a bench) into the rock-solid midfield that laid the foundation for their title win last season? And two, will the transfer that did not happen, of the brilliant England defender Guehi (Crystal Palace nixed it at the last moment) define their season (they shipped two goals to Bournemouth and two more to Newcastle, who were on ten men)?

Arsenal bought Eze, who I first saw as a kid operating beside Palace legend Zaha and not being outshone, and I would love to watch him and Saka on opposite flanks except for the man in between, their other major signing Gyokeres, proving a dud thus far. Newcastle had the pulling power of a skunk in a perfumery (Isak didn’t want to stay, and targets Sesko, Joao Pedro, Delap, Ekitike, et al, refused to go there) before shelling out on an unknown German (Woltemade did light up the Euro U-21s last year, and none other than Manny Neuer referred to him as ‘Woltemessi’) and then on Wissa to play up front alongside him. Chelsea did what it always does, getting rid of unwanted players at a significant premium, and more about Man U later in this note.

2. Has Pep lost his mojo?

Last year, we said that a brilliant team had grown old and comfortable together, having already won everything there was to win. Or that Rodri, the reigning Ballon d’Or winner, was out for the season. Or whatever. This year, what will we say? Underwhelming recruitment? Reijnders impressed in one game, leading to an expectation of memes coming up at Christmas, but he’s no De Bruyne. Cherki – already injured. The others – nobodies, other than two signings for the one position that did not require replacement, i.e., goalkeeper, with young Trafford probably wishing he had gone to Old Trafford given the subsequent coming of Donnarumma. Or is it outdated tactics?

EPL coaching standards are the highest in the world, and tiki-taka football has been read and countered. Teams now break a press using one of three methods – through it by beating a defender one-on-one and forcing a readjust of the press, which is now one short; around it by drawing the press to one side of the field and switching play to the other; and over it via route 1. Also, a brilliant defensive midfielder cum deep lying playmaker is key to tiki-taka, and Pep had Yaya and Busquets in his Barcelona teams, Schweinsteiger at Munich, and Fernandinho and then Rodri at Man City.

Will he be able to play another style? Can he? Does he have the necessary personnel?

3. What’s with the analytics?

It happened first in baseball, and some Brad Pitt film was made. It transferred to basketball and made the NBA unwatchable, with all teams operating with the same tactic – reach the three-point line, set up a shield, take a shot – no more Jordanesque sky hooks, no more Shaq dunks. European basketball is more attractive now.

It is now in football. I could handle the first-gen stats, i.e., possession percentage, shots on goal, and shots on target. I managed the move to the second gen, i.e., field tilt, PPDA, progressions, etc., and then to the xG revolution (not to worry, the exact definitions of these are in annexure). I now find something called ‘NPxG + xA’ to judge the creative ability of a player – for those with an interest, Haaland is head and shoulders above the others on this statistic, and the difference between him and no. 2 Semenyo is more than the difference between no. 2 and no. 25; good to see Grealish at no. 12; and the main surprise is no. 7 Estevao, recruited by Chelsea for bench strength, getting game time due to injuries, and now creating the selection dilemma that coaches dream about – who to play when the big boys return.

Where will all this end? Ultimately, statistics is like a bikini, no matter how much it shows, it always covers the critical stuff. And I, for one, like the measure ‘goals scored minus goals conceded’ the most – it has one hundred percent validity.

4. Will Man U regain its lost glory?

Personally, I don’t give a crap, but here is my two-paisa bit given that many readers follow this team. Great teams have great spines, i.e., goalie, central defender, defensive mid, attacking mid, and striker combos. Not good ones, great ones! Like Cech-Terry-Essien-Lampard-Drogba at Mou’s first Chelsea team. Like Casillas-Ramos-Alonso-Xavi/Iniesta-Torres of that Spain side. And my favourite, young Schmeichel-Morgan-Kante-Drinkwater-Vardy, only one of whom would be considered a great of the game and the subject of the saying ‘two-thirds of earth is covered by water; the rest is covered by N’golo Kante’, but who together had a great period of play in 2015-16.

Onana-Maguire-Mainoo-Fernandes-Hjolund/Zirkzee? Bayindir-De Ligt-Casemiro-Fernandes-Sesko? I just don’t see it happening with the current personnel.

An interesting element is Sesko. How will he fit in? I have seen him for Leipzig and Slovenia, and he has all the makings of a top striker. But strikers from the Bundesliga are hit-and-miss in the EPL, and for every Haaland there is a Werner and a Fullkrug. And, if Man U is slowly turning into a graveyard for talent, it would be hard to reverse.

5. What’s going on with VAR?

Having watched football from the early-1980s and seen some awful refereeing decisions – Schumacher’s assault on Battiston in 1982; Lampard’s disallowed goal in 2010 – I am pro VAR because it gets decisions right. It is my experience that referees err on the side of big teams, and that marginal decisions, too, go one way and not the other. VAR is worth the wait, worth the disruption in play, and worth the tentative goal celebrations.

Some events of this weekend shook my belief. I saw a beautiful goal for Fulham against Chelsea overturned (according to the columnist Marcotti, ‘VAR disallowed King’s counter-attacking goal for an imaginary Muniz foul on Chalobah – when you have possession of the ball and step on the foot of the opponent behind you, who you can’t see since you don’t have eyes on the back of your head, it is not a foul’). And I saw Barcelona being awarded a dubious penalty against Rayo Vallecano which the VAR could not review because it was not functional at that time. WTF!! The EPL bosses have acknowledged the error, de-rostered the concerned VAR ref, and reprimanded the on-field ref for changing his original (correct) decision. And it was a home game for Rayo, so their VAR contractor was at fault. But, still, WTF!!

6. Will the EPL-Championship yo-yo continue?

The last two seasons saw all three promoted teams being relegated back into the Championship. Will it happen again this season? The indications are that it won’t, the three promotees have shown signs of fight and have garnered points on the board. My bet is on Sunderland staying up because of one of the most under-the-radar signings of the transfer window, ex-Arsenal and Bayer Leverkusen captain Xhaka, who brings steel onto the field and into the dressing room, and who continues to have a wand of a left foot as seen from his pinpoint assist at the end of their 2-1 win over Brentford.

 

Annexure: Football Analytics

1. Field Tilt (%)  ((Team’s final third passes) / (Total no. of final third passes)) * 100  tells us how much attacking territory a team is controlling.

2. NPxG + xA  non-penalty expected goals plus expected assists  judges a player’s ability to create.

3. PPDA  Passes Per Defensive Action  (Total opponent passes in their defensive and the middle thirds) / (Total defensive actions by the team, including tackles, interceptions, fouls, challenges, in the same thirds)  measures the number of passes a team allows its opponent to make before it attempts a defensive action – this describes the intensity of a press; lower means more aggressive.

4. Progressions  Number of times a player runs with the ball for 5 metres or more.

5. xA  Expected Assists  assesses the likelihood that a given pass will directly lead to a goal  allows us to value the underlying contributions of creative players.

6. xG  Expected Goals  assesses the quality of goal scoring chances in a game and also measures whether a striker is better or worse than expected, whether a team is creating high quality chances, and was a win deserved, based on quality of chances and not just number of goals  takes into account variables such as shot type (header, foot shot, volley, bicycle kick, backheel, etc.), shot location (distance to goal, from the centre or from out wide, etc.), assist type (through ball, cross, cut back, set piece, etc.), defensive pressure, goalkeeper positioning, inter alia.

The Short War Fallacy

The Short War Fallacy

A Two-Pager by Ajit Chaudhuri – July 2025

“It is when a mosquito lands on your testicles that you look for ways to solve problems without using violence” – attributed to Confucius.

Despite being designated a dinosaur, i.e., someone who grew up in the days before mobile telephony and the Internet and therefore doesn’t know one’s pronouns, I am sometimes asked for an opinion. One such occasion was in the aftermath of Operation Sindoor, when there was a clamour to ‘finish them off once and for all’, blah, blah, blah, when I was asked whether we did the right thing by agreeing to a ceasefire.

I sidestepped the question with a “How does it matter what I think?”

But I do have a view – that we were fortunate to extricate ourselves from a situation that we did not want (and were not prepared for) with our dignity (somewhat) intact.

Why?

The primary reason, in my opinion, is that the key assumption underlying the ‘finish them off’ school of thought – that such a war would be short, decisive, and victorious, and that our overwhelming military superiority combined with the speed, direction, and ruthlessness of our initial attack would quickly overwhelm them – is fundamentally flawed. This is because, one, it is known in military circles that audacious surprise attacks usually deliver far less than promised. Two, it is easier to start wars than to end them. Three, our western neighbour may be an economic basket case, but its armed forces are not – it has the same British Indian Army military traditions as ours without the constraints of civilian oversight; it has cheap, high-quality weapons with assured supply lines; and, unlike us, it has powerful all-weather allies. Four, what would victory mean anyway? The very thought of us administrating the frontier agency areas bordering Afghanistan has me not knowing whether to shudder or to laugh, these are, after all, places that the best administrators in history, the British, chose to leave alone.

The chances therefore are that, assuming nukes are not used (and a credible theory of victory in a nuclear war over an adversary who is able to retaliate in kind is yet to be formulated), continued hostilities would have resulted in yet another ‘forever war’.

The article “The Age of Forever Wars: Why Military Strategy No Longer Delivers Victory” by Lawrence D. Freedman in the Foreign Affairs issue of May/June 2025 throws some light upon this term. It says that there was a view in the late 19th century that surprise offensives could produce decisive victories, leading to – European leaders in the summer of 1914 assuring their respective publics that the coming war would be over by Christmas (it went on till 1918); the German blitzkrieg of the early 1940s overrunning western Europe in weeks and rapidly advancing into the USSR; and Japan attacking Pearl Harbour in December 1941 (we know what happened to both countries).

More recently, towards the turn of the century, the contrast between Operation Desert Storm (or the first Iraq war of 1991) and the US’s campaign in Vietnam and the USSR’s in Afghanistan resulted in a theory that an enemy could be defeated with speed, manoeuvrability, and real time intelligence, along with overwhelming force and smart weapons. This too proved short-lived, with the US’s counterinsurgency campaigns of the early decades of this century coming to be labelled as the ‘forever’ wars. In fact, the early successes of most wars since the end of the Cold War have faltered, lost momentum, and transformed into far more intractable conflicts.

Despite this, short wars (i.e., immediate success at a tolerable cost) retain an allure, resulting in – failure to appreciate the limits of military powers; setting of objectives that can be achieved, if at all, only through prolonged struggle; and an emphasis on immediate battlefield results that neglect broader elements necessary for success such as achieving conditions for a durable peace and effectively managing an occupied country where a hostile regime has been toppled – to the extent that, for a politician on the warpath, even admitting to the possibility of protracted conflict is seen as having doubts on one’s armed forces. And when a short war transforms into a ‘forever’ one, it imposes different demands on the military, the economy, and society (see below).

Short Wars

• Are fought with existing resources.

• Present only temporary disruptions to the economy and society.

• Do not require extensive supply lines.

Long Wars

• Require development of capabilities that can adjust to changing operational imperatives.

• Demand strategies for –

o Maintaining popular support

o Re-arming and replenishing troops

o Keeping the economy functional

Some examples of successful short wars –

• Israel v Arabs, the Six-Day War, 1967

• Indo-Pak War, 1971

• Falklands War, 1982

• Operation Desert Storm, 1991

Some examples of short wars that transformed into long wars –

• The US in Afghanistan – the longest military campaign in US history – unsuccessful.

• Russia v Ukraine, 2022 onwards – was meant to overrun Ukraine in days – still on.

Proposals to end a ‘forever’ war in which neither side can impose a victory on the other even if both or one are occasionally able to improve their positions usually take the form of a ceasefire. The problem with them is that the parties to the conflict usually regard them as mere pauses in the fighting, offering both sides the opportunity to recover and reconstitute for the next round – they have little effect on the underlying dispute. Yet, some last – the Korean War ceasefire of 1953 continues to hold despite the conflict remaining unresolved and both sides preparing for a future war.

To conclude, dear fellow Indians, please remember – wars start and end through political decisions. The ones to initiate armed conflict usually assume a short war. The ones that bring fighting to an end usually reflect the cost and consequences of a ‘forever’ war. Do not let politicians and their puppet media houses sell you the allure of a military’s ability to bring conflicts to quick and decisive conclusions – in practise, this is rarely the case. Cut their water supply, shame them in international forums, whatever, but, if you are not prepared for a ‘forever’ war, it is best not to go in for war at all.