Pat’s stat: the unavailability of the Devils midfielder

The RTBF teams accompany you every day to analyze, decipher and bring you to life the 64 matches of this 2022 World Cup. Daily, Mathieu Istace and Patrick Stein go through the statistics and offer you the most significant ones.

And this Monday, it was a statistic from FIFA reports that caught our attention. Within these detailed reports, one can discover the number of pass proposals of a player offered to his partners during a match. We thought that studying them in detail might give us an indication of one of Belgium’s problems: the fluidity of the game. The Belgian team is not running as well as before, everyone has seen it. Suddenly, the role of the hubs of the team is to be studied. The 62 pass proposalsAxel Witsel in the 90+ minutes played yesterday are too few to hope to increase the pace of the team. By combining their efforts, Drunk et Tielemans offered 109 solutions to their partners. A classic holding midfielder like casemiro offers him 85 proposals on average to his teammates. Of course, this figure does not explain everything, far from it, but it shows how important each cog in the chessboard is. This Thursday, no one will be able to hide.