Welcome to the latest instalment of It Is What It Is, the sister column to Adam Hurrey’s Football Cliches podcast and a parallel mission into the heart of the tiny things in football you never thought really mattered… until you were offered a closer look.

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Coasting along at the business end of the season

Neil Young sang about it, Chris Rea yearned for it, Winston Churchill defiantly pluralised it and, for at least the last 20 years, we have accused coasting mid-table football teams of it, figuratively.

Being “on the beach” is a curious footballing crime — that of not giving the proverbial 110 per cent, of letting standards slip, of not doing the basics — the sporting equivalent of sacking work off at 4pm on a Friday. Most Premier League seasons have cultivated a standout candidate for a team who look like they have mentally checked out of the twice-weekly domestic grind and, to ram home the idiom’s meaning, turned their thoughts to Ayia Napa (2000s), Dubai (2010s) or Mykonos (2020s).

This season, it might not be so straightforward. A battle royale of a relegation scrap is only now starting to unravel, the title race is going to somewhere near the wire, the top-four race has plenty of legs left and, perhaps crucially, the teams who previously would have been satisfied with mid-table (Brighton & Hove Albion, Fulham, Brentford, Aston Villa) are now dipping for the line in the top 10. 

The only team with nothing to play for (that is, a tangible objective or just “what a job Thomas Frank has done down there” kudos) is Chelsea, languishing in 11th with a goal difference of -3 and a dismally near-symmetrical results record in the league. On paper, they are a shoo-in for the dubious “on the beach” spoils… but aren’t they just too chaotic, too despairing, too newsworthy in their ineptitude? The whole spirit of being on the beach is that the only real effort you’re putting in is to go under the radar with your autopilot averageness. Chelsea aren’t coasting over the line, they’re tripping over it while everyone else points and laughs. This, clearly, is not a state of being “on the beach”.

To determine this season’s ideal beached whales, we should eliminate the two ends of the table. First place to eighth (occupied by Liverpool, seemingly gathering some late steam in pursuit of Europa Conference League away trips to Sivasspor and Dnipro next season) is out of the equation. So too is the relegation battle, which for our purposes, right now, will be demarcated at 17th place (Everton) downwards.

That leaves half a dozen teams whose tools we will examine to see if they have been downed sufficiently. But what tools do we mean here? A useful model to use here is the David Moyes Matrix of Basics (2013):

Being on the beach is surely defined by a lack of physical commitment, a diminished desire to regain possession and a motivation void when it comes to the final third. All these things can, conveniently, be quantified to some extent. 

We’ll assess our six case studies’ tackles per game, shots per game (for and against) and their PPDA (the number of passes they allow their opponents before they attempt a “defensive action” or, in more Keysian terms, how much they let the other team dictate the tempo). That data will then be split: each club’s average across the season vs their last seven games, a carefully-defined window that takes us back to mid-March, the very earliest that a team’s perceived, collective clocking-off can start to be detected. You may know it as “the business end” of the season.

Then, the team who have dropped off the most across the board will — with a degree of statistical confidence — be declared to be “on the beach”.

The declines in each basic footballing principle are apparent across the board, but some teams rule themselves out of the final shake-up. Crystal Palace, thanks to their Hodgson bounce, are merely tackling less (almost certainly because they’re attacking more). Chelsea, defying the on-paper theorists, are tackling more and shooting more (to little reward, but that’s not important here). Gary O’Neil’s south-coast pressing monsters Bournemouth (geographically the closest to an actual beach, unless you are of the school of thought that Craven Cottage sits in the “tidal” portion of the River Thames) are evidently not taking their foot off the pedal either.

In fact, since mid-March, only one team have failed to improve on their season averages in the Moyes Matrix of Basics… and it’s not even David Moyes’ team. While each of their given rivals in this unprecedented theatre of war have improved in at least two areas (except for Brentford, who are ninth and still broadly full of optimism), Leeds United have dropped off in three, and have stagnated in another. 

They are, officially, on the beach.

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This week on the Football Cliches podcast: Beginner-level knee-slides, ChatGPKeys & the Match of the Day seagull

The Athletic’s Adam Hurrey was joined by Charlie Eccleshare and David Walker on the Adjudication Panel for the 250th episode of the pod. The agenda included: the new world record for keepy-uppies, Rolls-Royces at the snooker, horses finding pockets of space at the Grand National, the least textbook knee-slide celebration in Premier League history and a Match of the Day viewer who uncovered some bizarre audio that nobody had ever noticed.

Meanwhile, the panel appraised the traditional vantage point of watching football from a nearby tree and tried to define the classic footballing “departments”.

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The corridor of uncertainty

Each week, It Is What It Is fields queries from readers on the quirks and anomalies of the language of football (and other niches). Here are this week’s posers…

Ross Keep — I see Sergio Goycochea & Rudi Voller. Who else?

This is, of course, the official video game of the 1990 World Cup, released — rather unusually — several months after the event, which explains the action shots on the cover and confirms, more or less, the time window we’re working with here.

Ross has got us off to a running start: the goalkeeper is, indeed, Argentina’s penalty-saving, second-choice custodian Sergio Goycochea, captured in a mirrored, adapted image of his save from Italy’s Roberto Donadoni in the semi-final:

The uppermost player is clearly Argentina’s Claudio Caniggia, most likely celebrating his semi-final equaliser against Italy, but in the wrong kit (both his goals at the tournament came in the first-choice albiceleste shirt), for which there is no logical reason.

Ross is certainly correct about Rudi Voller rising for a header, sandwiched between two Argentine defenders in the final, although depicted in a bafflingly yellow West Germany shirt. We’re not fooled, Sega/Virgin Mastertronic, we can see the trademark moustache.

But who are those defenders? Luckily, we have the squad numbers, sort of: No 18 is Jose Serrizuela (nicknamed El Tiburon — “The Shark” — of course) but, on the right, is that a 15 or a 19? Oscar Ruggeri (wearing No 19) was withdrawn at half-time in the final, replaced by No 15 Pedro Monzon, who lasted barely 20 minutes before being sent off for a studs-high, sliding tackle on Jurgen Klinsmann. Infuriatingly, the unfaithful art design means that the hair says Ruggeri… but history contends that he wore black undershorts in the final.

In either case, careful examination of the entire game on YouTube reveals that Rudi Voller didn’t contest an aerial duel with Serrizuela at any point in the 90 minutes, let alone two Argentines at once. I know what you’re thinking: “What about that long kick upfield from Bodo Illgner in the fifth minute?”

Well, you’re barking up the wrong tree on two counts: 1) That’s Klinsmann, not Voller, and 2) while Ruggeri is in attendance, the other airborne Argentine is No 13 Nestor Lorenzo.

In summary: they’ve made it up.

Finally, the mid-shot Brazilian is surely their standout name at the 1990 World Cup, Careca, despite the hair here being a little straighter than reality. We can, though, consult images of his boots — a pair of Mizuno Brazils — which match the cover image’s efforts enough to be confident we have our man.

In all, an underwhelming result, but that’s mostly out of our hands and down to some unnecessary licence on the artists’ part. For a more heroic act of footballer identification against all the odds, please enjoy this Twitter triumph: finding the players and game depicted in the billiards room’s TV on the 2010 version of board game Cluedo:

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This week on the Football Cliches podcast: The Overmythologised XI

Adam, Charlie and Michael Cox compiled a line-up of players whose myths, auras and internet legacies have eclipsed their mortal footballing existences.

The selection process took in cartoon goalkeepers of the 1900s, defenders who played on one leg for half their career, “Scholes, of Manchester”, a midfielder who defined both an entire role AND sparked the most boring football debate of all time, the token striker who was good on a computer game when you were 15, an 8,000-word Wikipedia page and the big question: Zlatan or Eric?

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It Is What It Is is published every Friday — send in your questions and observations on the language of football (or any other curiosities you’ve spotted) by commenting below or tweeting Adam Hurrey here.

(Top photo: Getty Images)