Coach Sandeep PatelAIFF A Licence

The blog

Analysis and match commentary

Games I have watched properly, written up the way I would present them to a squad. Tactics, decisions, individual jobs within a shape, and the occasional argument with a pundit. New pieces go up as the fixtures come.

About this blog

What gets written up here, and what does not

I write about games I have actually watched, usually twice. The first viewing is for the story of the match, the second is for the thing I want to explain: a pressing trigger that worked, a full back who was left alone twice in the same ten minutes, a substitution that changed the shape rather than just the personnel.

Most pieces cover the Premier League, European competition and Indian football, because those are the games in front of me. Some are previews, written before a team sheet exists, which means they are about problems rather than predictions. Some are post-match, which is where the honest work happens, because a scoreline hides as much as it tells you.

What I do not write is transfer speculation or anything I cannot see on the pitch. If a piece here makes a claim about a match, it is because I watched that passage of play and could show it to a room of players.