The Composure Gap

About one minute and thirty seconds into Crystal Palace 1 Ipswich 0 the ball found its way to Adam Wharton on the halfway line. He paused on the ball, unflustered, unrushed, impudent. He dipped left and into space. He held the ball so long that I actually had time to ponder the danger. Where was the pressure on the ball? He has all the time in the world to pick a run...

With the outside of his left foot, Wharton lazily poked a flat pass in a neat arc through the Ipswich lines, setting Eddie Nketiah away on goal between full back and centre back. Timing that sort of pass is child’s play when no one is hurrying you. Just keep it a half second, until the moment your team-mate’s trajectory intersects with the opposition offside line. You just need the composure to execute it.

Wharton, who we last encountered as an admittedly pretty, but rather flimsy, presence in Blackburn’s midfield in their 4-3 defeat at Portman Road, is all composure. He plays the game at his speed. Eddie Nketiah very much doesn’t. He’s quick, technical, athletic, but rushed, frenetic in his decision-making. He lost his mano-a-mano battle of wits with Alex Palmer and the score line remained blank.

A lot has been said about the (often astonishing) gulf in physicality that has opened up between the Championship and the Premier League. Every week, Ipswich seem to line up against a team that is physically bigger, stronger and quicker. At times we’ve looked small, lost too many duels and been swiftly punished. Adam Wharton, conducting the Crystal Palace orchestra, wasn’t that. In his 87 minutes on the pitch he lost 5 of his 9 duels, he made no tackles, nor any fouls, not even a nice, clean, game reading interception. Yet from the base of midfield he made 6 chances and 2 big chances. His passes slashed big holes in our lines, leaving us exposed over and over again. He picked and prodded at us like an elongated Luka Modric.

Wharton’s peerless passing at times exposed a shortcoming of ours which I think has drawn less commentary than the physicality issue. What I’m going to call The Composure Gap. Athleticism is huge at this level but decision-making and execution, that really trumps everything.

For the stable teams in this division, with their tried and tested Premier League players, most of their squad will feel comfortable about their ability in games like Saturday’s. They have been here, done this, many times before. Sometimes they’ll recruit someone from a lower division or promote a youth teamer and they’ll need to develop that sense of ease, but they’ll do so in the context of ten other players who have already found their feet. Some of them, like Wharton, will find that calm almost instantly. It’s something they have innately. Others will be drip fed in whilst they search for it and discarded if they don’t develop it.

Midway through the second half Jack Clarke dispossessed Eberi Eze on the halfway line. The whole pitch opened up in front of him as he drove forward, every Palace player bar Tyrick Mitchell in front of the ball. Mitchell checked his blind spot. Over his right shoulder Julio Enciso was matching him stride for stride. Mitchell dropped deeper, awaiting reinforcements. No team-mate in sight. Two on one, he was in trouble.

Clarke drove on a little longer but released the ball perhaps a beat too quickly. He hadn’t sufficiently committed Mitchell such as to take him out of the game. He erred in his pass too, forcing Enciso to break his stride and search for the ball with his trailing leg. By the time he’d wrangled it into position and looked up to assess his options, defenders were streaming back and any path to goal was swiftly dissolving. His desperate shot was easily fielded by Dean Henderson in the Palace goal. Composure. As soon as Clarke had made his pass, you started pondering if we’d have escaped so lightly had we given Palace such an opening. Would Ismaila Sarr or Eberi Eze have fluffed their lines in the same scenario?

Jack Clarke has been improving since January and put in a decent performance here too. This isn’t about him particularly. Simply that Jack is one amongst many in our squad still learning to compose themselves as Premier League players. Some of it is the pace of the game, yet I’m struck by how often we make poor decisions even when granted luxurious amounts of time. It is like moments weigh more in this place, in this company, under this pressure.

In some games physicality has told. We looked small trying to battle Newcastle’s midfield, we looked slow chasing Bournemouth. In tight games like this one though, it is decision-making that really tells. Plenty of our players have the speed, fitness, strength and technical ability to compete, too few of them bridge the composure gap, either through experience or innate, intrinsic calmness.

Too many of the players that do have that have played in too few of our games. Axel Tuanzebe has it but can’t stay fit. Sam Szmodics and Conor Chaplin do too and we have missed both over the past few months. Wes Burns was just finding his when disaster struck. Alex Palmer has it but was recruited too late. Dara O’Shea and Luke Woolfenden both have it but play in the same position. Indeed, Woolfie has so much of it that it seems to leak out of him and into the players around him, with wider beneficial effects.

Then we have the complex cases. We have experienced players, like Kalvin Phillips and Ben Johnson, whose errant career trajectories over the past few years seem to have left scars. Neither has been as calm as we need them to be. Elsewhere, Liam Delap’s play is far too instinctive for him to be bothering with “making decisions”. He simply does things and hopes to make them the wisest choice by force of will.

The biggest group is younger players putting the pieces together at different rates. Jacob Greaves looked like he was going to play in his slippers all season until he shanked that clearance against Aston Villa in August, but has too often looked frazzled thereafter. Although pundits have (often unfairly) gone after Leif Davis for his defensive concentration, for me it’s been the number of unforced, unpressured passing errors that mark the difference between this season and last. Jens Cajuste looks super cool whenever he feels contact from opposition midfielders and gets to slide elegantly away from them, but like he needs therapy whenever he approaches the penalty area. Omari Hutchinson has got calmer and more effective as the season has gone on. You could say the same for Jack Clarke and Jaden Philogene, though I think they both have more distance to travel. Aro Muric’s issues stilling his mind have been discussed at excessive length already and require no further analysis.

Meanwhile Palace were dealing with just the one frantic mind, tolerated in the hope that his broader skillset might compensate. Nketiah had another big miss in him just before half-time. Where Nketiah erred, his team mate Ismaila Sarr did not. A fortunate ricochet, an astute first touch, a fierce acceleration, a delicate chip and it was all over in a blink of an eye. One moment of composed clarity, the end.