Welly Nix: Envisioning A Future Without Ulises Davila
The Wellington Phoenix have four games left in their season, three of them to be played within an eight-day stretch starting on Saturday arvo, and they probably need to win at least three (if not all) of them to crack that pesky top six. Wins require goals. Goals require creativity. So it’s not the best thing that Ulises Davila is still a major doubt with that hamstring injury picked up against Adelaide - an injury which caused him to miss the 2-2 draw with Melbourne City.
The good news is that he did travel with the team to Wellington for the game against Western United, although he didn’t do a lot of training during the open session that the Nix held on Wednesday morning. Ordinarily you’d say there’s no way he’ll play but with finals dreams on the line that changes things. No doubt the club with “give him every chance”, as clubs always say in this situation... but it remains a high possibility that the Nix will have to play a large chunk of their remaining four matches (five including the one he’s already missed) without their talisman creative midfielder, one of the very best attacking players in the competition.
What’s more is that if reports are to be believed – and when they start popping up on both sides of the Tasman from numerous sources they usually are – then Davila is on his way out of the club at the end of the campaign anyway. Despite initially being happy to stay in Wellington, and with negotiations progressing to keep him around, in the end the Nix simply weren’t able to match the financial weight of other A-League teams with Macarthur coming in strong with the Luca Brasi offer. Two milly over three years? Yeah that’s real coin, that is.
Remember that when the Nix let Steven Taylor go to India it had a lot to do with balancing the books during a covid period in which they’d had to scoop up a fair bit of government funding just to stay afloat at all. There’s just no way they could have matched the cash. Better hope they’re getting on the line with Stevie T’s agent post haste though because losing both of them would be chasmic. It’s nice to see Ben Waine, Clayton Lewis, and Oli Sail getting well deserved contract extensions but those ones were sitters. That SBS piece also reckons Cammy Devlin is on his way to Melbourne Victory so... chop chop, folks. There’s still 14 players coming off contract from this squad (including Davila, Devlin & Taylor) and it’d really be nice if we didn’t have to keep rebuilding the bulk of the team year after year.
So whether the Phoenix have the services of Uli Davila again this season, they sure don’t seem like they’ll have those services beyond it and that’s a chunky problem given how important Davila has been to this team’s attacking prowess. Not about to use the one-man-team metaphor or anything (because there’s no such thing in football) but damn there haven’t been many players more influential than Uli Davila.
El Mago Zurdo
In 47 A-League games for the Nix (plus an FFA Cup tie), Uli Davila has scored 19 goals and has 10 assists. Some of that scoring is boosted by his penalty prowess (7 of those goals were spotties) but that’s still some heftiness. The next top scorer for the club in that time is David Ball with 8.
Yet it goes deeper than that. It’s not just the output, it’s how this team plays. Its 4-2-2-2 shape is designed to allow freedom for the dual 10s, with Davila’s posting on the right wing coming with a free licence to drift inside onto his left foot and shoot as much as humanly possible. It’s a low percentage play but it’s an easy situation to manufacture given his close-ball control and sneakily elusive dribbling. He can get to that point on the edge of the area to shoot pretty much whenever he wants. Let the bloke do that 4-5 times a game and he’s going to provide goals.
He’s also going to soak up a lot of the attack. Across the entire league, only James Maclaren has taken more shots than Davila. Maclaren’s up to 109 of them in the magical year that he’s having... Davila is second with 78 just ahead of Matt Derbyshire (76), Dylan Wentzel-Halls (73) & Bruno Fornaroli (73). The difference with Davila is that because he’s shooting from further out he’s only getting 26.7% of those shots on target. So... second in total shots but 95th in shot accuracy (and that’s discounting anyone with fewer than 10 shots this season). Davila averages a shade under four shots per ninety minutes but only one of those is going to be on target. Again, there’s nothing wrong with this, Davila is a rare player of the quality that you’d trust with that kinda usage. Just pointing out that pretty much a quarter of the Nix’s total shots come from Davila and that leaves a significant hole in the way they play when he’s not there.
Ewing Theory
There’s an idea purported by American sports media bloke Bill Simmons called the Ewing Theory. It stems from the New York Knicks in the 90s and the perceived trend that, although Patrick Ewing was clearly the best player on that team... the team itself appeared to play better when he was absent.
Sometimes that can be the case: you have a guy who has this heavy influence on your team and you sorta sit back and let him do what he does, you maybe zone out a little yourself, you become over-reliant on them. Corners are cut and the team becomes predictable. Then suddenly that person is missing and other players have to step up. Other players want to step up, this is their opportunity. No individual is capable of carrying the load of that star player but by working together and all that corny jazz... you get the idea. There’s some Ewing Theory potential here for sure (at least: hopefully).
The Alternatives
Here’s the pass map from when the Nix played Adelaide United a couple weeks back (I picked that game because it was the club’s last win so it’s an indication of the team playing well... granted it was a last-second penalty that did it)...
Shout out to Rob Scriva on Twitter for doing The Lord’s work.
Notice where Ulises Davila is. He drifts in so far infield that he’s hardly even playing on that right side at all. Which in turn creates a heap of space for Louis Fenton to attack... except that’s not really what Fenton is best at. He’s not a particularly dynamic player. He won’t take a dude for skill or pace. If this was happening on the opposite side while James McGarry was starting then phwoar mate just imagine. Let alone last season while Libby Cacace was in town. Fenton on the other hand usually gets lost looking at how isolated he is and passes back or inside to a square midfielder. He’s gotten better lately but still.
Without Davila against Melbourne City last game it was David Ball who started on the right; David Ball who has been going through something of a drought lately. Before that game Ball had gone six in a row without a goal or an assist playing mostly as a left winger just to get him into the team. Ben Waine, Jaushua Sotirio, and Tomer Hemed had getting the walk-ons up front and with Reno Piscopo out injured it was Ball who made for the best replacement out left. Except maybe he didn’t because he clearly wasn’t contributing enough.
Ball is a guy who does his best stuff in the penalty area because he’s good in tight spaces. He’s clever, he can finish under pressure, and he can spot an open teammate. He’s also quite right-footed so having him on the left wing both neutralised him as a crosser and limited his shooting opportunities. Also, this is a little weird to say but here goes: because of his monster workrate that deeper role sorta indulged him to do too much work. Admittedly shielding a teenaged fullback a lot of that time (although not in this ADL game) but it meant he was further away than ever from that opponent’s penalty area.
When Ball played on the right however... different story. He attempted more crosses (3) in that MCY game than he has in any other match all season and one of those crosses earned him an assist for Tomer Hemed’s 88th minute equaliser. It was a superb cross which Hemed expertly dispatched inside the far post. Ball also had a couple shots on target in that match and was generally just way more noticeable than he had been over the previous month or so.
Plus because he’ll play closer to the edge than Davila does, that also brings him into action as a support player for Louis Fenton – meaning it’s no longer about Fenton attacking empty space but about Fenton getting forward and trying to create an overload leading to those over/under-lapping runs. Much more in his wheelhouse there.
Not to mention Tomer Hemed himself. If the emphasis is now more on getting numbers wide and delivering the ball into the area then that unleashes Hemed as a much more useful presence up top. He’s a beast in the air and an excellent finisher. He’s not a counter attacking option or a guy whose movement is going to drag defenders around. Swing the ball in towards him though and watch him go to work.
(Obliged to add here: Free Palestine).
Doubt we’ll see anything different from Ben Waine, Jaushua Sotirio, or Reno Piscopo. None of those three will be affected by what we’re talking about here but definitely those other three were well suited to the combinations allowed by an absence of Uli Davila. It’s not to the point where it’s even a conversation that Ulises Davila isn’t still the first name on the teamsheet when fit – and there’s still that chance he’ll be involved against Western United this weekend - but considering David Ball is contracted for next season and Davila is not... it’s useful to know that there are other options.
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