Play The Passing Lane And Not the Man With The Ball: Bournemouth's Unique Defense

Bournemouth are off to a great start this season. They are 6th in the table with a +4 goal difference and have spent a huge amount of time in the lead (4th highest share of passes coming in a winning position). This has happened largely because they have played an easy schedule, hat tip to Mark Taylor's work there. But that doesn't interest me, what interests me is why are there so many dentists? It feels like they are a 1/1 ratio with doctors but they take care of just your mouth and doctors take care of the entire body, right? What also interests me is just how passive Bournemouth's defense is, and how they challenge you to do the work of passing through them to score.

First we look at tackles and interceptions per pass allowed

This doesn't really change much wherever you move around on the pitch.

This lack of tackles and interceptions is not new for strangely underrated Eddie Howe and Bournemouth, but the trend seems to be heading in one direction. Maybe this shifts back up as we get to harder parts of the schedule, but for now it's a continuation.

Only Chelsea have fewer raw tackles and interceptions, and of course they spend much less time defending (63% possession vs Bournemouth's 49%).

-Now this doesn't mean they are easy to pass against, actually once you start closing in on goal, Bournemouth are generally quite difficult to complete passes against (something that they were good at a few years ago, but not as great the last few years).

-Teams do get forward a lot against Bournemouth, which makes sense.

-And, of course, for this no-hassling defense to work at all there have to be no places on the pitch from where you can quickly get shots from. All of these charts are compared to average, so at every place on the pitch you are further from a shot in possession against the Cherries.

-Bournemouth don't force you to pass backwards. Not in total and not in specific spots on the pitch, let's take a look at my old trusty zone map:

if Bournemouth was compact enough to throw up a wall at certain spots discouraging opponents from going further we should see it in share of passes that advance a zone, right?

Case closed then, no wall. Or...maybe we should just look at completion% allowed when trying to advance from a zone (so lower=tougher to complete against)

ah, that's more like it. Above average across the board, Bournemouth are tough to actually complete forward passes against.

Bournemouth have played the passing lanes and not the man with the ball this year. They've done it effectively, but conditions have been perfect. Can they do it against better teams, can they do it chasing games? We will watch and see.