Out Of Touch

Keys and Gray’s inability to grasp the role of Liverpool’s new throw-in coach confirms what most of us already knew

Jamie Hamilton
Sep 3, 2018 · 4 min read

The level of misunderstanding surrounding Jurgen Klopp’s recent appointment of a new ‘Throw-in coach’ at Liverpool is almost comical at this point. Statsbomb supremo, Ted Knutson called it right when he tweeted a clip of notorious neolithic Luddites, Richard Keys and Andy Gray, riffing on the topic with their characteristic blend of obstinate ignorance and boorish, bravado laden banter.

Knutson, who specializes in a brand of football consultancy which uses data and analytics as its bedrock and has been involved in a number of relatively high-profile professional contracts including projects with the likes of Danish set piece specialists FC Midtjylland and Championship side Brentford, framed his tweet with lyrics from the Flintstones theme-tune.

And his reference is spot on. Keys and Gray are obsolete, football media’s original odd couple, whose existence now seems to embody a curious, testosterone fuelled gender inversion of Sex And The City 2, appear to be more than happy basking in the glory of their own image, hypnotised by their own reflections shone back by the shimmering facades of a mall-riddled middle eastern metropolis, lost in a sweltering materialist dystopia.

Keys sniggers like a spineless quisling egging on the playground bully as Gray lambastes the apparently idiotic notion of employing a ‘throw-in coach’, the game’s gone, next you’ll be telling me female pundits are fit to comment on the men’s game! Ha! Don’t make me laugh!

The pair’s hubris is quite breathtaking to behold, so certain are they this latest innovation is nothing more than folly, a progressive fad brought to you by the people responsible for coloured boots, tattoos and expected goals.

The question is, of course, how can they be so sure? BEIN Sport’s answer to Ant & Dec have clearly failed to engage with the idea in any meaningful way. They seem to believe that Thomas Gronnemark’s role will be to merely teach the Liverpool 1st team squad the action of throwing the ball into play. This infantile interpretation (no disrespect to any infants reading) displays a quite remarkable inability to comprehend even the most basic of football concepts.

A football match is an ever-changing, complex system of moving parts and, it seems to me, that the role of the new coach is likely to be as concerned with the action of ‘throwing a ball’ as a set-piece expert is concerned with the taker’s general passing technique. Surely it is about planning and coordination, like an NFL coach adding to his team’s playbook.

We were all so impressed by England’s set-piece ingenuity in Russia and yet these commentators seem blind, perhaps willfully so, to the possibility of exploiting the potential gains that throw-in situations offer. Why? Why not learn how one might be able to take advantage of a scenario that happens around 50 times every game? Simply dismissing this as fantasy without even trying it out, without even taking it for a test-drive is, quite frankly, bewildering. Do Keys and Gray not think that coaches should try to increase the probability of their team gaining a positive result?

When considered in this way, their position seems like a madness, a thought disorder of the most fundamental type. As Knutson explains –

When I said years ago the world had only scratched the surface on set pieces, this was a big part of it. Think of what you can do with a fast, long throw from fullback when your strikers can’t be offside. Or that throwers have their heads up, unlike corners [or] freekicks.

I understand the scepticism, it is reasonable, in fact sensible to be wary of The Emperor’s New Clothes, but new ideas must at least be put to the test. There is a deep irony here in that Keys and Gray were once, many moons ago, at the forefront of football’s technological revolution. Gray’s computerised graphics seemed more like science-fiction than studio analysis and his content was ‘cutting-edge’ back in the early nineties. But now, thirty years on, it is as though he has since existed oblivious to the advancements in football coaching and theory, he has been left hopelessly ‘out of touch’, like one of those Japanese World War Two fighter pilots, shot down over the jungle only to emerge decades later, entirely unaware that the conflict had ended long ago.

As I find myself saying with increasing regularity, the traditional football media is in its death-throws, and Keys and Gray’s most recent cringe-worthy inability to even entertain the possibility that something ‘new’ might actually be ‘good’ is just the latest in a growing litany of embarrassments that are symptomatic of the late stages of an illness that, for the football media that continues to provide safe passage on the gravy-train for Keys, Gray and their ilk, is almost certain to prove fatal.

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