Any athlete would say that time flies by in their profession, like Jonny Wilkinson waking up after winning rugby union’s World Cup final and trying to work out what he should dream of next. The buzz was there and then it was gone, replaced by something closer to anxiety.
Football is the same, a sport where standing still is no different to going backwards. When I asked Luke Ayling a few months ago about winning the FA Youth Cup at Arsenal, he said what players often say: it feels like yesterday. Yet here that Arsenal team are 11 years on, scattered far and wide; some in the Premier League, some in non-League and elsewhere in Europe, some retired and the most recognisable of them unattached. The thing they have in common is that none of them are at the Emirates.
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Would Arsenal recognise the Ayling they knew, a decade after he swapped the plushest of Premier League academies for Yeovil Town and Huish Park? His hair is longer and the top knot came later but his face shows a familiar blend of in-game vigour and off-field relaxation (both emotions apparent in photographs of his formative years). The biggest change with Ayling is positional, the strong and steady central defender who morphed into a box-to-box wing-back. They did not see it coming in London. With few exceptions, they did not see it coming at all.
Ayling will meet Arsenal in a league game for the first time in his career on Sunday, a proper reunion after all this time, and his path to this point is like most in professional football. A small and elite percentage of players get what they want from start to finish. The majority are asked to hang in, look for the right breaks at the right time and take the odd leap when their head tells them to jump. Ayling went to Yeovil because he knew he had no chance of breaking into Arsenal’s first team. His was a straight choice of lounging around in the comfort of London Colney a little longer or braving the wider world. It all seems so sensible now.
As a full-back, Ayling is in the same stylistic category as Liverpool’s Andy Robertson and Trent Alexander-Arnold, two of the Premier League’s best exponents, but it fell to him to persuade Terry Skiverton to give him a go there at Yeovil. Skiverton saw defensive midfield as the alternative to fielding Ayling at centre-back. Bristol City were so unconvinced about Ayling’s aptitude that they let Leeds United have him for £200,000 in 2016.
His first season with Leeds, where his end-to-end game began to shine through under Garry Monk, made that sale seem peculiar and his pivotal influence in Marcelo Bielsa’s squad has only encouraged the view — shared, it should be said, by Lee Johnson, the coach who flogged him — that Ayling was ludicrously under-valued. His transfer to Elland Road and his handling by Bielsa has been the making of a modern right-back.
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Bielsa’s tactics at Leeds do not accommodate conventional defenders (and the politics involved in him unexpectedly sacrificing Pontus Jansson for £5.5 million should not obscure the fact that Bielsa’s technical requirements challenged the Swede more than many others around him). Leeds have lived for 18 months without significant aerial presence at the back because Bielsa’s reliance on movement and fluent passing demands a few trade-offs.
Distribution mattered more than anything and out wide, his full-backs were useless if they lacked the physique to overlap or underlap and progress the ball. In Ayling’s case, he had a licence to play as much in the opposition’s half as his own. He was free to take risks in the knowledge that Bielsa would answer for them if they came at a cost.
The final goal in Leeds’ 4-1 defeat at Crystal Palace before the international break epitomised that, coming with Ayling and others caught upfield and Leeds out of shape. But that game underlined Bielsa’s thinking when it comes to playing safe. The comparison between the clubs’ right-backs exposed in microcosm the difference between Bielsa and Palace’s manager, Roy Hodgson.
Ayling’s touch map, shown in the first graphic below, is a mass of activity not only down the right but in more central areas and occasionally wide on the left. He is involved at both ends of the pitch, an attacking outlet as much as a defensive asset.
In contrast, Palace right-back Nathaniel Clyne (image two) is conservative and restrained, sticking tightly to his area of the pitch and limiting his contribution beyond halfway. Clyne embodies a team who cope on average with less than 40 per cent of possession and pile responsibility on a quick and dangerous front line. Ayling embodies a team who are always out for blood.
The 29-year-old is a fierce runner and a positive passer whose positioning and distribution led to both the goal scored by Patrick Bamford at Selhurst Park and the finish from the striker which was controversially disallowed for offside.
The variety in Ayling’s movement and his use of the ball — sometimes in wide areas, sometimes driving through space in the middle — is an integral part of Bielsa’s attacking plan and he has developed into a highly progressive footballer.
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In the Premier League this season he is third behind Robertson and Alexander-Arnold in the list of defenders making passes into the final third. He is seventh in the average for progressive passes — those which significantly advance a team up the pitch — with close to five in every match, and second to Robertson in the list of chances created by a defensive player.
| Apps | Final 3rd passes | Final 3rd passes per 90 | Final 3rd complete | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Andy Robertson | 8 | 179 | 22.38 | 131 |
T. Alexander-Arnold | 8 | 170 | 22.11 | 109 |
Luke Ayling | 8 | 143 | 17.88 | 90 |
Luke Shaw | 7 | 141 | 20.91 | 97 |
Stuart Dallas | 8 | 134 | 16.96 | 93 |
George Baldock | 8 | 122 | 15.25 | 92 |
Kyle Walker | 7 | 121 | 17.62 | 95 |
Andy Webster | 8 | 105 | 13.13 | 68 |
Ben Chilwell | 5 | 104 | 20.8 | 80 |
Kieran Tierney | 7 | 102 | 14.78 | 65 |
The graphic below from Twenty3 splits the pitch into sectors and shows the spread of events in open play — passes, duels, crosses and so on — over the course of Leeds’ eight Premier League matches.
It shows that Leeds are more active on the right than on the left in open play, although the rules set by Bielsa for Ayling’s position apply to the other side of the pitch too.
Stuart Dallas, Bielsa’s preferred left-back, has completed more passes into the final third than Ayling and all but four other Premier League full-backs this season. He sits above Ayling in sequences leading directly to goals, albeit while creating five opportunities fewer. But in order to appreciate Ayling’s part in making Leeds’ tick, it is necessary to analyse the extent to which other players look for him when Bielsa’s side exchange the ball. There are very few players who Leeds go to more.
The most passes between two players at Leeds in the past eight games have come between Ayling and Robin Koch (227 so far). A large percentage of these are lateral balls, low on risk and a means of setting Leeds up to press forward, but more impactful are Ayling’s 49 passes to Mateusz Klich, more than half of them played forward.
Ayling and Klich appear to have a natural understanding, as demonstrated by the fact that Bamford’s two finishes at Palace were preceded by Ayling picking out Klich in a threatening area.
As the next table outlines, Ayling and Dallas attack in a way which gives Klich scope to feed possession to them in advanced positions and more than 65 per cent of Ayling’s passes to right winger Helder Costa are progressive rather than sideways or backwards. It is the mark of a defender who is constantly probing, consistently in line with Bielsa’s expectations of him.
| Players | Passes | Forward passes |
|---|---|---|
143 | 19 | |
89 | 0 | |
84 | 4 | |
79 | 0 | |
66 | 10 | |
63 | 12 | |
60 | 8 | |
56 | 32 | |
53 | 17 | |
49 | 28 | |
35 | 23 |
As a result, Ayling has been one of Bielsa’s more creative resources in the Premier League.
Jack Harrison has laid on 15 chances this season and Klich 12 but Ayling is third in the list with eight. Three of those were classed by Opta Stats as big chances — better than the average opening — and he is in the top 20 players across the division for expected assists (higher than both Robertson and Alexander-Arnold), suggesting that Ayling is occupying useful territory up front.
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That he is still to provide an actual assist leaves room to sharpen up, as does a pass completion rate of 71 per cent in the final third, but in a machine with many important cogs, it is difficult for Leeds to play well if Ayling’s individual performance falls short. He is always in the thick of a game, with a club-high average of 95 touches.
| Player | Chances created | Big chances created |
|---|---|---|
15 | 4 | |
12 | 1 | |
8 | 3 | |
7 | 0 | |
6 | 0 | |
5 | 0 | |
4 | 2 | |
4 | 0 | |
3 | 1 | |
2 | 1 | |
1 | 0 | |
1 | 0 | |
1 | 0 | |
1 | 0 | |
1 | 0 |
Arsenal, if Mikel Arteta persists with his 3-4-3 system, might find that they are susceptible to the width that Ayling and Dallas supply. Arteta’s team lost 3-0 to Aston Villa in their last game and both of the goals scored by Villa’s Ollie Watkins came from direct runs down the left flank. Arsenal had Bukayo Saka and Hector Bellerin on either side of their midfield four, in principle to halt any overlaps, but they were picked off by a Villa side who Leeds comprehensively thrashed two weeks earlier.
Ayling’s task will be to lead the charge while keeping a leash on Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang; the sort of challenge he would have given his right arm for 10 years ago.
Ayling is one of three members of the 2009 Arsenal FA Youth Cup squad currently playing in the Premier League, along with Kyle Bartley at West Bromwich Albion and Henri Lansbury at Aston Villa. Jack Wilshere was until recently but finds himself without a club after quitting West Ham United.
Former coaches of Ayling’s believed he could aspire to Premier League football, even as he said goodbye to the Arsenal academy. As Neil Banfield, Arsenal’s ex youth-team coach put it, when the opposition get better Ayling gets better. Mentally, Banfield said, he had the confidence to feel at home in whatever company he shared.
But very few people appreciated the true range of his ability as Bielsa did when he joked in 2018 that “we have Ayling who can solve every problem”. Ayling the man is as Arsenal once knew him. Ayling the player is like nothing they remember.
(Top photo: Sebastian Frej/MB Media/Getty Images)
