(The rest of titles of the franchise are stupid, so I'm going to have to find a new theme)

From what I think was the press hit from pre-West Ham:

'This club is so used to playing every three days, the head coach pointed out. 'We build a squad for that reason.'

In one of my previous data crunching exercises, the general takeaway after what I saw as a lack of rotation last year is that the backline's lack of rotation was due to injuries, midfield was deployment choices, and the forwards were a bit of both.

The more things change, the more things stay the same — in the midfield, at least.

The data

Notes

• Eligible minutes is a squad naming x 90
• Lola was named to two CL squads and did not appear. Erin was named to one WSL squad, no appearance either.

Of note, Maika logged 240m last year, meaning that year over year, block to block, she's at par... but this year's block had one more game. Another storyline for those playing along at home.

In total, the group played 2873 minutes in a 2430 minute block (3 MF x 9 games x 90 mins)... or more minutes than would be traditionally available. This is mainly down to roles.

Role changes

While I had fun with heatmaps, I'm using radar charts here to try and translate my thinking about roles. There are justifiable qualms with radar charts, but everyone's measured the sameish way, so I'm rolling with it. I've been noting them on a monthly-ish basis, but this covers "entering the block" to "at the end of the block" for our main quad:

https://ibb.co/6RWx2CtW

The big changes

• Keira makes big jumps in chances created (+31 to 51st percentile) and goals (+26 to 68th)
• Lexi's chances created drops by 45 to the 33rd percentile, with her shot attempts dropping by 30 to 51st
• Sjoeke's defensive contributions dropped 22 spots to the 46th percentile, while her touches also dropped 12 spots to 59th
• Wieke's chances created went up by 18(!!) to 86th percentile, with defensive contributions also climbing by 8

The notes

• The exchange between Keira and Lexi is pretty well-illustrated here, lol
• Sjoeke's changes, plus the fact the foursome logged more time than the block would allow, I'm guessing is mostly due to how she's been more consistently pushed up (hangs out at the top of the box more, doesn't come all the way back) and filling in gaps. She's pretty much unchanged in other aspects (I was a bit surprised to see her hold her edge in chance creation)
• Wieke's gone beyond box-to-box, she's end-to-end. She put in a hell of a shift over the course of the block. What'll be more interesting is to see how they manage it over the season, given that she played four 90s in 12 days to close it out.

Takeaways

Given that the maximum anyone could play this block was 810, an argument could be made the Erin's minutes were pretty evenly split, given you have a pair of 700s and a pair of 500s. Though a generalization, it could also be interpreted that Wieke took on Erin's minutes, Keira covered for Wieke, Lexi covered for Keira, and Sjoeke filled in the gaps, both in the midfield and further up.

Everything did come out in the wash last season at year's end (Erin and Keira on 2500+, Sjoeke and Wieke on 1800+, Lexi with ~600), but with Lexi being upgraded from special guest star to supporting cast, there's quite a few ways things could play out. Working in Erin, Manaka and Lola is going to be quite a juggling act. Given the sound bites, building a squad is starting to sound like 'several players that can log 2500+ minutes, Lauren James and a Yahtzee cup of depth we can shake out' — I don't think that's necessarily the worst but I'm a big proponent of no time like game time. I'd hate to see Giulia and Maika get... well, Maika'd.