Mesut Ozil – Lazy Like A Fox

That Ozil fella sure is lazy. Lazy like a fox.

Here’s a typical Ozil heatmap (Everton, Mar 1, 2015.)

The boy gets around. He also gets up and down. 11.61 km covered that day. The heat map only shows his touches. Ozil is mostly about running without the ball. They don’t do heatmaps for that.

In fact, check out the Sanchez goal from this weekend against Liverpool. Both Ozil and Coquelin, in quick succession, pile on the pressure in midfield, to force a turnover. But Ozil doesn’t actually get a touch on the ball, so it doesn’t show up in any silly stats. But, I’m sure he’ll get loads of credit for that.

Player vs Everton March 1, 2015 KM Covered Mesut Özil 11.61 Santi Cazorla 11.00 Olivier Giroud 10.85 Héctor Bellerín 10.46 Kieran Gibbs 10.10 Gabriel Paulista 9.99 Francis Coquelin 9.62 Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain 9.27 Laurent Koscielny 9.10 Alexis Sánchez 9.00

The Media grasp it for a brief second…and then they lose it again.

And from the World Cup:

Summary for those who are “table-challenged:” Mesut Ozil sprinted A LOT at the World Cup. And he’s pretty bloody fast too.

There is enough of evidence, stats and facts out there for anyone interested in being correct. It would seem many in the media are not that interested in being correct. Maybe that’s not the story that sells.

So who is really being lazy? Ozil…or the pundits?

Smarter than a Cundit.

Mesut Ozil is an IQ test for pundits. Or as Mesut refers to them, Cundits. Tragically most are found to be certifiably retarded in taking this test. Sure, “retarded” is a Politically Incorrect term nowadays, unless of course you’re talking about Cundits. Then it’s usually the only acceptable term – Michael Owen? Phil Neville? Alan Shearer? Robbie Savage? Robbie Mustoe? Robbie Earle? Anyone called Robbie?

Mesut Ozil’s movement on the pitch is a Rorschach test for Cundits. Tragically most are found professionally incompetent after taking it.

Mesut Ozil and the art of deception.

You don’t see it from your TVs but Mesut Ozil has a rather bizarre way of behaving on the pitch. Here’s what Jagielka said about marking him recently:

“The guy’s a weirdo. Mumbling to himself like a psychotic hobo all the time, limping, looking like he might need to lie down at any moment. And then…Whooomf! He’s off.”

“One minute he’s whistling like an absent-minded window cleaner. Then he starts this “Doo be doo be doo. Don’t mind me. I’m just running over here away from the ball, minding my own business. I’ve no idea why they keep passing it to me. Look, the balls over there but I’m going to run over here” routine. He’s very odd.”

Here was Mesut Ozil’s version of the same event:

“People ask me why I went to the disco on my day off? I need people. I’m just so lonely on the pitch. All space and no people. The disco…it’s the opposite. That’s why I crave it.

On the pitch, I’m just hanging out over there on my own, in a place I call “between the lines.” (I might open a disco with that name, when I retire.)

Sometimes I wander around on the pitch for what seems like days on my own, without passing another soul. But eventually down the road I will spot a fellow traveler of the unworn path. 3 days ago I bumped into Thomas Muller. Well, I say “bumped into.” In fact, when we spotted each other, we stopped in our tracks and meandered off in opposite – well, not quite opposite, that would have been too predictable – directions.

Before that, it had been days since I’d seen anyone else on the pitch. He was some way off in the distance. Pretty sure it was David Silva but just as I was about to avoid him by veering off in another direction, he picked up a dry, leafy branch, and started sweeping the dust on the trail behind him as he disappeared off into a narrow canyon.

It is lonely out here, away from the madding crowd with just an occasional footballer visible in the distance. But others I meet are less reticent. I have had some fascinating encounters. For every Javier Bardem I run into, offering to show me how his gas cylinder contraption works (“Errr, no thanks very much, mate, you mad bastard,) there has been a stroll alongside…

a Jean-Paul Sartre who told me: “Freedom is what we do with what’s been done to us” – Ooookay then

an Anatoly Karpov who told me: “Pawns not only create the sketch for the whole painting, they are also the soil, the foundation, of any position” – Super! I’ll get straight on that

a Cutter, the great Magician, who explained: “Every great magic trick consists of 3 Acts: The first is “The Pledge”. The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course… it probably isn’t. The second is “The Turn”. The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you’re looking for the secret… but you won’t find it, because you don’t really want to know. You want to be fooled. But you wouldn’t clap yet. Because making something disappear isn’t enough; you have to bring it back. That’s why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call “The Prestige”.” – Duh.

Cutter, the great Magician, taught Mesut Ozil nothing but a new language to explain what he already does. Ozil has been in the deception business since he learned to feign a limp at the age of 9 to buy a yard on a defender.

From that early success, he began to innovate rapidly. Faked laziness or limping was easy, and yet disinterested body language, while seemingly obvious, still works to this very day. Whistling absently was less of a success, at least against the better teams. Eventually his experimentation led him to cross paths with the American Military/Industrial Complex who were interested in gaining an understanding of how Ozil had learned to jam the Pundit Detection Systems (or PDS’s) of his natural enemy.

The first lesson Ozil taught the military: “In Stealth, you do not need to be smart. You only need to be smarter than your enemy. When my enemy is the Pundits, or as I call them, Cundits, you don’t need to be very smart at all.”

“I save my real tricks and methods for the best defences I face.” It is at this point he begins to elaborate on the Stealth technologies he has developed with greater and greater sophistication, and which will later be incorporated by the military into the F22 Raptor (Stealth) Fighter:

Features including but not limited to –

Flat surfaces with very sharp edges to scatter radar

Coatings to absorb radar energy

Signal jamming equipment

Camouflage

Looking lazy

Limping

Whistling

Sulking

Manoeuverability – Above all, movement. Movement away from….

“Stealth can only take you so far. As long as you are displacing molecules at speed, someone can still detect you,” Ozil explains.

“Movement, unpredictable movement, is the real trick, the real magic here: First I jog aimlessly – “The Pledge.” Then I make my move – “The Turn.” Then I make the key pass – “The Reveal.””

The perfect pass, the perfect weight. The one everyone expected but no one saw coming.

Ozil finished the interview, as only a German can: “Even a bad magician can make the dove disappear. But with a good magician, the dove lives.” Yeah, that kind of killed the mood at the end of the interview.