Ever since Ashley Westwood moved to Villa from Crewe on the deadline day of the summer transfer window of the 2012/13 season he has divided opinion. To some he’s a useless player who either doesn’t know forward passes exist or he’s incapable of pulling them off. To others, he’s a vital cog to the Villa team who quietly does his job of winning the ball and laying it on to his more creative teammates.
But which of these is more accurate? And more to the point should Villa look to keep the central defensive midfielder or offload him?
Looking at his basic stats, you would have to say he strays more towards the tag of ‘useless player’. He’s bagged just 3 goals across his entire Villa career despite racking up 112 appearances or 9355 minutes of Premier League action for Villa. That’s approximately a goal every 3118 minutes, and even in a stat you would expect a central defensive midfielder to do better in; assists, he doesn’t exactly pass with flying colours. He’s bagged 10 assists in his Villa career, equating to an assist every 935.5 minutes, or roughly an assist every 10.5 games.
However perhaps these stats don’t represent his true quality. In comparison to other players in Westwood’s position his lack of goals and assists is not alarming; it’s arguably just the nature of the ball winning and simple passing role they play. But is he any good at that role? Across his entire Villa career Westwood has made 1.6 tackles per game on average, which pales in comparison to Lee Cattermole’s average of 3 tackles per game, Claudio Yacob’s 3.2 per game and even Westwood’s teammate Carlos Sanchez’s 2.4 per game. Thus you could conclude from these stats that Westwood is not a very good ball winning midfielder. But the Englishman has an average of 1.7 interceptions per game, which is a similar level to the players already mentioned, and he gives away far less fouls a game with an average of just 0.9. Therefore, Westwood may not be as good at winning back possession through tackles as players in similar positions to him, but he fouls far fewer when he does be more combative and he disrupts oppositions passing reasonably well in comparison to his peers.
The biggest praise Westwood gets (and strangely his biggest criticism too) is his passing ability. Some fans gush at Westwood’s ability to pull off the simple pass, where as other fans scream that his passes are always to the side and he doesn’t help the team move forward. In terms of number of passes in a game Westwood has an average of 47.2 passes a game across his Villa career, which is at least 7 more on average than the already mentioned Cattermole, Yacob and Sanchez. These passes are generally successful too, with an average pass success percentage of 83.8%, better than Sanchez and Cattermole, and just 0.1% worse off than Yacob. Yet passing is all well and good, but do they really help the team? Well, Westwood has made on average 1.4 key passes a game in his Villa career; at least 0.9 passes more than his surrounding peers. So Westwood doesn’t just pull of an average of 39.6 successful passes a game, of these 1.4 are key passes for the team. Which when compared to what you might consider more attacking players (in similar positions) is still not terrible. Jonjo Shelvey has contributed an average of 1 key pass per game across his career, Gylfi Sigurdsson has an average of 1.4 and even James Milner only has an average of 1.5. So Westwood does contribute a reasonable level of important passes for the team.
Twitter: “There is the opening goal and a dream start for Aston Villa! Ashley Westwood!” Vs Hull City 2013/14 #avfc https://t.co/rKKDL9r0V7 (@avfcgoals)
To come to some sort of conclusion about Ashley Westwood I would say he has come under some unfair criticism over the years, and this article has actually helped me to form a fairer opinion on him. He’s no Payet or Coutinho, but he isn’t Salif Diao either. Westwood offers Villa a consistent and safe outlet for distributing the ball, and every now and then one of these passes may create an opportunity for Villa. His struggles to get more assists can half be explained by the absence of more than one real goal scorer for Villa in recent seasons, and this will only get worse with Benteke not adequately replaced. Perhaps Westwood could be more combative in the role that he plays, but at the same time his more reserved nature means he picks up less fouls and yellow cards for the team.
To summarise, Westwood would be missed if he decided to leave come relegation, and we should try to keep him and nurture him to be better still.
*All the stats come from WhoScored.com and are only the recorded statistics about all the players on the WhoScored.com database.
