Sergino Dest was very good in his first El Clásico. But why?
People do not understand Sergino Dest’s Instagram. They see him staring down the barrel of the camera doing barbell curls in his Ajax shirt, and they think its vanity. Now he’s in an all-green 1970s disco bowling uniform posing in front of a glass storefront that has green paint on it and also is reflecting green trees from across the street, and they think he’s “looking for attention”. Next people see he has four different posts of him just looking at his phone, and in one of those pictures he’s giving his phone a cool finger-point for a selfie he’s taking with it (thereby being in two different pictures at once), and they don’t know what to think at all.
But it’s actually very simple what to think: First, Sergino Dest is an artist, potentially a generational one. Second, the picture of him taking a picture of himself is likely an early attempt of his at merging the personal ego with the infinite. And, third, he fucking loves Instagram.
There was an expectation that Vinícius Junior would torch Sergino Dest in Saturday’s El Clásico. I don't mean among the USMNT types. It’s simply not a way we’re inclined as a people to think, so that possibility could not have occurred to us. But most people with an interest in the game and some background knowledge of the match-up anticipated something ugly down Barcelona’s right flank. Dest had recently arrived at Barcelona from Ajax with a reputation as being a bad defender, while Vinícius had YouTube videos titled 50+ Players Destroyed by Vinícius Junior and Vinícius Junior Humiliating Everyone 2020.
But Vinícius did not torch Dest. In fact, by the time it was all over eleven different twitter accounts paid Dest’s performance the highest honor possible by sending out slight variations on this tweet:
Dest had pocketed Vinícius.
Did Vinícius just have a bad day? Probably. He only attempted two dribbles.
Is Vinícius bad in general now? There have been rumblings his attempted dribbles are down this season (to two per game, incidentally), but, no, Vinícius is not bad now. Dest still deserves credit for containing him.
Does this mean Dest is not a bad defender? Maybe. He certainly didn’t seem like a bad defender to me anyway.
How sure are we that he was even a bad defender at Ajax? We’re not completely convinced he was a bad defender at Ajax.
The way I choose to see it is that while Dest wasn’t a bad defender at Ajax, it would not have been difficult for someone inclined to think that he was to find reasons to support their thinking. They could easily find examples of repeated mistakes. These examples would tend to relate to Dest’s not having fully learned to stay locked-in for ninety minutes. It’s not that he’d be wandering off into the stands, but maybe he’d glance for support at a bad time and an attacker would dribble half by him. Or he’d be caught flat-footed, arrive to challenge a beat late, and so then lose it. Or he’d misread the urgency of a situation, get muscled as a result, and his man would be off toward goal.
Or maybe up 3-0 against Heerenveen he wouldn’t get back with El Clásico level drive. You would not have seen below sequence happen this past Saturday. No, he’d have been busting back straight from the jump:
Dest wasn’t defending Vinícius only -- that’s not how soccer works. He had to also contend with Karim Benzema, who Real Madrid sent in and out of the halfspace. Benzema would either be dropping back for the ball, or pushing up to pin Dest and Pique. Other times Benzema would go all the wide of Dest, with Vinícius in the halfspace or moving more central. And then there was Real Madrid’s left back, Ferland Mendy, who’d function as a wide winger all the way up whenever they had Barcelona back in their block. But occasionally, it would be Mendy moving into the half space, with Vinícius staying all the way wide. Or instead out wide it might be, again, Benzema. They’d all -- Vinícius, Benzema, Mendy -- be swirling around, and Dest had to rotate between them measuring risk, closing space, and providing cover.
Next we need to think back to early 2019 when Dest was interviewed on the Scuffed Soccer Podcast. He talked about his development, his experiences coming through the Ajax academy, and his time with the United States youth national team:
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But it’s actually very simple what to think: First, Sergino Dest is an artist, potentially a generational one. Second, the picture of him taking a picture of himself is likely an early attempt of his at merging the personal ego with the infinite. And, third, he fucking loves Instagram.
Defending Vinícius Junior
But Vinícius did not torch Dest. In fact, by the time it was all over eleven different twitter accounts paid Dest’s performance the highest honor possible by sending out slight variations on this tweet:
Dest emptying his pocket after the game. pic.twitter.com/cishX8i4Bb
— hesham (@Hesham_FCB) October 24, 2020
Dest had pocketed Vinícius.
He’d played him tight, often higher up the field. To whatever extent Barcelona had a coherent pressing scheme, it appeared to me that it involved a trigger to press whenever a Real Madrid received the ball with their back to goal. Dest was active with that early on. (By “appeared to me”, I mean they said explicitly that’s what was happening on the Managing Madrid podcast post-game report).
Defending Vinícius like this increased the risk of his getting into the space behind, but Dest did pretty well to almost never let this happen through a combination of thoughtful positioning, being fast, and a good measure of sheer determination. It might start as taking a preemptive step to stop Vinícius getting slipped in, then continue as a charging run as long as need be to prevent his successfully arriving and receiving in the box.
I say almost never because Dest wasn’t perfect -- a better weighted ball from a Vinícius teammate here, a better Vinícius finish there and the story of Dest's performance would have been different. That doesn’t matter, though. He pocketed Vinícius. And squinting at the screen you'd almost swear that standing out for Barcelona in his first El Clásico was something Dest appeared genuinely convinced he was supposed to be doing.
Defending Vinícius like this increased the risk of his getting into the space behind, but Dest did pretty well to almost never let this happen through a combination of thoughtful positioning, being fast, and a good measure of sheer determination. It might start as taking a preemptive step to stop Vinícius getting slipped in, then continue as a charging run as long as need be to prevent his successfully arriving and receiving in the box.
I say almost never because Dest wasn’t perfect -- a better weighted ball from a Vinícius teammate here, a better Vinícius finish there and the story of Dest's performance would have been different. That doesn’t matter, though. He pocketed Vinícius. And squinting at the screen you'd almost swear that standing out for Barcelona in his first El Clásico was something Dest appeared genuinely convinced he was supposed to be doing.
Why?
Before we get into answering that, here's a video of Dest defending Vinícius:
Questions
Did Vinícius just have a bad day? Probably. He only attempted two dribbles.
Is Vinícius bad in general now? There have been rumblings his attempted dribbles are down this season (to two per game, incidentally), but, no, Vinícius is not bad now. Dest still deserves credit for containing him.
Does this mean Dest is not a bad defender? Maybe. He certainly didn’t seem like a bad defender to me anyway.
How sure are we that he was even a bad defender at Ajax? We’re not completely convinced he was a bad defender at Ajax.
A brief note on Dest’s defending at Ajax
Or maybe up 3-0 against Heerenveen he wouldn’t get back with El Clásico level drive. You would not have seen below sequence happen this past Saturday. No, he’d have been busting back straight from the jump:
Now back to El Clásico / It was about more than Vinícius
And he did it well.
But why did he do it well?
I believe Dest performing above expectation in Saturday’s El Clásico can be explained in part by a concept popular in electoral politics: The Enthusiasm Gap. The idea is that when voters are polled in a particular electoral contest, they might be evenly divided in preference between one candidate and the other. But if, owing to dynamics of the race, one side is more enthusiastic about voting for their candidate than the other side is theirs, then the side with the more enthusiastic voters will win the election. That’s because their voters are more likely to turn out to vote on account of how enthusiastic they are.
So our very basic starting premise here is that Dest outperformed because he was more enthusiastic about what was happening on the field than his direct Real Madrid opponents, and our initial working hypothesis is that what accounts for this gap is it was Dest's El Clásico debut. I believe his performance supports this theory, but, and this is important, I say this only in part accounts for Dest's performance because it cannot possibly be the only force at play here, and this is for two reasons:
The solution needs to provide a cause for Dest’s enthusiasm advantage that is independent of, and supplementary to, this game having been an El Clásico. And this discovered cause must also be likely to have produced a state in Dest relating to locked-in-ness and perhaps primal motivation that is a different from, and greater in force than, that of mere enthusiasm.
It wasn't just about more than Vinícius; it was also about more than El Clásico / A theory of Dest's likely mystical experience
So our very basic starting premise here is that Dest outperformed because he was more enthusiastic about what was happening on the field than his direct Real Madrid opponents, and our initial working hypothesis is that what accounts for this gap is it was Dest's El Clásico debut. I believe his performance supports this theory, but, and this is important, I say this only in part accounts for Dest's performance because it cannot possibly be the only force at play here, and this is for two reasons:
- If it was that El Clásico debut alone could explain an exceptional performance in an El Clásico debut, then over time we should have seen an unusually high percentage of El Clásico debutante’s being among the better performers on their team, which we have not.
- And, more importantly: Yes, Dest’s performance can be characterized as enthusiastic, but it cannot be characterized primarily as enthusiastic. It was an enthusiastic performance, of course, but the description is incomplete to the point of being useless. Enthusiasm was a force, but not the essential force. Clearly there was also something inspiring complete focus and overwhelming motivation beyond what is normal for Dest, and other debutantes.
The solution needs to provide a cause for Dest’s enthusiasm advantage that is independent of, and supplementary to, this game having been an El Clásico. And this discovered cause must also be likely to have produced a state in Dest relating to locked-in-ness and perhaps primal motivation that is a different from, and greater in force than, that of mere enthusiasm.
If these seem impossible conditions, then that’s probably because you hadn’t yet entertained the possibility that during this year’s El Clásico there was something that caused Dest, and I do mean Dest in particular, to enter a trance, flow, or mystical state. If you prefer, you can think of it as some kind of religious experience.
To finish connecting these dots first we need to think back to the above sections on Dest rotating defensively between Vinícius, Benzema, and Mendy. They move around him again and again: Vinícius, Benzema, and Mendy, and on and on. It looked, from our perspective, like this:
To finish connecting these dots first we need to think back to the above sections on Dest rotating defensively between Vinícius, Benzema, and Mendy. They move around him again and again: Vinícius, Benzema, and Mendy, and on and on. It looked, from our perspective, like this:
Next we need to think back to early 2019 when Dest was interviewed on the Scuffed Soccer Podcast. He talked about his development, his experiences coming through the Ajax academy, and his time with the United States youth national team:
“People in my team, in the US U-20, they were talking about Diego Lainez. And I was like Who’s that I don’t know him. And then they said he’s the best player of Mexico, and they showed me his Instagram, and he had a lot of followers, so I was like Oh damn. But I was not scared. I was like Ok, let him come.”Now, suppose you are Dest, and try, if you can, to imagine the intensity of this experience:
