Lee Cattermole Makes Transition from Red-Card Regular to Mr. Reliability

Football is not always about beauty. It’s not just about attacking, brilliant dribbling or gorgeous sweeping moves. It’s also about defending, about getting the balance right, about winning the ball back, about the unglamorous but necessary jobs.

This is often a problem for national managers. The players who are hyped are not the grafters. They are the ball players, the forward-surgers, the technical virtuosos, the goalscorers.

We have to pick Lampard! We have to pick Gerrard! We have to pick Scholes! We have to pick Beckham! We have tactical incoherence.

A national manager may find himself with four excellent attacking midfielders; it’s the nature of the job. It’s not like club management where he can trade one of them for a holding player. He has to take tough decisions and leave one of them out.

Roy Hodgson, it seems, hopes he can convert Jack Wilshere into a holding player who, with the energy of Jordan Henderson and Fabian Delph or James Milner alongside him, can provide enough of a defensive shield.

Perhaps he’s right, but it seems strange he hasn’t at least called into his squad a 26-year-old holding player who has flourished over the past year.

When Lee Cattermole was named North-East Sports' Writers Player of the Year for 2014, there was widespread scepticism from outside the region.

Scott Heppell/Associated Press

Saturday’s performance against Chelsea, though, will perhaps convince some of those who have not seen him go from strength to strength under Gus Poyet.

He is a player of great physical courage, as he showed with three superb first-half blocks, but he has also become a player of great discipline and tactical intelligence.

With his shorts hitched high, tirelessly patrolling that area in front of the back four, Cattermole was a key figure in Sunderland’s progress to the Capital One Cup final and their late rally to Premier League survival last season.

Part of Cattermole’s problem is that his reputation goes before him. He has become the stereotype of the thuggish English midfielder, the hard man who has outgrown his era.

For a time, that reputation was deserved. He had, after all, been sent off five times in the Premier League by the age of 22.

In the last four years, though, he has been sent off only once—and even that was a highly debatable decision for a slightly misjudged tackle on Ahmed Elmohamady.

Matthew Lewis/Getty Images

It is true that he’s been booked six times already this season, so perhaps there has been some backsliding, but up to a point cautions are inevitable for a holding midfielder who makes tackles.

Perhaps the change in Cattermole’s approach is a result of him maturing, but he also seemed to change when playing alongside the Albania midfielder Lorik Cana in 2009-10.

Cana was an elegant hard man, somebody whose brooding good looks and charismatic demeanour seemed to earn him a dispensation denied Cattermole.

That season, Cana did his share of the dirty work, leaving Cattermole to perform a more distributory role. It turned out he was good at it.

He was never going to play the languorous long passes Cana did, but he could bullet the ball to team-mates, initiating rapid breaks.

Mike Hewitt/Getty Images

After Cana left in the summer of 2010, Cattermole seemed to feel the burden of being the destroyer and was sent off in the opening three games of the following season. Since then, though, he has cleaned up.

According to figures from WhoScored.com, Cattermole averages 3.1 tackles and 2.6 interceptions per game; he wins the ball more than all but three other Premier League midfielders. His pass success rate, meanwhile is 81.3 percent, a highly respectable figure for somebody in his position.

It’s hard to see what more Cattermole has to do: He wins the ball and distributes it simply. He has ceased to be a red card waiting to happen.

Nobody is pretending he is a holding midfielder of the class of Javier Mascherano, Claude Makelele or Didier Deschamps, but then neither was Nobby Stiles.

Sometimes there’s a need to look beyond glamour to the reliable performers who can get the job done.