He's back!

Like many football fans, I've been feeling rather bereft over the last few weeks - since the unhappy news broke that Adam Clery was quitting the FourFourTwo Youtube channel that he'd made essential viewing over the last 18 months.

Now it's emerged that, in partnership with The Independent newspaper, he's launching his own Youtube venture, The Adam Clery Football Channel (ACFC), where we'll be getting more of the chirpy, irreverent tactical analysis videos we've come to love. (It looks like he might still be working with FourFourTwo occasionally as well - but on more 'magazine'-type pieces, mini-documentaries rather than game analysis.)

I'm pleased to see that his first posting on the new channel concurs with my own positive impressions of Thomas Tuchel's debut in charge of England....

For those who don't know.... Adam is, as we say in Britain, a top bloke: unpretentious, down-to-earth, a regular guy - but also very shrewd about his football. He's become the 'gateway drug' for tactical analysis videos. There are other guys out there who will go into more detail about particular patterns of play, or how a team seeks to morph its formation between different phases of possession and so on; but if you just want to understand why Team X is doing so well recently, or how Team W has fallen away, or why the weekend's Y-Z derby game ended as it did... Adam's your man. He's brisk, breezy, accessible - with just the right amount of silly, self-deprecating humour to help hold your attention across a discussion that will often stretch to 12 or 14 minutes or so. His videos - sometimes on teams, sometimes on individual players, but mostly breaking down particular big game outcomes - are always both entertaining and enlightening, and I cannot recommend them highly enough. Do go and check them out.

The engagingly daft little 'teaser' vid for the new channel that he posted a few days ago is a fine example of the man's unique style.