xG

dinosaur

 

No.

With all due respect Loyal, I think you’ve completely missed the point of the thread, which was to show in terms of chance creation, we are up there.

It wasn’t to disprove the observation you seemingly have, I have, and many other fans have……that our strikers are dire.

It was to show in relative terms to others in League 2, we are not a disaster of a team.

we just need that bit more attacking quality.

 

It doesnt tell you anything different for our team, no, you are right there, but it just puts numbers on it I suppose so you can measure your teams performance against others in the league. That is hard to do otherwise if you support one team and dont watch other sides regularly beyond them playing your own team. Its difficult to form visual opinions on other teams but easy to find xG and similar that underpins their performance to work out if the real life league table is fair.

 

The truth of the matter is you need a bit of luck with recruitment or rely on some inspired scouting. Look back at the strikers in L2 that have scored goals…..they weren’t all big money signings were there.

Paul Mullin went to Cambridge on a free, making permanent a loan spell from Tranmere after being pushed out from Vaughan going there. You wouldnt have expected him to win the golden boot last year.

look back to our own strikers….. Wells wasn’t wanted at Carlisle. Arrived on a free and was a raw kid but no record.

That Max Watters least year came from nowhere before scoring at Crawley and signing for Cardiff for decent money. Tom Pope came from nowhere too.

It’s not easy finding a goalscorer and its even tougher doing it at a L2 club with a L2 budget.

That’s why players like Kurtis Guthrie and Theo Robinson are professionals and Barry Conlon always bagged himself a new contract, along with his next pint.

 

It doesn’t help us put the ball in the net but what it highlights to me is a few things;

1) we are creating goalscoring chances which are not being converted. Compare that to last season when we just didnt create chances back end of the season. Yes, you could see this already without xG, but by putting numbers on it you can compare our attacking effectiveness year to year

2) having a value for xG lets us compare with the actual league table to get a handle on ‘luck’. Most fans think their team has been unlucky, naturally, and yet they can selectively forget chances the opposition has missed. xG tells you whether a run of clean sheets is unsustainable…..watch out for Tranmere in the weeks ahead……their numbers suggest theyve been very lucky not to concede more.

3) we can compare our attacking output vs the rest of the division. Yes, you can look at GF in the actual league table for this, but a team might just have had a lucky hot run and their xG would suggest they cannot sustain it. That was why City’s form dropping away last season was predicable….we weren’t creating enough chances to dominate and deservedly see teams off. We were lucky in that honeymoon caretaker period and although the boys deserved their extensions, Sparks was right to fire them long term when the results levelled out. If you looked at the results and usual league table you wouldn’t have seen that coming, but xG guys did.

its just a strong trend, however much as we debate it, that a teams actual performance, in most cases, mirrors the underlying xG, which is why million pound decisions are made on those numbers.

In the PL especially, the teams with the best xG numbers are the best teams. There’s usually an exception but its no surprise to see Brighton, for example, doing much better this season after some freak luck not scoring as many as they should last year.

Teams who are ruthlessly clinical and create little but score what chances they do create are the dodgy ones. If their strikers hit a bad patch or are sold their results can nosedive.

 

The stats were showing we were scoring more goals than we would have expected in certain games - sometimes from scraps of chances or worldies like Novaks overhead kick - and often not conceding as many as we would have expected, perhaps due to wasteful finishing from our rivals (I don’t think it was due to inspired goalkeeping!).

in the end we got found out and results reverted to what the stats suggested as we’d been a bit fortunate during our hot run.