Author: Benjamin Pugsley

By Ben Pugsley

1) Monday Night Football

Remember a time when Monday Night Football was an afterthought? It is very far from an afterthought now. In fact, MNF is easily Sky's best football feature of the week. Ed Chamberlain anchors the program nicely, never overbearing or too talkative. The tech set-up is marvelous, but let's be honest - this is the Gary Neville show.

Neville is punchy in his analysis, short and concise in his explanations of the intricacies of the game of football. But it wasn't always this way. I distinctly recall Neville's debut on MNF, it was Man City v Swansea, and Neville looked nervous and uneasy, unsure of himself.

Neville has come a long way since then, and this gives us hope that Carragher can follow a similar path - initial nervousness and a steep learning curve, before finally settling in and becoming a pundit who can teach us as much about the game as Neville already has.

This is excellent.

2) Arsenal Win!

Panic over!

After an Arsenal loss in week 1 panic was rife. Wenger was lambasted for his failure to spend, the team wasn't good enough. Now, these arguments may have merit when looking at the bigger picture, but surely we can't draw such conclusions after a single game. Or even two games.

Arsenal may need to strengthen in order to compete for a place in the top 4 and the club does have issues when playing against quality opposition.

What Wenger excels at is setting up his teams to crush sub-par opposition.

Arsenal's Fixture List With Opponents Shots on Target Ratio At The Time Of Fixture.

In 2012/13 Arsenal were a fine team when playing against opposition with a SoTR of less than 0.50. But problems arose when Arsenal played teams with a SoTR >0.50, a W 1 D 7 L 5 is testament to that.

In short, Arsenal's opening day loss to Villa may have simply been 'one of those results', Arsenal's win against Fulham was a return to normality and was completely expected. We shouldn't have read too much into the opening day loss and we shouldn't read too much into Arsenal's away win against what will likely be a sub-par shots team.

The above graph poses a question, though: Is Arsenal's failure to hold their own against >par SoTR teams a fault with Wenger's tactics, or do Arsenal simply not have enough quality players?

3) Final Third Passing Ratio

As usual, I am counting a huge amount of statistics for the Premier League in 2013/14. One of the new categories this year is Final Third Passes. Now if you count final third passes for and against we can calculate a plus/minus number. We can also calculate a teams ratio of final third passe. If you set your database up correctly you can also calculate home and away and moving averages for final third passes.

Here's what I have so far:

Final Third Passes

In the coming weeks I will explain in a little more detail just how we can use final third passes to evaluate a team strength.

4) Man City And Corners

Joe Hart and his Manchester City team-mates are taking a little heat right now for the 3-2 loss at Cardiff. That loss featured two Cardiff goals from just three corners. You probably don't need me to tell you how rare conceding two goals from corners is in a single game. It's rare. By my count, Man United (away at Reading) and Man City (vs Ajax) are just two of the teams who managed the infamous feat last year.

Both of Cardiff's corner goals were created by excellent deliveries into the box, with Hart looking to be particularly culpable for Cardiff's goal that gave the Bluebirds the lead. I don't think anyone should over-react to the two goals that were conceded. Zabaletta switched off for Cardiff's first corner goal and Lescott, surprisingly, was beaten to the ball on the second corner goal. Neither of those lapses by Zabaletta or Lescott are common occurences.

Shit happens, conceding two set piece goals in a single game likely won't happen again all season. More on City defending those corneres can be found here (link).

5) Newcastle Zzzzz

There are a lot of interesting things going on at Newcastle, Kinnear, lack of transfer spend, Pardew's job security. Unfortunately none of these things are taking place on the pitch, where Newcastle are doing their best 'early season Sunderland 12/13 impression'.

Newcastle have had just one shot on target in ~190 minutes of football this season. I can forgive them for the away trip to Man City, red card and hammerings et cetera, but West Ham were an easy game for a home team in 12/13 and I suspect they may well be an easy game once again in 2013/14.

Newcastle are at home to Fulham next Saturday. If Newcastle don't win, or at least put on an improved offensive display against another poor travelling team, then the polite early season atmosphere may become more toxic than darkly humorous.

6) One Nil To The Arsenal Spurs & Liverpool

Spurs and Liverpool both have six points on the board from their two games played, and although both teams may have been far from impressive in racking up their points totals, a win is a win. It is also worth noting that the early part of any season is a minefield. We have promoted teams, new managers and new players to bed in to new systems.

The newness can make early season form difficult to predict and considering Tottenham have the Bale distraction and about 39 new players to bed in, their results are just fine. Liverpool, well, they have new signings to integrate and are currently playing without their best player who, despite some of the protestations of the analytics community, will improve this team upon his return.

A win is a win at this early stage, worry about the underlying performance indicators after 7 or 8 games or so.

7) Gareth Bale

The Welsh Ronaldo. The shots volume monster. The one man team. I have written more words about Gareth Bale in 10 Points than any other player. I have been a huge admirer of Bale since I first created this weekend round-up - I implored City to buy him as early as last January - and these may be some of the last words I write about the player for the transfer deadline is approaching fast.

You know, Bale may shoot too much, he may be a greedy bastard, some of his goals scored may regress from last seasons high, but I still think this is a beauty of a player. He is 24, has all the physical skills that are so pleasing on the eye and Tottenham, although they have bought well, may have a hard time replacing his performance.

This (link) by the super smart @halfagain touches on the difficultly of replacing a outstanding player:

However, there’s another measure of value in football, one that’s ultimately more important: value per minute of available playing time. While their respective contracts and transfer purchase prices (Jovetic + Negredo < Cavani in total), will likely prove better value per dollar, and perhaps higher in absolute production, it requires minutes from two putative starter-ish players, rather than the minutes from one position.

If we replace Cavani with Bale and Jovetic & Negredo with Lamela and Soldado then the above quote clearly highlights the difficulty in replacing a superstars performance per minutes played. It may take two players to replace Bale's performance and that likely means an minutes played efficiency loss for Tottenham.

I'm gonna miss Bale, 40 yard shots and all. He is a rare, exciting talent who is technically out of this world and the Premier League will be a poorer without him. Or......he may well stay at Spurs for one more season. My Lord.

8) Shots On Target % Rating

Bear with me on this one. Over the last year or so I have ran Shooting Accuracy% (SoT%) for and against, this is simply shots on target/total shots. Shooting Accuracy% (SoT%) measures how efficient a team is ast getting it's shots on net and preventing the opposition from doing likewise.

This is where Shots On Target % Rating comes in. To calculate the rating we take each teams SoT% for and add it to that teams SoT% prevention number (if the opposition has 10 shots and 3 of them are on target the prevention% is 70%).

Add the SoT% to the SoT Prevention% and we end up with a table like the one below.

Week 2

Yes, Tottenham's number is correct. League average rating is 100, and although we are only two weeks into the season some teams have a nice rating number.

This may well be something I come back to once a few (8) more game weeks have elapsed. I have these numbers by Game State too, which may well tell us some cool things about score effects and defensive shells. Again, we'd need more data first.

Any thoughts?

9) Kolo Toure

I don't really know what is going on here, but I liked it. Via @Green_Scouser Obviously I was struggling to fill point #9!

10) Goal Of The Week

An honourable mention to Danny Sturridge but Dzeko takes it. A slight deflection?

The Summer of 2013 in football analytics was dominated by strikers shots performance and their conversion%'s.  Colin Trainor and Constantinos Chappas created their Expected goals metric (link), the 11tegen11 was the first to look at expected goals and, more recently,  Devin Pleuler has begun tweeting out information on expected chance quality.

Added to those smart pieces of work was information on shot quality and shot location (Colin Trainor) and all in all it was a tremendous leap forward in the investigation of quantifying striker performance. The one question I have with some of this work is repeatability or test-retest reliability over a number of seasons.

Now, I know it's not an entirely fair question as a lot of the data that these new metrics are built with is, well, relatively new. We don't have 4 years of shot location data or shot placement data. Still, I wanted to know something about the ability of a striker to repeat a previous seasons performance. I have a little historical data on strikers so I thought I would take a look at which aspects of a strikers performance are repeatable and which are not.

These are the metrics I will be focusing on, all penalty goals and shots are removed:

• Scoring% (goals/SoT)
• Shooting Accuracy% (SoT/Total Shots)
• Goals Per 90
• Assists Per 90
• Shots Per 90
• Shots On Target Per 90

I searched through my database for strikers who played in the Premier League in consecutive seasons (year 1 to year 2) and found 174 data points, some of the outlying data points will be removed on certain charts. What we are looking for is a relationship between a strikers performance by a given metric between yr 1 and yr 2 (2011/12 to 2012/13 for example).

In short, are players who post, say, a high scoring% in year 1 likely to repeat that performance in year 2. There are some interesting results. I'll start with the metrics that have the strongest year to year correlation.

Shots Per 90. R2=0.435

Shots per 90 has an R2 of 0.435 and although the correlation isn't all that impressive, it's the strongest correlation between year 1 and year 2 of any of our metrics listed in the introduction. If you are going to pick out any aspect of a strikers performance that may be repeatable year-on-year then shots per 90 should be the metric you use.

A striker is more likely to reproduce his shot volume year on year than any other countable aspect of his performance.

Shot On Target Per 90. R2=0.234

Shots on target per 90 is is the second most repeatable aspect of a strikers performance, although the correlation between year 1 and year 2 has dropped sharply. SoT per 90 has a correlation of 0.242, and although that number is far from impressive, it's out of this world compared to some of the correlations you will see shortly.

I've long said that shots and shots on target are the two metrics I would prefer to use in order to predict a strikers future performance. I wouldn't want to use goals scored or scoring% for we know these regress heavily. The correlations above, and below, bear this out.

Goals Per 90. R2=0.048

Outliers have been stripped out.

This chart is simply all over the place, the year-to-year correlation is virtual non-existent. There are obviously outliers here, players who can reproduce goals per 90 year-on-year but those players are mighty rare, even in the Premier League.

Assists Per 90. R2=0.033

Again, I removed the outliers who didn't record an assists in yr 1 or yr 2.

This is a pretty similar chart to the Goals per 90 one featured above. It's a mess, there's little repeatability in comparison to shots or shots on target.

Shooting Accuracy%. R2=0.0165

This is shooting accuracy%/SoT%. It's another scattered set of data of points with virtually zero repeatability. This is the one metric that stunned me a little for I was always under the impression that a striker had some control, some form of skill in getting a certain percentage of his total shots on target. Obviously not.

Scoring%. R2=0.0073

Finally, we get to scoring% which is goals/shots on target.

I removed the extreme scoring% outliers by controlling for a minimum number of shots. Scoring% is not to be confused with Shooting%/Conversion% which uses Total SHots and not Shots on Target.

There is virtually zero relationship between a striker managing to convert his shots on target into goals in year 1 to year 2. We have sent out warnings before about backing strikers who rode high scoring%'s to their impressive goal tally.

A quick recap: don't bet on a striker who had a high scoring% in year 1 to repeat that  percentage in year 2. This likely means a drop in goals scored, unless the players shots on target per 90 can be boosted. Scoring% is random, it's true in football and it's true in hockey.

Conclusion

There isn't one metric that we use to evaluate strikers that has a particularly high level of repeatability from one year to the next. But if we are to choose any of the metrics to try and predict future performance then shots per90 and shots on target per 90 are clearly the two we should use. The percentage metrics - shooting accuracy% and scoring% - are, to borrow a turn of phrase from MC79, a crapshoot.

We know these metrics are predominantly luck driven, we know they regress heavily and it would be folly to predict the future performance of a striker using either of those metrics. Would controlling for the location of shots, say in box shots only, strengthen the correlation between yr 1 and yr 2 scoring%?

I would have thought so, but @footballfactman ran the numbers and central in-box shooting% (goals/total shots) had an r2 of just 0.02.  One last time, if we are looking for a repeatable aspect of striker performance, then all roads point us in the direction of a players shots and shots on target, not his goals per90 or shooting accuracy% or even a players scoring%.

1) Arsenal

Arsenal fans, I know the anger vented on Saturday has been building for a loooooong time and I know it seems dark and depressing right now but don't panic. Yes, you guys may have had a very quiet summer; yes, it's disappointing no money has spent; everyone seems to be injured and now we have Lady Nina Bracewell-Smith expressing regret about selling her shares to Kroenke. Oh, and there is a tricky CL qualifier away at Fenerbache and everyone seems to be injured.

But don't panic, seasons are long, one bad result in the first game of the season shouldn't be the blow that brings down the Wenger empire. It'll get better, players will be brought in, injuries will heal and Arsenal will likely be in the CL groups. Learn lessons from this summers inertia and don't panic!

2) Aston Villa's Attack

It's only one game, it's only one game, it's only one game..........but, I quite liked the shape of Villa's attacking setup on Saturday. Benteke offers the muscularity through the middle, Weimann is the intelligent schemer who buzzes in the inside right channel and Agbonlahor offers blistering pace. Those three players looked plenty capable of causing opposition defenses problems with their counter attacking play.

This is a young Villa team who will suffer through some defensive issues throughout the season. It's also a Villa team who will be fun to watch if only due to that attacking trident.

3) Muscle Memory

It's only one game, but Man United looked characteristically efficient during their 1-4 away win in Swansea. Infact, it looked like Ferguson was still in charge of Man United and that should be placed into the credit column for Moyes. We should also credit the players for that performance for it seemed like the United players were acting on some kind of muscle memory in terms of calmness, discipline and patience.

This is a very experienced group of United players who also have many seasons worth of experience playing together in a tactical scheme that was created by one of the best tacticians we have known. These United players will not have forgotten Ferguson's teachings, they will not have forgotten the amazing tactical magic that he instilled in this group.

Moyes may not change a whole lot at United, and on Sunday it appeared that this United team was playing purely from memory, and those memories were created by that weird voodoo magician they called Fergie.

4) Sunderland

I love writing about Sunderland. It all stems for from focusing on Sunderland's early struggles by the underlying numbers in 2012/13. A short recap: Sunderland were terrible all season, but they were unusually, frighteninglyterrible in the first dozen games or so. Now Sunderland have Di Canio at the helm they are likely to be just as interesting a team to write about in 2013/14 as they were in 2012/13, but likely for different reasons.

Sunderland should be slightly better this year with the investments they have made, but I was still mightily intrigued to see how Sunderland started the season. They lost, going down 0-1 at home to Fulham. The result was disappointing but that wasn't what shocked me. The fact that Sunderland out-shot an opponent was shocking.Sunderland out-shot Fulham by a total of 21 to 5 and 3 to 1 in shots on target.

Were score effects an issue? Sunderland out-shot Fulham 12-4 at Tied game state. Has Paolo Di Canio turned this Sunderland team into one who is capable of out-shooting an opponent? It's only one game

5) Mourinho V2.0

A grown man. Half and half scarf.

I was as impressed as it's possible to be with Chelsea's home victory against a newly promoted side. Yes, Hull were there for the taking but Chelsea played some very nice stuff in the first 30 minutes. Quick, pressure passing and smart movement form Chelsea's attacking wizards. And Mourinho looked relaxed!

Once into the second half Chelsea sat back as is their wont. Now, I saw quite a few tweets which stated that Chelsea were outplayed in the second half by Hull. I counter that opinion by merely saying that this was Chelsea 'shelling' and this means Chelsea purposefully sat back, tightened up their defensive shape and focused less on expending any tactical currency on searching for a third goal.

This 'shelling' is a tactic that every team employ. It was a tactic that Chelsea particularly struggled with last term. Yesterday against Hull, Chelsea went into the 'shell', maybe it was a deliberate practice as Ted suggested, maybe it was default Mourinho.

Either way, when 'shelling' it appears as if the team is being outplayed, you tend to get out-shot by the opposition, but those shots will be from poorer positions on the pitch, those shots will be blocked at a higher rate and this means those shots are unlikely to result in goals against.

It's only one game, but I'd lean towards the 2nd half being a competitive practice session and the 1st half being more indicative of Mourinho v2.0 - quick passing, all movement and attacking intent.

6) New Strikers

Hey, it wasn't a bad weekend for the new striker recruits was it? Bony scored, Wolfie scored, Soldado scored. If a team spends a lot of money at the sharp end of the field it's always nice for the club to get an early return and for the player to get off the mark early. No striker wants to do a Forlan.

Anyone want to create an over/under line on when Neymar's first league goal will arrive?

7) Best PL Debuts From A Striker

Now, I haven't researched this too much but of the top of my head I remember hat-tricks from Ravanelli and Shearer(x2). Klinsmann had a pretty good debut in his first Spurs spell and that debut game is where the 'dive' celebration was born. A personal favourite was watching the debut of George Weah for Man City, it was farcical that a player of such stature and skill was debuting for a newly promoted side under the management of Joe Royle. $$$!

But one particluar debut game sticks in my head and that performance came from a complete unknown. He was leggy, highly skilled and Man United just couldn't live with him that day.

Wanchope was a bolt from the blue, a shock of lightning. Any readers have any suggestions of great PL debuts?

8) Man City v Newcastle

Whilst we are on the topic of good debuts from strikers, I wonder what price one could get for Jovetic or Negredo scoring at home to Newcastle? That's not the ony question that arises from the Monday night fixture: How will City's new signings appear at first blush? Just how dominant will a Fernandinho/Yaya pairing be? Can Pellegrini get off to a winning start and ape the satisfying opening day wins of Moyes and Mourinho?

And what of Newcastle and Pardew? Will they be better and healthier this year? Will we find out exactly who the hell they are?

9) Goal Of The Week

The lack of usable highlight video is already bothering me and we are just 2 days into the new season. Why is there not a Premier league youtube channel with highlights/goals videos from each game every week?

Robin van Persie - the 2nd goal.......wooof!

10) Don't Panic Or Get Too Excited

If your team had a good opening day result - United, Southampton & Chelsea - it may be best to not get to excited or draw any conclusions that are too concerete about the quality of your team. If you are an Arsenal fan, or a fan of one of the promoted clubs, then don't be too downhearted. You know, shit happens in a one off game, shit happens at the start of the season.

We are many, many weeks and games away from being able to make any serious predictions about how the season may shape up.

Corners: Some people love 'em, some people hate 'em and Avon Barksdale wants them back already!

A corner is a set piece play that usually sees ~16 of the 22 players on the field of play have the chance to influence the game during the 3 0r 4 seconds from the point the corner is taken. The attacking team can score a vital goal, the defending team can safely clear their zone and launch a potentially devastating counter attack.

The delivery of a corner is an interesting thing in itself: Does a team punt the ball into a zone and hope luck is on their side and the corner kick falls to an attacking player? Would that last sentence be disrespectful to the complex attacking schemes that certain clubs employ at corners? Maybe the success of a corner kick for the attacking team isn't so much about luck but more about the skill of the delivery which can be almost viewed as a hard accurate pass?

What about the positions of the players and the runs they make? What about the type of corners - short, long, in-swing - and the the success rate of each type?

I think you can see where I am going here.

Corners are complex, they can also be brutally simple in their effectiveness. There are so many variables to consider on every single corner kick that it becomes virtually impossible to explain why some teams are better at them than others. Some of a teams ability is luck, some of it is skill and some of it is unexplained. And let's leave it at that for now.

What I want to write about today is each teams corner count and the number of goals for and against from corners in the Premier League in 2012/13.

Corner Count

Liverpool are the corners champ with 285 and 174 against - good for 1st and 2nd place in the league last year. The top 7 in corners are the teams we would expect to be there. Some teams - United and Chelsea - look to be a little shy of the totals we may expected them to have posted, but score effects probably accounts for some of the difference between expected and actual.

Man United had the 5th fewest total number of corners. Curious.

Goals For And Against

Man United have have had the 5th lowest total of corners in 2012/13 but they had by far the highest total goals from corners; 15 for and 6 against. Let us focus on United's 15 goals for from corners. That is 17.4% of Man United's total goal output and whatever your opinion on corners, that percentage of goals from corners was an invaluable contribution to the title win.

If you are looking for a skill driver behind man United's 15 goals then look no further than RvP's delivery, and some of Fergie's voodoo magic.

Working our way down the table: Chelsea are a fine corner team at both ends of the pitch;Wigan scored a lot; Liverpool were average and Newcastle were so bad. One goal scored from two hundred and three corners! If we guessed at Man United's scoring record potentially being driven by skill, then what can we make of Newcastle's scoring record? Appalling skill level or the darkest dirtiest run of bad luck?

Raw Conversion % And Conceded %

This chart is the basic conversion and conceded percentages for each teams. The calc is goal/corners.

We can see a concentration of teams around the horizontal and vertical mean lines and usually this is where teams will reside in terms of conversion and conceded %, but naturally there are outlier teams. Man United are so far out on their own that they were either the beneficiaries of some tremendous luck or they are are in possession of a skill and tactical setup that is unique in the Premier League. Answers in the comments please.

If Man United were the good then Newcastle, Swansea, Arsenal and Tottenham were the bad conversion teams of 2012/13. I don't know why certain teams are able to score and convert their corners into goals at a high rate and other teams struggle mightily with what seems so simple to other teams.

A few smart fellows had some ideas on this topic:

Ted says:

@benjaminpugsley skill, but causality is complex. Delivery the most important element, then systemic attack of weak points — Ted Knutson (@mixedknuts) August 4, 2013

Simon Gleave responded with this:

@mixedknuts @benjaminpugsley I disagree Ted. Having studied this a little, I think that luck easily outweighs skill. — Simon Gleave (@SimonGleave) August 4, 2013

Oli Juliusson chipped in with this, which focuses on the type of delivery:

@benjaminpugsley @mixedknuts that short corners are better than people thing but inswinging seem to work the best. — Oli Juliusson (@OliJuliusson) August 4, 2013

 

@benjaminpugsley @mixedknuts and when short corners do result in a shot, they lead to goals more often than the others. — Oli Juliusson (@OliJuliusson) August 4, 2013

Some interesting thoughts from some smart people. This article wasn't specifically written with the idea of discussing luck and skill in the scoring of goals from corners, it was written in order to display some basic information which isn't publicly available. We have corners for and against and corner goals for and against in the tables above, please do go and sort them and find out how good your team were from corners last term.

In Part II: Shots for and against from corners, scoring% and prevention% and Corner PDO.