Feel Mir is better than we give him credit for but is not the answer we all crave. Recognising it costs silly money to find a bang average striker in UK he will have to come from abroad. Our history with foreign strikers is not good but is there a PVH out there going for reasonable amount.
Statistical analysis of the season to date
- Thread starter Calvin Plummer
- Start date
I see the striker I recommended in the summer - Jean-Pierre Nsame has 13 in 16 games in Switzerland so far this season.
A record like that might put him out of our reach now though.
Red Bread
Vital Reserves Team
Dead right but only when we were winning and top of the top league. ?
Red Bread
Vital Reserves Team
Like I say equal top on points ?
in_the_top_one
Vital Football Legend
Worse than that.
It was when Dirty Leeds were champions! (And it was about them.)
pebble
Vital 1st Team Regular
Stats are fine as far as they go - but my earlier post which CP didn't like was based on seeing something called the 'expected goals championship table'.
Not sure if it was in the links he gave, may have seen it on ltlf - but searching now, I can't find anyone with the gall to display it as a table.
Talksport has this:
17. Nottingham Forest – Real position = 2
Real points = 22 | Expected points = 11
So someone, no doubt on the basis of hours of research in their bedroom, reckons we should be 17th with 11 points. But we're 2nd with 22 points.
What got me was seeing an actual table based on this crap, with 'expected' won drawn and lost, and figures in brackets showing that we'd won rather more than predicted and lost several fewer - as if the nerd was right and reality was an unfortunate anomaly!
Brentford were somewhere like 3rd in this table, and no doubt Leeds were top.
By all means play with figures, knock yourself out...but to show a table based on what your stats say ought to be true, with the actual stuff in brackets, is possibly a signal for the men in white coats.
Not sure if it was in the links he gave, may have seen it on ltlf - but searching now, I can't find anyone with the gall to display it as a table.
Talksport has this:
17. Nottingham Forest – Real position = 2
Real points = 22 | Expected points = 11
So someone, no doubt on the basis of hours of research in their bedroom, reckons we should be 17th with 11 points. But we're 2nd with 22 points.
What got me was seeing an actual table based on this crap, with 'expected' won drawn and lost, and figures in brackets showing that we'd won rather more than predicted and lost several fewer - as if the nerd was right and reality was an unfortunate anomaly!
Brentford were somewhere like 3rd in this table, and no doubt Leeds were top.
By all means play with figures, knock yourself out...but to show a table based on what your stats say ought to be true, with the actual stuff in brackets, is possibly a signal for the men in white coats.
Calvin Plummer
Vital Football Legend
Sigh.
pebble
Vital 1st Team Regular
Any constructive comment?
Myopic or not, I say what I see.
You insult anyone who disagrees with you (or is it only me that gets it?), but we're all entitled to our opinions.
Have you anything to say in defence of a 'league' which puts us 17th on the basis of someone's stat overload, and appears to treat the real table as an annoying afterthought?
And while there are 12 teams within 6 points of top spot, we're joint top, second only on goal difference. Could be a lot worse.
We could actually be 17th and people would be screaming for Lamouchi's head.
Calvin Plummer
Vital Football Legend
I just don't have the inclination to teach someone who isn't willing or is incapable on how to use statistics. It's a little like a creationist mocking evolution and then demanding a lecture.
I'll give you a very brief answer, data is data. Assuming your collection method is accurate then you have completely unbiased information at your disposal, something that's not true when we watch, especially as fans.
To use data effectively you have to understand its limitations (of which there are many but you don't have the background to understand them), and it's strengths.
So to take your example above, the league table is largely irrelevant because it isn't matching up with reality. However that doesn't mean it's without value.
Expected Goals (xG) gives an indication of the situations we've created that typically lead to a goal. The stats suggest that compared to rivals we are creating less clear cut opportunities and besides you I think everyone has noticed that we aren't creating a vast amount of goal scoring chances. So a manager can look at that and think how can I adjust strategically (or use the transfer market) to increase the amount of times we get into excellent positions. Hence why he keeps adjusting the shape and formation in behind Grabban. SL clearly doesn't think it nonsense...
What it doesn't take into account (especially in the short term) are things like how clinical a side is - Grabban when presented with the same opportunities as say me will score more goals, even with the same expected goal outcome.
Similarly it can't take into account the strengths of individual defenders and keepers in one on one duels.
There's a reason why players like Kane or a top keeper allow a team to outperform their xG.
It's also worth noting there are a number of different formulas for xG and unless you provide the one TalkSport used along with their dataset for me to interrogate it's impossible to give a more specific answer.
One small aside have you ever gone to a match and thought "we were unlucky there" - if so that's your brain performing an xG calculation itself...
Woanz
Vital Football Legend
Mirz attempted scorpion kick does show he has some talent and flair.
Red Bread
Vital Reserves Team
Magnificent in its eccentric madness!
Apollyon
Vital Football Legend
No it doesn't. Absolutely nonsense.
The Poacher
Vital Squad Member
Not withstanding all of the above, the current league table doesn't lie, stats always will confuse folk and bring diverse opinions to those who follow them. Imo.
pebble
Vital 1st Team Regular
Sorry if I implied that you were the one spouting nonsense - I have no quarrel with people using stats to analyse and improve performance. It was the expected goals table that annoyed me, which may have been an attachment to a stats thread on ltlf.
Data is data, but we get information through our senses. All perception is ultimately subjective. One football match contains thousands of incidents which may be hard to categorise objectively - for a start, you might need replays from different angles to decide whether a particular tackle is
a foul (with maybe a card for the defender),
a fair tackle (play on), or
a dive (booking for the attacker).
And no two refs will ever agree on every incident, so a fair play league based on red and yellow cards issued will ultimately be subjective.
Same goes for expected goals. One man's 'routine block by a defender doing their job' is another man's 'certain goal denied by fluke intervention'. Chopping reality up to analyse it is fine in theory, but how you put it back together involves value-judgements.
And the thing with goals is that no-one can be sure how the game would have gone if (for instance) Brentford's deflected free kick just before half-time had gone in. On the evidence of the season so far, Forest would have equalised in the second half and maybe gone on to win, but that's an overall observation which doesn't depend on micro-analysis.
So to record an 'expected win' for either side based on an interpretation of the number of chances created is a step too far. To build a league table from 'expected' results is two steps too far.
My opinions are no doubt influenced by working for HMRC as a customer adviser, which mainly meant dealing with a constant stream of cases or pieces of post. At some point the organisation adopted Lean, a system developed by Toyota and perhaps useful on a car production line, but less applicable to the work we did. Stats became more important, but the same people as before would cherry-pick easy cases to boost their stats.
Overnight, the office was flooded with Japanese terms and gimmicky jargon. What irked many of us was the way Lean glorified its own diagrams and buzzwords as if these were the magic keys to perfection. The map is not the territory.
So I'd dispute that my response to an incident is my 'brain performing an xG calculation', because that's whoever invented the term xG trying to persuade us that the world can only be seen in their terms.
Calvin Plummer
Vital Football Legend
There's a lot that's inaccurate here, and a lot that's obvious to anyone who uses xG. You're drawing far too much inference from it instead of seeing it as just another tool for measurement. You do at least recognise personal bias which is something...
Of course you're doing an xG calculation when we talk about being lucky or unlucky in a match. Apart from you're basing it on your own bias as a supporter and beliefs of what constitutes a close miss etg "We hit the woodwork three times so were unlucky" is an internal xG calculation.
The difference is that xG is taken from tens of thousands of matches and data points, rather than your (all fans and staff) own small biased data pool.
Again it has lots of limitations, but it's a valuable tool but it is just a tool (and one of many), it's how you use it that counts.
pebble
Vital 1st Team Regular
Exactly.
If someone's using all those data points to spot problems and solve them, improving a team's performance, fine.
Creating pretend league tables based on xG stats is misusing the tool, in that case!
And I still suggest that interpreting the data is subjective, no matter how many data points you have. Raw data might tell you a lot about quantity without judging quality.
So 'Ameobi turned well eight yards out but shot tamely straight at the keeper' contains a value-judgement - the shot could have been harder and/or better-placed. I'd imagine the chance would rate highly as an 'expected goal', but the stats alone wouldn't tell you whether it was a brilliant save or a poor shot.
And would they tell you how the chance was created? If Ameobi's turn was a piece of rare skill that would outwit most defenders, there would be little point in the Brentford coaching staff using xG to try and prevent such chances.
So it's not as simple as 'objective stats good, subjective bias bad'. You can't possibly rank goalscoring chances purely by distance from goal, number of defenders back, etc - any realistic approach includes judging how well the players involved did their jobs at the crucial moment.
On that basis, I'd challenge the view that we're not creating enough. Yes, we could be more fluent and create more shots on goal from open play. We don't knock the ball around as a team in quite the way Leeds, West Brom, Fulham or indeed Brentford do. Give it time, it should come as the players get more used to each other's game.
But some of the long passes against Brentford were superb. Watson pinged a couple out to the wings, Samba found Ribeiro well...
...and Carvalho and Chema both came close to sending Grabban clean through with exquisite passes curled over the top of defenders. On another day (the difference may be impossible to capture with stats!) he gets free and scores one of those, Ameobi scores one of his two chances, Silva scores with either the free kick or the shot.
Maybe I'll have to grudgingly dive into the world of xG and see how it analysed Forest v Brentford. If it tells me Brentford should have won, I rest my case.
