Ben Mayhew has produced his first Scatters of the season (https://experimental361.com/category/divisions/championship/). This is the shots per goal, for and against, corrected for quality of shot (xG and xGa):
Something weird with Preston. Expected goals allowed 1.2 expected goals scored 1.2. In both cases their figure is 0.125
The scale on the Y-axis starts at 0.9, and the X-axis at 0.8. Something to do with optimising the image size to fit on his web pages?
Interesting that the teams clustered bottom right are currently 1st, 2nd, 16th and 17th in the league. I wonder what's happening at Boro and WBA to account for their lowly league position. Poor finishing? Bad luck?
West Brom have drawn 6 of their 8 games (1 win, 1 loss). I listened to their recent game against Burnley, which finished 1:1. The commentator's verdict was "How did West Brom not win that -- again?"; the Burnley keeper Muric was Whoscored's MofM. As for 'Boro, their 8 fixtures have included games against West Brom, Sheffield, Reading, Watford and Sunderland; all have been tight and the three losses all by a single goal. I think we'll see both in the top six soon.
It's hard to look beyond Sheff U, Norwich, Burnley, Watford, West Brom and Middlesbrough as the top six, with a possible downgrading of Boro for QPR or another midtable-ish team. The key will be who makes the top two.
Yes, 'key' was rather sloppy language on my part, Robbie, but I think you know what I meant. The most important thing. Since the other four will have to fight it out in the lottery that is the playoffs and only one of them can go up.
Actually I wasn't sure Gozo. If the most important thing is promotion, winning the play-offs is just as "key" as gaining automatic. I agree that top two might be key to keeping blood pressure down though!
With games against current form team Bristol City and then West Brom coming up, here's a question: We've been promoted four times already since 2010. In those 4 seasons, what is the average number of points dropped against the other six teams making up the rest of the top 7 at the end of the season?
Why top eight? Back of a *** paper calculation, I think against the other top six teams we averaged 1.4 ppg. (Ie dropped 1.6 ppg). Some big discrepancies though - with Farke in 20/21 promotion, despite our big points total, we averaged just 1.1ppg against the rest of the top six. Whereas under Neil where we finished fifth we averaged 1.8ppg against the rest of the top six. (Farke’s first season and Lambert’s were roughly the same 1.3/1.4ppg). Doesn’t seem like you can read too much into it.
I looked at results against the six strongest teams in the league other than ourselves (as measured by final league position). The rounded average is 17 points dropped. With 36 points at stake from those 12 games, it is more or less a case of points shared. As you say, we did best in that respect under AN, and worst last time when we finished with our best ever Championship points total (97). The points dropped in those four seasons (chronological order) were 18, 14, 18, 19. [Edit] For the sake of completeness, under Worthy in 2003--2004, we hit that same average, 17 points dropped.
Got it. So basically inconclusive for us - we would need more data on all promoted sides as to whether how they did against the rest of the top six is correlated with success the next season. I suspect the answer is that it is not really correlated.
No match thread yet so here's the team news for tomorrow night: https://www.canaries.co.uk/content/team-news-no-new-injury-concerns
Sounds like Hayden and maybe Giannoulis back after the international break? No update on Idah, he had exploratory surgery and is expected to be out for a few weeks last we heard.
I seem to recall DS saying he was arranging a friendly during the international break to get Hayden some minutes. Hopefully Dimi may play then as well.
Shame. Russell Martin's Swansea held Sheffield United until the 4th minute of added time, losing 0-1. The good news is that Watford lost 2-0 at Blackburn and Burnley drew 1-1 at Preston.
