Leeds did it with Meslier, who was the same age. You could see the mistakes he had in him, but Bielsa trusted him right the way through it. Gunn never came back from that 9-0 and being dropped - I'm not sure which one of those finished him off (probably both) but that was a large investment out of the window. Saying that, I would be marginally in favour of playing McCarthy, and have been all season, but I can see where they are coming from - get through it, and he'll be a better GK for it.
This is exactly what loans are for though. It’s reckless management from the club imo. Unless he’s a world class talent like the kid at AC Milan was, there is no need for us to gamble on him. There were so many good, experienced keepers available this window as well. I think it’s a catastrophic failure and a big part of us being bottom.
He doesn’t get beaten at his near post on the regular. He can kick the ball towards a team mate. He is better than McCarthy and by no means the reason we’re bottom of the league. Even if we had the best goalkeeper in the world we would still be in the **** as we can’t score.
One of the elements that GK xG does not include -- and is explicit about not including -- is goalkeeper positioning. A shot from 12 yards that is close to the center of goal is one that, statistically, is going to be saved most of the time per the numbers. The issue in this respect is that such shots come in a couple flavours: the player taking the shot receives the ball while the keeper is more or less centered in the goal, and beats the keeper (bad goalkeeping), or the ball is squared across goal, where the keeper is positioned at the near post and needs to dive back merely to reach the center of goal. GK xG grades those out equally as chances to make a save, but they aren't remotely equal. I don't think Bazunu has been spectacular, but some of what is being laid at his feet ultimately owes to catastrophic defending, rather than keeper error. Take a recent example: Awoniyi's goal for Forest. Opta's xG rates that shot as producing a goal 67% of the time: it was a shot from 7 yards out, unmarked, from open play. Opta's post-shot expected goals rates it lower (ie., more likely to produce a save) however, because it was straight into the center of the goal: post-shot, it has a 54% chance of being a goal, so when Bazunu failed to save it, he's penalized .46 goals. But it was a ball squared across the front of the goal, at pace, where Bazunu was by necessity hugging the near post; his only chance was to cut out the cross, rather than the resultant shot, but Brennan Johnson kept it far enough away from him that he couldn't. He had absolutely no chance to make that save: he has to be in position to stop the shot from the angle if Johnson takes it, and he's wholly reliant on our defense being in position to cut out the square ball. Our defense...didn't do that. They let Awoniyi get to the front of the net uncontested and he had an empty net to aim at. That's not on Bazunu.
^^That sounds like a good argument for xG being absolute nonsense imo. That said I don't particularly rate Bazunu at this point in time, doesn't pass the eye test* for me. It's not his fault of course but I'm baffled to hear people declare he's definitely better than Alex at this time as in my view he's quite clearly not (though his ceiling is undoubtedly higher). Interested to hear further analysis on what attributes he has that makes him a better keeper. Is he a better shot stopper or better at commanding his box? Can't agree with either of those tbh and they're the 2 most important things for a keeper in my view. *blasphemy in 2023 I know.
It isn't nonsense, but like all things it needs to include context, especially if you're looking at small samples. It'll give you the broad strokes: is your team getting into dangerous positions? Is it getting the ball to the people in dangerous positions? And it has enough correlation to long-term scoring chance generation to be meaningful. As an example, xG says that we're pretty **** at creating chances. It also says that basically everyone other than JWP (mostly through his FKs) has been **** at converting the chances they create. It says that Adam Armstrong and Moi in particular take a lot of wasteful shots that you wouldn't expect to end up as goals often (and that their finishing is such that they waste even more of them than most). That seems like an eminently reasonable series of conclusions that comports with the eye test to me.
Problem with xG (and the overuse of stats in football in general) is the assumption that everything in the game is measurable which it quite clearly isn't. Me and you could both look at the same chance and assign different percentages of how likely it is to go in, because the entire sport is subjective as ****. Not arsed for a long debate over it btw, it wasn't the main point of my post
I don't think anyone is saying that everything is perfectly measurable; I certainly wouldn't. But the more data points you have, the less disagreement over any one data point matters. xG for a single game tells you a bit of a story, but it's operating off a small dataset and only useful in broad terms. xG for a single season tells you a bigger story, and xG for (as an example) a player's career to date tells you a story you can draw much more definitive conclusions from. Harry Kane has a really high xG/90, and has also massively outperformed his xG over the course of his career: just as you'd expect, he's good at getting into dangerous places, and really good at finishing his chances. The eye test and the stats agree. Gabriel Jesus has a really high xG/90, but has significantly underperformed his xG career: he's also very good at getting into dangerous places, but his finishing often lets him down. Consequently he'll run hot and cold, alternately looking like a world-beater and David McGoldrick. The eye test and the stats agree. Adam Armstrong has a high shots/90, but a bad xG/90 and an even worse xG: he doesn't get into dangerous places, wastes a lot of potential attacks by taking speculative shots, and fluffs the genuine chances he receives. He's just a bit **** at the whole scoring thing, as I think all of us (and our future robot overlords) can agree.
No one can back up the claim he is better, because he isn’t. Statistically the worst keeper in the top 5 leagues. Says it all.
Being linked to Bamba Dieng a bit in the last couple of days. Was meant to be going to Leeds in the summer but turned them down to go to Nice where he failed a medical so ended up staying at Marseille. He isn’t their main striker and has only played something like 6 times this season, so seems a bit of an odd link if there wasn’t some truth in it
Maybe they'll nick Semenyo off us now (assuming we're in for him, we've held talks with the player's reps apparently).
