Love them or hate them, they’re here to stay, not just in football but our own working life, where we are set targets and judged at our appraisals.
I bet you used to point to your goals scored tally when you were playing, if things were going well.
On their own they can be distorting but it’s not that long ago that we were discussing, during a game, just how bad the quality of the crossing was.
Given their freedom to get forward, I don’t think it is unreasonable to expect them to have a few more assists.
I am not detracting anything from other areas of their game.
In their defence, with regards to crossing, I recently mentioned that we need to have players arriving in the penalty area, behind Ings and Adams, so that if they are attacking the 6 yard area, there is someone following in for a pulled back cross. We don’t make it easy for them.
Yep get rid of stats, they are misleading.
But not goals scored that’s actually important.
Oh ok, and assists because you can’t score without an assist.
Yes yes, chances created tells you something important
Key passes? Ok if it leads to a chance I guess
What about defenders? Um, tackles and interceptions then
Well I suppose some midfielders do work hard and run further
..
..
...
..
So xG is distance run over chances created multiplied by the square root of the the refs average whistle tweet length. Yep that sounds good.