Conceding goals vs Scoring Goals Recent League One History

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Conceding goals vs Scoring Goals Recent League One History

Post by BWFC_Insane » Mon Sep 20, 2021 9:12 am

There has been a lot of discussion about goals scored, goals conceded where the issues lie etc. But I thought it was worth looking at recent league one history to see how we fair...its an 8 game sample so treat with caution.

Thus far if we extrapolate our goals scored and goals conceded rate across a full season we'll score 80 goals (80.5 but lets assume the half was the Burton goal and round down) and concede 69.

How would that look against the 20/21 league one table?

Hull finished top with 80 scored. Peterborough second on 83. They were the highest scoring teams. The play off teams scored 60, 70, 69 and 77 respectively.

What about goals against? Top 2 conceded 38 and 46 goals. Play off sides....37, 42, 50 and 56. You have to go down to Burton who finished 16th and conceded 73 to go past our projected 69.

Lets look at the 18/19 season (since 19/20 was aborted).

Top 2 scored 90 and 80. Play offs scored 73, 83, 80, 76. Top 2 conceded 42 and 39. Play offs 40, 51, 47, 58. Gillingham in 13th highest side to concede over 69.

And we can go back to 2014/15 and see that no top 6 side has conceded 60 goals. Some have got there scoring under 60 though. Bradford, Charlton, Gillingham and Oxford.

I'd say its pretty clear that IF we have any pretension of the top 8 or top we cannot concede at the rate we are. We can even afford to score fewer goals and still sit top 6 comfortably if we reduce how many we concede. Now 8 games is a small sample and I have no doubt that people will claim we've not distributed our goals evenly etc etc....but the point remains - history is clear - we HAVE to stop conceding so many goals if we want to get near the top end. And whilst obviously we need to match that with scoring goals - the fact is that even if we score at the rate we have across 8 games it won't mean anything if we continue to ship them in at the same rate.

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Re: Conceding goals vs Scoring Goals Recent League One History

Post by Worthy4England » Mon Sep 20, 2021 11:42 am

Not sure why there's so much debate, other than a bit of xG fog. Rioch's promotion season we conceded 46? Todd's we conceded 20. It's not an either / or it's a "both" but 69 feels way too high.

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Re: Conceding goals vs Scoring Goals Recent League One History

Post by BWFC_Insane » Mon Sep 20, 2021 12:01 pm

Worthy4England wrote:
Mon Sep 20, 2021 11:42 am
Not sure why there's so much debate, other than a bit of xG fog. Rioch's promotion season we conceded 46? Todd's we conceded 20. It's not an either / or it's a "both" but 69 feels way too high.
For me its a debate for a few reasons.

Evatt said the other week 'we might be a bit open but we'll score goals. So if they score we'll got and score too'. I'm paraphrasing but that's more or less it. Now I wanted to check my 'anecdotal view' that such an approach rarely leads to success specifically looking at relevant league one trends and I think that reinforces my view that no matter how free scoring you are IF you are likely to concede it eventually catches up with your results.

Secondly we know that this season Evatt has tweaked the system to put as he calls it 'two number 8's' in midfield as opposed to the two more sitting players last season. So a 4-1-4-1 rather than say the 4-2-3-1 of last season. This has undoubtedly made us easy on the eye as Sheehan and Sarce have relative freedom to find space and play in that advanced midfield areas and make runs. But for me it also leaves us more open. I don't want to stifle our attacking play but I do think we need a more nuanced game by game approach. Rotherham noticeably found huge gaps in front of the back four in the opening half hour and whilst their goals came about from set pieces their press and play definitely for me caused us issues - and when playing a good side like them you find out how costly those issues are.

Thirdly the set piece issue - we look more challenged by them than we do to score from them. And when you raise that some people seem to be of the view it doesn't matter. You could argue that Rotherham won the game purely because they converted one of their 4 corners yet we didn't come very close from any of our 11. That simplifies it a bit but...

Fourthly our possession is high yet our most effective performance was away last week with 44% of the ball. This suggests that a) when we have a lot of possession we're not really maximising it but b) we're potentially more vulnerable to teams who allow us the ball then try and score a goal from a corner or on the break. That's a concern because its one thing resisting pressure before finally conceding a more worrying thing is when you dominate the ball yet still concede two goals.

Last season we went up based on the 1-0 and whilst I'd say that isn't something to aim for - its fair to say that arguably our best chance of beating Rotherham was to nick a narrow win. Our football feels like its very knife edge - we attack if we don't score you'll get a go. And that was the first half on Saturday. Second half was different but I do fear that we lack real control in games and the best sides will exploit that. Its a balance - I don't want us to play the slow, predictable sideways stuff we ended up with last season at times but neither do I think we should necessarily be opening the whole pitch up like we did at times first half against a side who are very capable and probably more streetwise than we are.

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Re: Conceding goals vs Scoring Goals Recent League One History

Post by Prufrock » Mon Sep 20, 2021 1:16 pm

It's one game and only the highlights but I noticed on Saturday that every single one of our attacking highlights came from a set piece. And add Johnston's disallowed goal. We're much better at them attacking wise than we were last year.
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Re: Conceding goals vs Scoring Goals Recent League One History

Post by Dave Sutton's barnet » Mon Sep 20, 2021 4:03 pm

Absolutely no doubt at all that the defence needs to improve. But so does the regularity of scoring – as in, the number of games we scored in, not an average skewed by crapshoots.

We've played 10 first-team games and we've failed to score in half of them. Has a team ever gone up while failing to score 23 times out of 46? Possibly, especially under three points for a win, but I very much doubt it. A quick look at last season's League One shows that Hull scored in 38/46, Peterborough in 38/46, Blackpool 34/46. Only two teams failed to score 23 times out of 46 - Northampton and Bristol Rovers, both relegated.

Purely in league games, only three teams in this division (Crewe, Donny and Shrewsbury) have fired more blanks than us. They're all in the four-team relegation zone. And Crewe and Donny have only played seven games to our eight.

It's nothing we didn't discuss and worry about pre-season, but perhaps judgement (and averages) have become clouded by us scoring 11 goals in three games. That's not the problem (although only winning one of them isn't great.) The problem is all the games we're not scoring in.

We can't carry on heading towards 69 goals conceded, but neither can we only score in half the games. Actually, that'd be an improvement on current returns: Ipswich was the only proper game in the last five where we've troubled the scorers. Hopefully, hopefully, it's a blip and it will be rectified, either by sharpening up, or by Baka returning, or better yet by scoring from set-pieces.

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Re: Conceding goals vs Scoring Goals Recent League One History

Post by BWFC_Insane » Mon Sep 20, 2021 4:15 pm

Dave Sutton's barnet wrote:
Mon Sep 20, 2021 4:03 pm
Absolutely no doubt at all that the defence needs to improve. But so does the regularity of scoring – as in, the number of games we scored in, not an average skewed by crapshoots.

We've played 10 first-team games and we've failed to score in half of them. Has a team ever gone up while failing to score 23 times out of 46? Possibly, especially under three points for a win, but I very much doubt it. A quick look at last season's League One shows that Hull scored in 38/46, Peterborough in 38/46, Blackpool 34/46. Only two teams failed to score 23 times out of 46 - Northampton and Bristol Rovers, both relegated.

Purely in league games, only three teams in this division (Crewe, Donny and Shrewsbury) have fired more blanks than us. They're all in the four-team relegation zone. And Crewe and Donny have only played seven games to our eight.

It's nothing we didn't discuss and worry about pre-season, but perhaps judgement (and averages) have become clouded by us scoring 11 goals in three games. That's not the problem (although only winning one of them isn't great.) The problem is all the games we're not scoring in.

We can't carry on heading towards 69 goals conceded, but neither can we only score in half the games. Actually, that'd be an improvement on current returns: Ipswich was the only proper game in the last five where we've troubled the scorers. Hopefully, hopefully, it's a blip and it will be rectified, either by sharpening up, or by Baka returning, or better yet by scoring from set-pieces.
For me though this partly comes down to being able to dig out results in different ways.

Teams looked at us early doors and went 'crikey Bolton are good when you leave them space to play in behind the midfield', So they stopped doing that. And we won't score as many. No team in the world would. But Cambridge away a classic example and Evatt said himself after the game that the big problem was conceding a sloppy goal. Once that happens its ideal for Cambridge. But play the game tire their press and work at 0-0 and chances are an opening arises later in the game. We weren't at our best and they make it difficult. But those are the games you need to dig in defend well, find a way and see what happens.

Saturday another really good example of that - nobody would say we lost that because of missed chances. We lost it because we conceded two goals without Rotherham having to do much. There is too much pressure on us to score a lot of goals because we often look like conceding. And for me there is a balance to it - if you concede a lot it weighs the strikers down and if you can't score it wears the back four down.

Saturday was a classic case of not really being good enough to play a Rotherham side the way we'd like. So we have to find a different way round it. For all we dominated possession second half they were comfortable and that's for me mainly down to the fact they had a 2-0 lead to protect and we got frustrated and ran out of ideas. 1-0 and I feel that's a very different 45. Goals change games and conceding them like we did is a problem that is much easier to fix than the other end where surely we've shown (if unevenly) we're capable of scoring goals? But we need to accept that in many many games like Saturday it will be a tight 1-0 or 2-1 either way and we need to be on the right side of those games more often than not.

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Re: Conceding goals vs Scoring Goals Recent League One History

Post by Harry Genshaw » Mon Sep 20, 2021 4:16 pm

Whilst we certainly need to tighten up a bit i think under Evatt we're more likely to win a series of games 3-2 than 1-0. That's fine by me. I'm loving the footy right now and I've no particular desire to watch us grinding out points in chess match scenarios. Evatt will sort it.
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Re: Conceding goals vs Scoring Goals Recent League One History

Post by BWFC_Insane » Mon Sep 20, 2021 4:19 pm

Harry Genshaw wrote:
Mon Sep 20, 2021 4:16 pm
Whilst we certainly need to tighten up a bit i think under Evatt we're more likely to win a series of games 3-2 than 1-0. That's fine by me. I'm loving the footy right now and I've no particular desire to watch us grinding out points in chess match scenarios. Evatt will sort it.
The whole point is though that no team has been successful with that approach in recent history in league one. You can say 'we'll buck a trend' but I suspect you can extend that analysis to all football leagues and find that in modern times the 'you score 3 we'll score 4' type of teams almost always have failed.

I'd be personally delighted with a midtable finish and lots of exciting games to watch like. But expectations have risen and that's all I'm saying. To get in the top 6 - we almost certainly need to concede fewer.

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