The9

My theory on this is because they're the only club with the money to spend that are convinced they will actually improve their squad with some of our best players. They don't seem to have any recruitment plan other than "signing good players and hoping they fit". They are to West Ham as Spurs are to us. Same approach, more money.

Great fee, more than even I expected - accepted he was going soon a week ago, slightly perturbed he's gone to Liverpool but overall decent business - removes one of the obvious sources of difficulty in the squad. Now let's see if anyone else is going and whether/where we reinvest in the squad.

Football's changed quite a bit since 1986, and we set our recent impatience benchmark last season.

Hardly anybody I know IRL comes on here when we lose because of the pointless negativity, so the poll is going to be hugely skewed anyway. I didn't even know there was an original poll until about two days ago!

You wanna get over to the Prowsey thread.

Ah right, ta. I haven't actually looked at a ground map... for once I picked our tickets without really bothering to check.

Well, he could try making himself undroppable.

His job against Arsenal appeared to be to back up Stephens at right back to negate the threat of Sanchez - which he and Stephens did very well indeed. If it was a sparkling attacking performance expected, wrong opposition for that. Actually it is becoming more and more evident that his Schneiderlin-lite water-carrier role from last season was the closest he's come to consistently reaching the standard expected of a first team regular (Leicester performance excluded, we'd have half the crowd in the team in that case). With that in mind it's a bit strange that Pellegrino tried to play him as a support striker in pre-season and again at one point after the season began.

He's looked half-arsed for the entire time he's been with us, he's still been mostly fantastic when fit. I can't see him going to Liverpool now but if he does they're going to absolutely slaughter him for looking too laid back, like it matters. Man City fans would love him.

I'd say "might", it's hardly conclusive - I'd just have liked the opportunity to see what he could do in a "normal" season, as opposed to one where we played endless midweek matches and then basically had a month off playing no-one and then endless midweek matches at the end, too.

Surprised more teams don't do it if it's that easy.

Agreed, we were dynamic and impressive for 75% of the season home and away, couldn't score for anything though. Other games we were more defensive, and at the end of the season played a load of top sides back to back so wasn't expecting much from that anyway. Now we only seem to get those performances against teams our players might want to sign for.

I thought he looked like a typical Huth-style Leicester centre back, functional and defensive. His uncomfortable looking run and admittedly half-decent shot was entirely down to us standing off him, and his hands all over him foul on Austin before our goal probably should have been a penalty. Other than that we didn't do much to trouble their back line to see what he could do, but then defending is a bit of a lost art, as we showed by nearly conceding from Leicester drilling the ball straight at us out of the keeper's hands.

Also, if "Redknapp hates it" isn't a good enough reason for you, what is? It's an article about the development of ProZone into xG, also has lots of Saints references, Woodward, Wilson etc and ends up with this little snippet: "Two minutes later, City's attacker Sergio Aguero received the ball on the edge of the box, in a position to shoot. According to Prozone's goal-expectation model, he had a 12 percent chance of scoring. Instead of shooting, he went around a defender to a corner of the penalty area and, from a spot where he had a 19 percent chance of scoring, slotted the ball past the keeper. By the time Wilson landed at Gatwick, the news ticker running across the TV screens was saying that Manchester City were the new champions" There's enough in the rest of the article about affecting decision-making to support a reasonable assumption that the Aguero xG stuff above is accurate, though I've seen an actual interview about it somewhere.

Oh, and I found the article with the stats that Tadic was the most wasteful Prem player last season: http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/40699431 Player Goals Expected goals Expected goals difference Tadic (Southampton) 3 6.66 -3.66 Only includes players with a minimum of 50 shots

That's because it's not what I said. What I said was his natural skills have been enhanced by coaching based on xG (and other stats), which Man City's coaches have confirmed. It was years ago though. See a couple of posts below for a link that mentions it.

That's what the (slightly biased) Man City metrics guys said when asked about it.

As I always say when this happens, depends on your selected view. I'm on page 2777.

There are models for calculating how well players move the ball from low positions of xG towards positions of high xG as well. Though as xG only measures the chance itself, your argument about the creation of that chance is moot. xG also isn't about changing who is on the end of the chance, that's just an activity that might happen as a result of the data existing. Man City have been using this data for years (they even shared their data from 2011/12 to encourage amateurs to build statistical models), and the first time I heard about it was when Aguero's title-winning goal was used as evidence - he took the ball an extra couple of steps towards the goal-line (even though he was wide of the goal), which hugely increased the likelihood of him scoring compared to his original shooting opportunity. City's metrics guys were keen to put that down to Aguero's understanding of xG and the concepts of goal probability being coached into him rather than just that "striker's instinct" stuff which often leads to inefficient shots, like most of Redmond's, especially when Austin is in the box.

The stats show the xG of the average chance in similar circumstances, whether it is then scored or not by the player gives a player rating in comparison to it. I used a very simple pure goals vs xG rating above, before Yoshida scored and probably moved himself up the list a bit. Suffice to say Tadic airkicking from a yard out was not entirely unpredictable either. It's fair to say that the models can be developed further, but the entire point of it is putting a value on each of those chances, and each of those players, and each of those goals precisely because it rates the things that people can see and gives a tangible score to them. It is based on a massive database of efforts on goal dating back years, so an 80 yard chip will be rated as a very low xG precisely because evidence has shown it is very unlikely to score. xG of an "average" penalty is 76% (0.76), but Tadic has his own penalty score/miss stats to show how likely he is to score a penalty. Obviously because a penalty is a fixed match position, it's easier to compare than the wide variety of other chances in a match.

Wellllllllllllll there were those two 4 goal away wins...

FWIW Abdoulaye Doucore 1.776 (5) +3.8224 Chris Wood 2.160 (4) +1.94 Sam Vokes 1.158 (3) +1.842 Harry Kane 8.2 (10) +1.80 Steven Davis = better finisher than Harry Kane.

Current Saints players' xG (the Bournemouth game is on here) - which only show how many they SHOULD have scored from the efforts on goal taken, actuals in brackets and calculation of goals scored compared to xG on the right. I think the amount with less than xG says a lot. Name;xG;(Goals ["G"]); G-xG Davis 0.772 (3) +2.228 Austin 2.259 (4) +1.741 Gabbiadini 1.57 (3) +1.43 Pied 0.03389 (0) -0.03389 Hojbjerg 0.037 (0) -0.037 Boufal 1.099 (1) -0.099 Stephens 0.3397 (0) -0.3397 Lemina 0.364 (0) -0.364 Ward-Prowse 0.4904 (0) -0.4904 Bertrand 0.613 (0) -0.613 Cedric 0.619 (0) -0.619 Hoedt 0.656 (0) -0.656 Tadic 3.040 (2) -1.040 Romeu 2.156 (1) -1.156 Redmond 1.338 (0) -1.338 Van Dijk 1.368 (0) -1.368 Long 1.432 (0) -1.432 Yoshida 2.506 (1) -1.506

There's a reason the top strikers are at the top clubs. The amount of time it takes for the meritocracy to kick in at the top level is shorter than ever before. Long's xG compared to goals scored has been rubbish for a season or two, but that's not the stat we signed him for anyway. This is a nice graphical tool for looking at player (and chance) xG for 2017/18, there are previous season versions too - shows every chance this season (not sure how up to date) along with the location, type of shot, xG, player who took the chance, player's xG, and the opposition. There's also a summary of "best players" by pure xG rather than actual goals (Kane, Lukaku, Jesus, Salah, Lacazette). https://public.tableau.com/profile/paul.riley#!/vizhome/PremierLeaguexGandShotMap2017-18/PremierLeaguexGShotDashboard2017-18