Newcastle v Liverpool

[Colly]

It’s not luck, it’s that about a third of the teams in the PL are actually dross and nothing special.

Lucky results against spurs, man utd, Everton, Chelsea. That's 10 points there.

I'd argue we were unlucky in the other Spurs game, we were the better side but just couldn't finish our chances. That's football.

[bodacious benny]

Lucky results against spurs, man utd, Everton, Chelsea. That's 10 points there.

I'd argue we were unlucky in the other Spurs game, we were the better side but just couldn't finish our chances. That's football.

Agreed, and I’m sure there were games we drew/lost where we missed easy chances - doesn’t mean that the other team were lucky to come away with the points.

[Cal]

We don't exactly do well in the attempts at measuring this "objectively" through expected goals for, expected goals against, and expected points.


https://understat.com/league/EPL

Expected goals is fairly accurate to our goals scored - unfortunately that being we've had the second least amount of high quality chances created. Watford and Norwich in particular spurned a lot of what should have been high conversion rate chances.

I guess we have parallels with Sheffield United over the whole goalkeeper being made to make far more saves than they'd like to, but thriving in doing so and preventing what would be expected goals and salvaging points. This is presumably what's helped to nick a lot of those "lucky" wins.

The only team to outperform the expected points metric more than us is Liverpool.

[Colly]

Have I ever mentioned how much I hate xG? If not just pretend I've made a four paragraph great point about it because I'm sick of bloody talking about it. I'm an analyst by trade so in theory I should love the statification of football, but sentences like this make me f***ing vomit:

"Mo Salah led the Premier League last season for combined xG output following a progressive carry."

[bodacious benny]

Yeah I think xG is utter bollocks, but I still think it wasn't 'luck' that got us those 10 points for example.

[Cal]

Have I ever mentioned how much I hate xG? If not just pretend I've made a four paragraph great point about it because I'm sick of bloody talking about it. I'm an analyst by trade so in theory I should love the statification of football, but sentences like this make me f***ing vomit:

"Mo Salah led the Premier League last season for combined xG output following a progressive carry."

Great point

[Colly]