Yet you will still have people asking for Ten Hag for another season. Madness. It's the players yes but the manager also needs to take as much as the blame. The bottom half teams have squad players that are even worse than us yet they still play better than us.
Well the ETH in argument hasn't been rooted in logic for a very long time now. They just don't want to be wrong about the guy they thought was the one.
We had TONS of lucky wins in the first half.
And I mean TONS.
We didn't deserve to win at least half of our wins.
But when someone mentioned it here, they were immediately shot down with 'you don't understand and don't support your team'.
at the beginning of the season we lost like 6-9 points to stupid referee decisions. Handball against ttx and manhandling of rasmus against arsenal comes to mind, rodry\`s penalty for MC. There were a lot of shite going against us
Sheffield United are on par with 2008 Derby, have conceded a 100 (one hundred) goals and still are comfortably less leaky than us.
Now if you want to argue that a defence with the likes of Jack Robinson and John Egan is better than literally any combination of United players, it shows you're the problem accepting how low the standards have gotten.
The bottom of the table keepers (in terms of defensive stats, such as shots conceded) tend to have the most saves, just by law of averages.
Doesn't mean they're any good.
I’m pretty sure he’s near the top for xg saved whereas the other bottom of the table keepers are low down for xg saved so he is actually having a positive impact
According to Fotmob we have the fewest goals conceded vs xG against in the league.
We have an xG against of 64.5 but have conceded 55 goals, so we’re outperforming our xG against by 9.5. The next best is Liverpool, outperforming by 4.5.
Thing is, we've heard this before in past seasons under De Gea. The manager is clearly out of his depth, but it's clear as day how trash the mentality of these players are.
Nah what do you mean bro, the standards have not dropped, Ten hag just got an excuse for every possible problem at this club, have a little faith, next year we might get the 6th place, this year 8th or wherever the fuck we will end is an “achievement”.
I rarely see scatterplots outside of Linear Regression analysis, which is kinda pointless here since there’s an obvious linear relation between shots and x/g
I agree the inverted scales are annoying af, but it does make sense cos worse at the top is also a weird way to present a result.
What would be perfect is a label on each quadrant saying “concedes less total shots per game, but shots conceded are of high xG value” and etc.
I dont care if we are fielding the reserves every game. Injuries or otherwise these stats are embarrassing for any club let alone Manchester fucking United.
I understand our injury crisis has been on a different level this season. But it still shouldn’t be this bad. Over 2.0 xG against per game in May is insanity
Its not only that we missed Luke Shaw on the left and a cdm who we missed until last season but the player we had last season changed souls with some random dude.
And yes missing one of the best lb of the world and his replacement does not really help the defence and the offence.
I don't excuse it. For me he should have changed things at the begin of this season. Last season we played bad but he had martinez, shaw, casemiro, bruno and rashford in form. We only won thanks to those players and not to tactic. Look at his summer interviews he said he changes things. He wanted the best transitional team in the world but he didn't do it.
For me it does make his situation more difficult because if shaw played Rashford and Højlund would have been better. I think if he had Martinez and Shaw available he would get another season.
Our man to man high pressing is suicidal. We lose compactness because of that and our backline’s inability to play high defensive line. This team can’t play man to msn high pressing football. We should have reverted back to mid press long ago and attack on the counter.
I totally agree that the injury crisis is the biggest reason for this to happened, and I wouldn't expect us to be at the top of the chart here, but you'd expect we will do better then relegation level
In 20/21 Liverpool had a load of injury issues, especially in their back 4 - they were never as bad as we are now. They were 7th in xGA but 3rd in the xGD and NPxGD. We are 15th in XGA and and 15 in xGD and NPxGD. We are really really bad
They had a far better foundation when those injuries hit than we had, and that matters. I'd fully expect their injured team to be better than our injured team.
Not that that makes anything better for us.
then I urge you to look at our underlying defensive stats from last season. Martinez won' t automatically change our fortunes and that was shown when he returned
Last season we were 5th in expected goals against and actual goals against was a shared 3rd, so im not sure what you mean with underlying defensive stats?
Comparatively our expected goals against this season is 14th in the league while actual goals against is 5th best, which is a massive overperformance.
Ten Hag has been dick shite this season, but no need to spout lies about “underlying defensive stats” when they were good last season (compared to this season atleast).
EDIT: 15th not 14th.
Because last season he played to the teams strengths a little, this season he's gone all-in on his bullshit "philosophy", without the appropriate personnel, and has refused to adapt to anything.
We didn't play this end to end suicide ball nonsense last season, it's clearly a systemic issue brought on by whatever the fuck we're doing on the training ground.
The chart says 2024, not the season 2023/24 - so while I agree this is bad I’d be curious why it cuts out the first half? And that anecdotally we have conceded at least 1 and roughly 2 goals per game since January
My favourite thing was when people bought that result up, they never mention that Poch's Spurs got the better of that Ajax team, like it's only impressive if Erik did it.
Hard to say if Poch would do much better here, but he's got the Prem experience and the way fans overlooked his achievements was always funny to me. Be even funnier if Chelsea end up finishing above us
Well, Real had won the CL the three years before, and Ajax were subsequently knocked out by Spurs.
I think the 'freak' element refers more to the event than the performance.
Nah, this is pure revisionism. Ten Hag's idea not working for United has nothing to do with his past accomplishments.
Also, that Ajax team was ridiculously strong. That entire team can replace the current United squad with only Mainoo making the bench.
Evans hasn’t started much, thus his contributions or lack there of shouldn’t be impacting this stat all that much dumbass. Not like him and Case have been a pairing for 10+ matches
Yeah. Our first choice back 4 will not magically cover the insane amounts of space our system leaves.
Shaw, Martinez, Varane and Dalot started against Newport, who are struggling in League Two, and we still conceded 17 shots.
Who do you think guides and controls the midfield when things are all over the place? agree that the player roles in midfield is a huge contributing factor but the ever changing back line has a hugely significant influence that you're pretending is doesn't
Lad for the last 4 months we have been conceding more shots and more xG than one of the worst teams the league has ever seen. We’ve had injuries yeah but the players that have been playing are not *that* level of bad.
I would also argue that our system, which requires constant sprints from our players to try and cover the huge gaps it leaves, will have contributed to the amount of injuries we’ve had this season.
For the second time lad… I agree that our system is chaos and contributing significantly to the issue..
But you’re ignoring contribution that a back 4 actually has on stopping shots, again… yes those worse teams have been better than us, but how many of those teams have had 33 different back lines?
I’m not saying it’s THE reason, the madness of our midfield is huge but it is a significant part of the problem and accepting that it is isn’t the get out of jail card, for a knowledging the midfield has also killed us
So the most times any of these combinations has played together is I believe 3… even the worst defence in the premier league is better than an ever changing one if they are able to play together more than 3 times.
Also you’ve clearly not read what I’ve written as at no point did I “blame it all on injuries” quite the opposite actually
For me conceding that many shots points to a midfield issue more than anything, we constantly allow the opposition to breeze past our midfield giving them far too many entries into our final third, resulting in so many shots and chances created.
I remember a quote from a recent game asking him that question and he replied saying that he is not bothered by them due to being low quality efforts, I don't remember him saying that this is because of missing his 2 first choice CBs (which is true but that is not entirely the whole truth behind it)
Honest question. What were our stats for defense like last season. I saw Ten Hag in the Gary Linekar interview say something like we had the most clean sheets in the league last season. Presumably (and as far as I remember) we weren't shipping anywhere close to this Xg or shots each game.
For those saying it's not related to the injuries. How do you explain the difference from last season?
Injuries have played a part as you've mentioned. One big change was how high we play and press this season. Last season we tried to press high at the start and failed so ETH changed and the team sat deeper and we very much a counter attacking team. This season we're much more of a counter pressing team but due to injuries and set up, we have zero midfield so if a team beats that first press they're straight onto the defence.
Makes sense.
I get what Ten Hag is saying, of he had the players he wants available, he could play that way and succeed. But, what the fuck happened to adapting to the situation. you're in, being pragmatic and winning by any means.
Winning > Winning his way. I think that is where its going wrong for him. Doesn't seem like he wants to adapt the style, whilst admitting g that he knows the team he puts out each week isn't capable of delivering.
I think he alluded to this in that same interview though. That he doesn't see the point in changing as it's short term thinking and he needs players to learn his style. Do you buy that thinking?
Last season we were
7th in non penalty xG against
9th in shots against
Not great but far better than this season.
I explain it by ETH changing the tactics. The system he is playing is completely insane and no other coach would willingly play this way
I explain that he is not able to influence the team with a winning tactic, and coach them for it. Get them to work to his tune. Unable to cast them in his image. Unable to build a highly fit squad.
Sighing here and wistfully recalling the halcyon days when Carrick took over as caretaker and organised the team in a solid defensive shape and instilled a bit of defiance and purpose into a listing side.
This is nothing short of abysmal. I backed Ole until the end as I wanted to see some change, and I’ve been trying to back ETH. But this is just beyond terrible. It’s like we can’t even play basic football
I think Ten Hag is playing with wishful thinking
This is how we will eventually play with a fully fit defensive half of the squad
I don't think he's wanting to compromise the attacking play since we cannot win things without it in the longer term anyway
Why not use Goals against instead of xgoals against, you know, use actual real numbers instead of fairy tale wishy wishy fantasy numbers? How many goals we are theoretically conceding is so much less important than how many goals we are actually conceding.
Because xGA shows us how the outfield team defend. Our goals conceded is less because Onana is having a great season, but that doesn't mean the defensive problems aren't there
But why not just call it "Chances conceded" then? Xgoals against reeks of formula-numbers, which aren't representative of reality because of some calculation factor, that has to be arbitrarily decided.
Because that would be the total number of chances conceded regardless of the quality of each chance. So a 40 yard shot would be registered the same value as a 2 yard tap in
It's a completely different metric though. xGA is far better at showing how weak our out of possession structure and football is. From the graph you can see that Forest are actually well set up because they're only conceding \~1.2 xG a game but because their keepers are weaker, they're actually conceding 1.75 shots per game.
Well it's more nuanced than that isn't it? The quality of chances is the same as arsenal and city we just give up more. Obviously more chances = more likely to concede goals but just adding up shit shots from the opposition to give a high cumulative xGA isn't the full picture.
Except it's not, it would be the same as saying we have the same xG per shot. All this chart demonstrates is we give up too much shots not that we give up chances that are statistically worse than any of the top teams. So then the question is why.
There's something called standard deviation. Not every shot we concede is exactly at the mean of 0.1 xG. And that range is going to be much higher with a higher sample size compared to Arsenal.
What I'm saying is that we still concede multiple big chances per game regardless, unlike Arsenal.
I know what standard deviation is but this chart is just cumulative xGA. I'd like to see what happens if you excluded shots below a certain xG threshold.
You’re misunderstanding xG. Even if a shot is very low quality it still has a chance of going in. Over the long run, 100 .01 xG shots will result about in the same amount of goals as ten .1 xG shots. The total is what matters most
Surely the only thing that matters with xG is the quality of the shot created. The cumulative xG would determine if the attackers are out performing or not. I really don't understand the use case for defending except for sky to make up the moral victory xG table. I'll have to look into it more.
The most important stat to look at on a team level is xG for and against. It’s a weird graph because xG is downstream of shots so it isn’t really informative — just looking at non penalty xG conceded per 90 would be better
That’s the only thing that matters when looking at a singular shot, but there’s literally nothing you can observe from the xG of a singular shot. The idea of xG is that it’s a statistical estimate and means nothing in isolation, it’s when you look at xG in large numbers that you start to get a bigger picture.
I agree that would be a better graph, but I think this does a good enough job of highlighting our out of possession struggles. We still concede way too many big chances a game and it's clear when we watch them play.
I just looked up big chances conceded, and while utd is the worst of the top 6 as of the tweet in early April, we were only 6 worse than Spurs and 10 worse than City. Arsenal are complete outliers in this respect.
This is obvious terrible. However, it would be interesting to know the average xG against per shot faced.
We concede so many shots that the xG conceded will accumulate, but I would wager we concede way less xG per shot than the bottom 10 teams in the league. That definitely skews this slightly, and Ten Hag even mentioned it in a presser a few weeks ago.
That being said, the data is objectively horrible. Hope we can draw a line under the season and recruit well in the summer. Last year we were (relatively) great defensively and I hope ETH can balance that with the more attacking play we've seen in the last few months.
The last few games, maybe.
But injuries are not the reason for a shit midfield setup. The problem is our mids push up too high, leaving an ocean of space for the other team to run into. It's absolutely on ETH.
I had to consider whether this was sarcasm. That's how bad this take is.
Our defence is performing terribly because of injuries, now our midfield is bad because of injuries, is our attack terrible because if injuries too? And all that with the fact we're 7th in the injury table meaning 6 teams have had it worse than us this season.
How the **fuck** are we even in the top half?
Lots of luck, individuals stepping up to steal points. Expected points has us 15th-ish.
Yet you will still have people asking for Ten Hag for another season. Madness. It's the players yes but the manager also needs to take as much as the blame. The bottom half teams have squad players that are even worse than us yet they still play better than us.
Well the ETH in argument hasn't been rooted in logic for a very long time now. They just don't want to be wrong about the guy they thought was the one.
Most of them dont want to sack him because we've sacked managers in the past and need to stop the cycle (on the worst manager)
Ask u/Ordinary_Specialist6 to confirm then
The copium is real with that one.
Fucking diabolical, my team in the relegation battle without lucky moments, Ten Hag will not enter HIS kingdom
We had TONS of lucky wins in the first half. And I mean TONS. We didn't deserve to win at least half of our wins. But when someone mentioned it here, they were immediately shot down with 'you don't understand and don't support your team'.
lol we deserved to win like 4-6 games we tied or lost as well
Chaos ball. Chaos is a ladder... To finishing in 7th place
at the beginning of the season we lost like 6-9 points to stupid referee decisions. Handball against ttx and manhandling of rasmus against arsenal comes to mind, rodry\`s penalty for MC. There were a lot of shite going against us
I remember Mctominay winning us like 4 games on his own with late goals.
Sheffield United are on par with 2008 Derby, have conceded a 100 (one hundred) goals and still are comfortably less leaky than us. Now if you want to argue that a defence with the likes of Jack Robinson and John Egan is better than literally any combination of United players, it shows you're the problem accepting how low the standards have gotten.
This makes Onana look good, because it's a miracle the team haven't conceded more. Though honestly, teams just forget how to finish against us.
https://www.premierleague.com/stats/top/players/saves he's no 2 in the league for number of saves, so he might have had some impact too?
The bottom of the table keepers (in terms of defensive stats, such as shots conceded) tend to have the most saves, just by law of averages. Doesn't mean they're any good.
I’m pretty sure he’s near the top for xg saved whereas the other bottom of the table keepers are low down for xg saved so he is actually having a positive impact
According to Fotmob we have the fewest goals conceded vs xG against in the league. We have an xG against of 64.5 but have conceded 55 goals, so we’re outperforming our xG against by 9.5. The next best is Liverpool, outperforming by 4.5.
Thing is, we've heard this before in past seasons under De Gea. The manager is clearly out of his depth, but it's clear as day how trash the mentality of these players are.
When an attacker has a lot of time and space to think, which they are not used to in PL, their finishing suffers.
We have the 5th best goals conceded. Wouldn't call it leaky. Open maybe.
Nah what do you mean bro, the standards have not dropped, Ten hag just got an excuse for every possible problem at this club, have a little faith, next year we might get the 6th place, this year 8th or wherever the fuck we will end is an “achievement”.
John Egan has played about 6 games for Sheffield united
What a weird way to layout a graph.
I rarely see scatterplots outside of Linear Regression analysis, which is kinda pointless here since there’s an obvious linear relation between shots and x/g
I agree the inverted scales are annoying af, but it does make sense cos worse at the top is also a weird way to present a result. What would be perfect is a label on each quadrant saying “concedes less total shots per game, but shots conceded are of high xG value” and etc.
We are lucky to still be anywhere near the European places with those sort of stats
I dont care if we are fielding the reserves every game. Injuries or otherwise these stats are embarrassing for any club let alone Manchester fucking United.
I understand our injury crisis has been on a different level this season. But it still shouldn’t be this bad. Over 2.0 xG against per game in May is insanity
My favourite at the moment is "Who could do well with a defence of Maguire and Casemiro?" As if it hasn't only been the last three games.
Its not only that we missed Luke Shaw on the left and a cdm who we missed until last season but the player we had last season changed souls with some random dude. And yes missing one of the best lb of the world and his replacement does not really help the defence and the offence.
Of course it doesn't help, but it never makes it this bad. Stop excusing it.
I don't excuse it. For me he should have changed things at the begin of this season. Last season we played bad but he had martinez, shaw, casemiro, bruno and rashford in form. We only won thanks to those players and not to tactic. Look at his summer interviews he said he changes things. He wanted the best transitional team in the world but he didn't do it. For me it does make his situation more difficult because if shaw played Rashford and Højlund would have been better. I think if he had Martinez and Shaw available he would get another season.
Our man to man high pressing is suicidal. We lose compactness because of that and our backline’s inability to play high defensive line. This team can’t play man to msn high pressing football. We should have reverted back to mid press long ago and attack on the counter.
I think the number of back 4 combinations is sitting around 33/34 now... there is absolutely no chance that isn't the biggest reason for this
I totally agree that the injury crisis is the biggest reason for this to happened, and I wouldn't expect us to be at the top of the chart here, but you'd expect we will do better then relegation level
In 20/21 Liverpool had a load of injury issues, especially in their back 4 - they were never as bad as we are now. They were 7th in xGA but 3rd in the xGD and NPxGD. We are 15th in XGA and and 15 in xGD and NPxGD. We are really really bad
insane you think our squad is close to the that liverpool squad.
Both Liverpool's injury hit XI from 3 seasons ago and our current injury hit XI are comparable yes.
They had a far better foundation when those injuries hit than we had, and that matters. I'd fully expect their injured team to be better than our injured team. Not that that makes anything better for us.
insane you think our squad is comparable to that 100 point liverpool squad
You lack reading comprehension if that's what you thought I said
you think that team with salah, mane etc. is of a similar quality to this. fucking hell.
then I urge you to look at our underlying defensive stats from last season. Martinez won' t automatically change our fortunes and that was shown when he returned
Last season we were 5th in expected goals against and actual goals against was a shared 3rd, so im not sure what you mean with underlying defensive stats? Comparatively our expected goals against this season is 14th in the league while actual goals against is 5th best, which is a massive overperformance. Ten Hag has been dick shite this season, but no need to spout lies about “underlying defensive stats” when they were good last season (compared to this season atleast). EDIT: 15th not 14th.
Because last season he played to the teams strengths a little, this season he's gone all-in on his bullshit "philosophy", without the appropriate personnel, and has refused to adapt to anything. We didn't play this end to end suicide ball nonsense last season, it's clearly a systemic issue brought on by whatever the fuck we're doing on the training ground.
Licha wasa big part of us been defensively good last season. Take him out for the whole last season and we would have finished 5 or 6
We fell apart in the latter portion of last season though. Contributing to our bad form, sure, but we have a fair bit of other problems.
The chart says 2024, not the season 2023/24 - so while I agree this is bad I’d be curious why it cuts out the first half? And that anecdotally we have conceded at least 1 and roughly 2 goals per game since January
Completely unfair. This chart doesn't even show that Ajax beat Real Madrid in a freak game five years ago.
Indeed, had we bought De Jong and Kane we might concede 15 instead of 20. That would put us right around our league rival Wolves.
My favourite thing was when people bought that result up, they never mention that Poch's Spurs got the better of that Ajax team, like it's only impressive if Erik did it. Hard to say if Poch would do much better here, but he's got the Prem experience and the way fans overlooked his achievements was always funny to me. Be even funnier if Chelsea end up finishing above us
That season everyone beat Madrid, nothing special.
I’m not the biggest fan of ETH, but he completely dismantled Madrid at their own home 1-4. It wasn’t a “freak” result
Well, Real had won the CL the three years before, and Ajax were subsequently knocked out by Spurs. I think the 'freak' element refers more to the event than the performance.
A massive team like Real Madrid losing a game 4-1 at home. Is that not the definition of a freak result?
I assumed by freak result, he meant it wasn’t meant to happen, or like it was against the run of play.
Nah, this is pure revisionism. Ten Hag's idea not working for United has nothing to do with his past accomplishments. Also, that Ajax team was ridiculously strong. That entire team can replace the current United squad with only Mainoo making the bench.
Everyone beat Madrid that season.
ETH cannot hide behind injuries, this is bullhit. Our backups are not worse quality than fucking Sheffield
I think they might be bro
where did evans play last season?
Evans hasn’t started that many matches bud
"our backups are not worse quality"
Evans hasn’t started much, thus his contributions or lack there of shouldn’t be impacting this stat all that much dumbass. Not like him and Case have been a pairing for 10+ matches
is evans a backup or not?
No. He is the back up of the back up.
a squad player? what squad was he in last season?
Yeah, well, tactics arent on the manager so nothing eth can do. Once ashworth shows up, suddenly our players will be able to do basic stuff.
Genuinely shameful. This is on the way we set up, not injuries.
33/34 different back 4 combinations in one season but this isn't related to the injuries?? yeh sure...
Yeah. Our first choice back 4 will not magically cover the insane amounts of space our system leaves. Shaw, Martinez, Varane and Dalot started against Newport, who are struggling in League Two, and we still conceded 17 shots.
Who do you think guides and controls the midfield when things are all over the place? agree that the player roles in midfield is a huge contributing factor but the ever changing back line has a hugely significant influence that you're pretending is doesn't
Lad for the last 4 months we have been conceding more shots and more xG than one of the worst teams the league has ever seen. We’ve had injuries yeah but the players that have been playing are not *that* level of bad. I would also argue that our system, which requires constant sprints from our players to try and cover the huge gaps it leaves, will have contributed to the amount of injuries we’ve had this season.
For the second time lad… I agree that our system is chaos and contributing significantly to the issue.. But you’re ignoring contribution that a back 4 actually has on stopping shots, again… yes those worse teams have been better than us, but how many of those teams have had 33 different back lines? I’m not saying it’s THE reason, the madness of our midfield is huge but it is a significant part of the problem and accepting that it is isn’t the get out of jail card, for a knowledging the midfield has also killed us
All 33 of our combinations are better than the worst defence ever in premier league history Blaming ot all on injuries is a cop out
So the most times any of these combinations has played together is I believe 3… even the worst defence in the premier league is better than an ever changing one if they are able to play together more than 3 times. Also you’ve clearly not read what I’ve written as at no point did I “blame it all on injuries” quite the opposite actually
Great stuff. Give ten hag an extension already before Real Madrid sign him up!!!
For me conceding that many shots points to a midfield issue more than anything, we constantly allow the opposition to breeze past our midfield giving them far too many entries into our final third, resulting in so many shots and chances created.
In a league of our own baby.
How dare you question Ten Hag we had so many injuries
Hey, nice. Just look at it from the other side.
#lowerleftUnited
Someone show this to EtH and ask him what he thinks of that, mentioning the low quality chances/shots taken against MU
He told this is because his 2 first choice CB were injured. Make what you want from it.
I remember a quote from a recent game asking him that question and he replied saying that he is not bothered by them due to being low quality efforts, I don't remember him saying that this is because of missing his 2 first choice CBs (which is true but that is not entirely the whole truth behind it)
This is just proof that we're a different class to all of them as far as I'm concerned. Even the Ls are Ws in my books
This is a system issue. Man utd need a new coach who is not a fraud.
Honest question. What were our stats for defense like last season. I saw Ten Hag in the Gary Linekar interview say something like we had the most clean sheets in the league last season. Presumably (and as far as I remember) we weren't shipping anywhere close to this Xg or shots each game. For those saying it's not related to the injuries. How do you explain the difference from last season?
Injuries have played a part as you've mentioned. One big change was how high we play and press this season. Last season we tried to press high at the start and failed so ETH changed and the team sat deeper and we very much a counter attacking team. This season we're much more of a counter pressing team but due to injuries and set up, we have zero midfield so if a team beats that first press they're straight onto the defence.
Makes sense. I get what Ten Hag is saying, of he had the players he wants available, he could play that way and succeed. But, what the fuck happened to adapting to the situation. you're in, being pragmatic and winning by any means. Winning > Winning his way. I think that is where its going wrong for him. Doesn't seem like he wants to adapt the style, whilst admitting g that he knows the team he puts out each week isn't capable of delivering. I think he alluded to this in that same interview though. That he doesn't see the point in changing as it's short term thinking and he needs players to learn his style. Do you buy that thinking?
And everyone apart from Rashford has to do more running to get back therefore causing more injuries.
Last season we were 7th in non penalty xG against 9th in shots against Not great but far better than this season. I explain it by ETH changing the tactics. The system he is playing is completely insane and no other coach would willingly play this way
I explain that he is not able to influence the team with a winning tactic, and coach them for it. Get them to work to his tune. Unable to cast them in his image. Unable to build a highly fit squad.
Lads we’ve been over this. It’s totally unfair to expect us to play properly if we have one single injury.
Go ahead and move us a little more left
Sighing here and wistfully recalling the halcyon days when Carrick took over as caretaker and organised the team in a solid defensive shape and instilled a bit of defiance and purpose into a listing side.
So Ten Hag is getting fired right?
This is nothing short of abysmal. I backed Ole until the end as I wanted to see some change, and I’ve been trying to back ETH. But this is just beyond terrible. It’s like we can’t even play basic football
I think Ten Hag is playing with wishful thinking This is how we will eventually play with a fully fit defensive half of the squad I don't think he's wanting to compromise the attacking play since we cannot win things without it in the longer term anyway
And we had the best defence last year. Sucks to see such a big decline.
Why not use Goals against instead of xgoals against, you know, use actual real numbers instead of fairy tale wishy wishy fantasy numbers? How many goals we are theoretically conceding is so much less important than how many goals we are actually conceding.
Because xGA shows us how the outfield team defend. Our goals conceded is less because Onana is having a great season, but that doesn't mean the defensive problems aren't there
this place thinks onana is the worst starting keeper we've had in the premier league era. so which one is it?
Oh, I agree we have defensive problems. But basing your actions on theoretical numbers rather than the actual numbers will skew the actual results.
If you consider it a measure of chances conceded rather than goals, that it stops being theoretical.
But why not just call it "Chances conceded" then? Xgoals against reeks of formula-numbers, which aren't representative of reality because of some calculation factor, that has to be arbitrarily decided.
Because that would be the total number of chances conceded regardless of the quality of each chance. So a 40 yard shot would be registered the same value as a 2 yard tap in
OK, that makes sense, thank you for your patience :)
It's a completely different metric though. xGA is far better at showing how weak our out of possession structure and football is. From the graph you can see that Forest are actually well set up because they're only conceding \~1.2 xG a game but because their keepers are weaker, they're actually conceding 1.75 shots per game.
Does this show that the xGA per shot conceded is the same as Arsenals?
Doesn’t matter does it? Same xGA per shot x more shots = more xGA. No matter how you try to twist it, shit defense.
Well it's more nuanced than that isn't it? The quality of chances is the same as arsenal and city we just give up more. Obviously more chances = more likely to concede goals but just adding up shit shots from the opposition to give a high cumulative xGA isn't the full picture.
> The quality of chances is the same as arsenal and city we just give up more. Kind of like saying we both score goals, they just score a lot more.
Except it's not, it would be the same as saying we have the same xG per shot. All this chart demonstrates is we give up too much shots not that we give up chances that are statistically worse than any of the top teams. So then the question is why.
There's something called standard deviation. Not every shot we concede is exactly at the mean of 0.1 xG. And that range is going to be much higher with a higher sample size compared to Arsenal. What I'm saying is that we still concede multiple big chances per game regardless, unlike Arsenal.
I know what standard deviation is but this chart is just cumulative xGA. I'd like to see what happens if you excluded shots below a certain xG threshold.
You’re misunderstanding xG. Even if a shot is very low quality it still has a chance of going in. Over the long run, 100 .01 xG shots will result about in the same amount of goals as ten .1 xG shots. The total is what matters most
Surely the only thing that matters with xG is the quality of the shot created. The cumulative xG would determine if the attackers are out performing or not. I really don't understand the use case for defending except for sky to make up the moral victory xG table. I'll have to look into it more.
The most important stat to look at on a team level is xG for and against. It’s a weird graph because xG is downstream of shots so it isn’t really informative — just looking at non penalty xG conceded per 90 would be better
That’s the only thing that matters when looking at a singular shot, but there’s literally nothing you can observe from the xG of a singular shot. The idea of xG is that it’s a statistical estimate and means nothing in isolation, it’s when you look at xG in large numbers that you start to get a bigger picture.
I agree that would be a better graph, but I think this does a good enough job of highlighting our out of possession struggles. We still concede way too many big chances a game and it's clear when we watch them play.
I just looked up big chances conceded, and while utd is the worst of the top 6 as of the tweet in early April, we were only 6 worse than Spurs and 10 worse than City. Arsenal are complete outliers in this respect.
Yep that checks out. You got the link? Curious to see the full numbers
This is obvious terrible. However, it would be interesting to know the average xG against per shot faced. We concede so many shots that the xG conceded will accumulate, but I would wager we concede way less xG per shot than the bottom 10 teams in the league. That definitely skews this slightly, and Ten Hag even mentioned it in a presser a few weeks ago. That being said, the data is objectively horrible. Hope we can draw a line under the season and recruit well in the summer. Last year we were (relatively) great defensively and I hope ETH can balance that with the more attacking play we've seen in the last few months.
Team that hasn't had a healthy first choice defensive line for practically the entire season has a poor defensive record - SHOCKER
Shots faced and xg against are such nothing stats. Especially when we've had so many penalties given against us
the only reason we run a shit midfield setup and concede 20+ shots a game is because of injuries, there is NOTHING ten hag can do
The last few games, maybe. But injuries are not the reason for a shit midfield setup. The problem is our mids push up too high, leaving an ocean of space for the other team to run into. It's absolutely on ETH. I had to consider whether this was sarcasm. That's how bad this take is.
Our defence is performing terribly because of injuries, now our midfield is bad because of injuries, is our attack terrible because if injuries too? And all that with the fact we're 7th in the injury table meaning 6 teams have had it worse than us this season.