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Perhaps we're not as good as we think? Yes it's XG


Carl Sagan

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We debated Opta's weird stat, expected goals (known as XG) last year. Well, Sky have gone through the Championship to date looking at expected goals versus real goals to see whi, in thie mind, in playing best and not getting the rewards. Here's their table:

1425293972_20181107expectedgoals.thumb.JPG.2785093aee1c9dfa140dacd5e38679a7.JPG

There's a lot of spiel at https://www.skysports.com/football/news/11095/11546482/who-deserves-to-be-top-of-the-sky-bet-championship

Obviously there are things to like in it, in that they say the team in the most obvious false position are the gumps, who should be down near the bottom of the league but have got lucky so far. However, I'm surprised they drop us any places, but they do, down to 9th place. I thought we were creating a lot of chances and not taking tehm all, but the claim from this is that we've been pretty cinical.

A bit of fun. Given it does have the top 3 in the top 3 places there's probably some slight usefulness to it, but if so, shoud we all curb our enthusiasm?

Discuss!

 

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We average 15 shots per game, and 1.5 goals per game.

That doesn't sound particularly clinical to me. 

Think that xG table is erroneous tbh.

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I don’t want to get into THAT debate again but all I can say is don’t be quick to dismiss it. Carl made a similar post last year when Rowett was in charge when we were around second in the league before the collapse.

Just enjoy the ride and see where it takes us because it’s a lot more enjoyable than last year.

What I will say though is that we are conceding too many goals which could cost us long term. There’s only so many times that we can come from behind to win.

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16 minutes ago, SaintRam said:

We average 15 shots per game, and 1.5 goals per game.

That doesn't sound particularly clinical to me. 

Think that xG table is erroneous tbh.

I do think we've recently become more accurate, in that we've been having a lot of shots on target of late.

I guess it would be possible to go through all the timelines of the Expermental361 guy but I'm not going to do it. He says nice things about us against Brum "Derby recovered well from conceding early at home to Birmingham by dominating the match thereafter; the visitors weren’t able to muster a single shot after the interval" and here's his graph of the game:

1023959063_20181107Experimenta361JPG.thumb.JPG.3a18d8690493cb0ad1bb6ab00729d224.JPG

I see @nottingramis probably right that they've been lazy in terms of how they constructed the table, not based on overall goal difference rather than expected results. Link is https://experimental361.com/2018/11/04/championship-timelines-2-4-nov-2018/

 

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15 minutes ago, SaintRam said:

We average 15 shots per game, and 1.5 goals per game.

That doesn't sound particularly clinical to me. 

Think that xG table is erroneous tbh.

Deciding that is the point of xG though - separating good chances from bad ones, rather than just counting shots.  If we have 13 shots from distance and 2 sitters a game, and score 1.5 of them on average, then that is pretty clinical.

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5 minutes ago, Carl Sagan said:

We debated Opta's weird stat, expected goals (known as XG) last year. Well, Sky have gone through the Championship to date looking at expected goals versus real goals to see whi, in thie mind, in playing best and not getting the rewards. Here's their table:

1425293972_20181107expectedgoals.thumb.JPG.2785093aee1c9dfa140dacd5e38679a7.JPG

There's a lot of spiel at https://www.skysports.com/football/news/11095/11546482/who-deserves-to-be-top-of-the-sky-bet-championship

Obviously there are things to like in it, in that they say the team in the most obvious false position are the gumps, who should be down near the bottom of the league but have got lucky so far. However, I'm surprised they drop us any places, but they do, down to 9th place. I thought we were creating a lot of chances and not taking tehm all, but the claim from this is that we've been pretty cinical.

A bit of fun. Given it does have the top 3 in the top 3 places there's probably some slight usefulness to it, but if so, shoud we all curb our enthusiasm?

Discuss!

 

A bit of fun maybe but also a load of nonsense. XG is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is ACTUAL goals scored/conceded. Well, actually it's points gained. 

It still amazes me that people (must be an entire army) are employed to count and "assess" every shot a team has and then calculate these meaningless stats. 

Regarding our enthusiasm (I assume you meant to say confidence), if for some bizarre reason these stats could be relied upon as any sort of useful indicator then why should we change or view. Is it any worse to be creating relatively few chances but scoring from a good number of them than creating lots of chances? 

Also, isn't it the net difference of goal expected to score v goals expected to concede? Which means we might be creating lots of chances but also allowing the opposition plenty. 

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24 minutes ago, Tamworthram said:

A bit of fun maybe but also a load of nonsense. XG is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is ACTUAL goals scored/conceded. Well, actually it's points gained. 

It still amazes me that people (must be an entire army) are employed to count and "assess" every shot a team has and then calculate these meaningless stats. 

It’s a statistical way of measuring performance, hardly nonsense 

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