Honestly can’t stand that stat! Does my head in. Lost all respect for Chris Wilder when he brought it up in a presser.. in defence of us losing games.
Why don't you like it, don't you believe chances lead to goals? If not, why?
Is the aim of the game not to create more and better chances than the opposition, and hope your players are good enough to score/ not conceded them? What else can we do, not create, and give more chances away, how would that work out? Better or worse?
It's not an excuse, it's a partial explanation of a stat that few seem to understand, I'm happy that he's been quite open about things, where he can be.
Some other explanations are:
We're missing chances we should be scoring. If we aren't good enough to score them, then we have no right to complain we're not scoring, we're certainly creating enough, and putting in enough largely good-quality crosses.
The vast majority of errors, where we have missed chances, have been from players we had last year.
We're making silly individual errors, if we aren't good enough to cut these out, then don't complain we're conceding.
The vast majority of defensive errors, which have cost goals, have been from players we had last year.
We had some shocking decisions go against us in the first few games (which cost a fair few goals)
We've not really had any shockers go for us.
We played some pretty good sides in the first few games
We've been worse without Lenihan and Steffen, as far as "playing well", which I would categorise as creating more than the opposition, especially against good sides.
We bought two strikers who seemingly aren't as good as what we had last year (in the opinion of the manager), and one of the players getting a game ahead of them was a midfielder, or they're not up to speed yet.
We sold our best midfielder, and the only one likely to improve, and another £5m wasted on another who we gave away for nothing. We did this before we had replacements, which was lunacy.
None of the permanent signings we have spent money on were first choice, or are guaranteed starters.
It's a game of fine margins and nobody has battered us yet. Yes we've been battered first half in some games, but reacted well, which has been a surprise.
Three probable starting players have missed a lot of the games, I know this can happen, but it has happened, lets not pretend it hasn't.
High turnover of players, the main striker has only been here a few games
We were meant to get in two main strikers
We get dominated in the middle, more than anywhere else on the pitch, even though we're playing three in there. This pretty much eliminates all options of playing less than three players in there.
I don't think any of those other explanations can largely be blamed at the manager.
What I suppose the manager can maybe do better at:
We seem to lack concentration/ awareness, especially at the back, I'm not sure if there's any specific training we can do for this
Some defenders and Roberts were launching it too much (and don't have long ball ability), but they've got better at this (keeping it on the deck), they still need to work on it mind.
Improving confidence, although the players need to dig themselves out of this hole I think.
Kept McGree for the middle, when it became apparent that the free midfield signings were not going to cut it, although saying that the midfield have done ok in possession, and only been under the cosh when we've given it away too easily. Plus, McGree seemed a better finisher than Watmore, and that's saying something.
McNair is not performing like last year (or any other year), despite playing in a position which should suit him better, maybe last year he looked better as we didn't attack down the left, and he had Tav on his side.
Dijksteele has looked the best going forward, made the least mistakes at the back, and is also the quickest at the back, he has to play.
Dijksteele wasn't on the pitch when we shipped 3 in against QPR, but was when we scored two and looked far better, second half.
Dijksteele wasn't on the pitch when we shipped 3 in against Cardiff, but was when we scored two and looked far better, second half.
I would say we could do with another formation option, but keeping the same formation has got us back into games when we were behind, so not sure we need this yet.