xG table so far this season

All the table is showing is that we are consistently making more chances than the opposition.

That is true.

I have rarely seen a boro team control and create like the current one. But we don't take our chances.

The question is... is it because all our attacking players are terrible... or... because we have been a bit unlucky and our attacking players have hit a bad patch at the same time.

I'm of the feeling - if we continue to control and create like we are - the goals will come and we will go on a dominant run like we have seen several times in Carrick's reign.
But we were like this for big spells last season and we didn't address it, we go on runs where it works and runs were it doesn't.

If we want a tilt at the autos, (already looking a stretch) or upper play-offs with a solid chance of progressing through them, we simply can not be this 'streaky' where we play our best stuff and only get a win ratio of 3 games from 9 from it. We must be better, we must be more ruthless when we are on top.

Our points against the bottom six last season was pretty poor, our opening to this season was spectacularly benevolent from the fixture computer. We have been the better team for the majority of most games this season, for little return in goals and points.

This isn't a one off period of games where we have been unbelievably unlucky, or the opposition defence and keeper are having worldies to keep us out. A lot of games we are simply not working the keeper enough, we try an extra pass rather than shooting, we shoot poorly, weak shots near the keeper or under hit / scuffed efforts.

This isn’t bad luck, a few games you could say so, but we have been performing like this against a lot of teams for 18 months, maybe even getting on for two years now.

Without Forss and Akpom carrying a sustained goal threat from the three behind we are powder puff and have not really addressed it.

Archer, Giles, Forss, Akpom and Ramsey are all much better players than we have available now, who scored when we were on top and playing well. With McGree and Jones and others chipping in too.

Lath and Azaz have been beyond poor as goal scorers, I accept they are playing their part in the team, but the 9 & 10 are there to score.

They are not, and it is a huge concern that is currently derailing our season. Unfortunately we have nobody to replace either of them as far I can see, until Conway / Gilbert are back fit, on one of those is an unproven punt.

We need to change something to get some more ‘real’ threat on goal, the bizzare signing of Burgzorg doesn't look like it will address any of our short comings, I feel pretty confident saying Coburn would be more of an asset to bring on if we are chasing games.

Great xg doesn't seem a huge positive to me, it says one of the most important parts of your team is performing very poorly, over a sustained period now.

How long do the people who think it is great and only matter of time give before wanting something to change?

If we are tenth / eleventh after 18 games and top of the xg table, is everything still rosy and it's just a matter of time before we start battering teams?

Oh and our injuries are still an absolute joke too! Which can't be helping things at all either.
 
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Surely everyone accepts there is a element of luck in football, that in a tight league like the Championship can make the difference between a win and a loss over one game. Across 46 games it will even itself out to give a truer league position than say a short run of games.

Anyone not agree so far?

If we can agree on that - the next issue - can stats be used to measure when a team has been lucky or unlucky?

If we can agree stats that help to identify lucky/unlucky - the next issue is what stats i.e.

Goal attempts
Shots on goals
Possession in opposition box

I would say the three above are key stats

I don't know the mechanics of expected goals but I would guess it uses the above three stats to a major degree.

Expected goals to me is probably a guide, without been precise, but happy to read other posters alternative methods and stats to judge performances.
 
Stats like xG never tell the full story or show the actual reality.
They’re not meant to, they are indicators and if enough data is gathered you can see patterns.

What you should never do is use a single figure as some form of evidence of a silver bullet solution or definitive proof of a good or bad player
 
Not sure that is true either. You can add up, understand the concept of stats and believe your know what they mean. It's a skill in and if itself to be able to interpret stats meaningfully. Some folks probably don't know what they don't know.
Running-Kruger kicks in at that point for many people. If they don’t know it, it probably isn’t worth knowing and is nonsense. 🤷🏻‍♂️

It’s long been the case that intellectualism has been mistrusted by the masses. Now that football is intellectualised with data, analysis, and degrees of emotional empathy, the old skool fan distrusts it
 
If we can agree stats that help to identify lucky/unlucky - the next issue is what stats i.e.
Not really no.
I wouldn't look at stats from a game and claim one side had been lucky without watching any of the game. Stats need to be read in tandem with watching a game for a full picture.

For example, someone might claim we were unlucky against Watford on Saturday if they look at the stats.

XG
1.86 v 1.10

Big Chances
3 v 1

Possession
62% v 38%

Goal Attempts
11 v 9

Attempts on Target
5 v 4

Touches in opposition box
20 v 14

All in Boro's favour.

But, having been at the game and watching the extended highlights since, i don't think we were unlucky. If anything we were lucky to score at all. Our goal was very lucky. Azaz mis-hit a freekick and their defender mis hit his clearance and the ball landed in a position that meant Edmonson had a chance he could barely miss and accounted for 0.76 of our total xG. That moment of luck is not identifiable in the stats.

Their keeper only made one good save I'd say. The one from Doak (and to be honest we only got that chance because he pushed a fairly tame effort from Lath into a bad area). The rest of his saves were routine.

That Doak effort registered 0.43 xG. I think that is way above what it actually represented. The keeper spread himself really well and smothered it, there's no way that's a 2 in 5 chance.

The only good chances we actually created ourselves through a bit of quality were:

The early Azaz header which he should have finished. It wasn't through bad luck that he missed. It's because he missed the target and therefore poor application.

And the Lath header from Azaz's cross. Again, Lath missed the target so it's not down to bad luck. It was through poor execution of the finish.

Those chances registered 0.17 and 0.19. So those 4 moments represent the bulk of our xG rating. Apart from that we had handful of low chance pot shots.

It's not like their Keeper was pulling off wonder saves or we had chances blocked off the line etc. There was nothing unlucky about it. We just didn't show enough quality to create good opportunities and the couple of decent opportunities we did create, we squandered by missing the target.

It's not bad luck. It's poor performance by our front players.
 
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I don’t think xG v actual result is a case of lucky / unlucky. More a case of clinical or not.

Eg the Lath and Azaz chances. We should have scored, but we didn’t. We weren’t unlucky we just weren’t clinical enough. Been the case all season.

I’d like to think it’s more likely to come good rather than not creating the chances in the first place though.
 
Not really no.
I wouldn't look at stats from a game and claim one side had been lucky without watching any of the game. Stats need to be read in tandem with watching a game for a full picture.

For example, someone might claim we were unlucky against Watford on Saturday if they look at the stats.

XG
1.86 v 1.10

Big Chances
3 v 1

Possession
62% v 38%

Goal Attempts
11 v 9

Attempts on Target
5 v 4

Touches in opposition box
20 v 14

All in Boro's favour.

But, having been at the game and watching the extended highlights since, i don't think we were unlucky. If anything we were lucky to score at all. Our goal was very lucky. Azaz mis-hit a freekick and their defender mis hit his clearance and the ball landed in a position that meant Edmonson had a chance he could barely miss and accounted for 0.76 of our total xG. That moment of luck is not identifiable in the stats.

Their keeper only made one good save I'd say. The one from Doak (and to be honest we only got that chance because he pushed a fairly tame effort from Lath into a bad area). The rest of his saves were routine.

That Doak effort registered 0.43 xG. I think that is way above what it actually represented. The keeper smothered himself really well, there's no way that's a 2 in 5 chance.

The only good chances we actually created ourselves through a bit of quality were:

The early Azaz header which he should have finished. It was through bad luck that he missed. It's because he missed the target and therefore poor application.

And the Lath header from Azaz's cross. Again, Lath missed the target so it's not down to bad luck. It was through poor execution of the finish.

Those chances registered 0.17 and 0.19. So those 4 moments represent the bulk of our xG rating. Apart from that we had handful of low chance pot shots.

It's not like their Keeper was pulling off wonder saves or we had chances blocked off the line etc. There was nothing unlucky about it. We just didn't show enough quality to create good opportunities and the couple of decent opportunities we did create, we squandered by mixing the target.

It's not bad luck. It's poor performance by our front players.
You probably shouldn't use stats to judge any single game b g. Well you can, but the conclusions may well be very wrong.
 
I don’t think xG v actual result is a case of lucky / unlucky. More a case of clinical or not.

Eg the Lath and Azaz chances. We should have scored, but we didn’t. We weren’t unlucky we just weren’t clinical enough. Been the case all season.

I’d like to think it’s more likely to come good rather than not creating the chances in the first place though.
I looked at xg a couple of years ago and tried to see if it could be used to generate income from trading it somehow.

Here's what I found. It's the most accurate indication of the winner of a match after the game had been played, except the final score. It's the most accurate single stat to predict the winner of a game before kick off. It's better than league position, believe it or not. There is some bad stuff though. It loses you money, or at least it did in the 6k results I looked at. It loses a lot of money as well.

When I did this analysis I used the xg for the current season only. I normalised it over 90 minutes and the games had to be league games and finally both teams had to have completed 8 games in the current season. It's an awful predictive stat if you want to make money. This is because it's over backed not because it's useless.

The question you asked it may be lucky v unlucky over a handful of games. Over a season a team scores very close to its xg.

Some examples from the top of the championship last year. XG followed by accrual goals scored
Leicester 86. 89
Ipswich. 75. 92
Leeds. 81. 81
Southampton 81. 87


Bottom
Rotherham 32. 37
Huddersfield. 49. 48
Birmingham. 50. 50
 
So would you say Ipswich were lucky or just extremely clinical? I don’t think they’d be able to do it again!
 
Running-Kruger kicks in at that point for many people. If they don’t know it, it probably isn’t worth knowing and is nonsense. 🤷🏻‍♂️

It’s long been the case that intellectualism has been mistrusted by the masses. Now that football is intellectualised with data, analysis, and degrees of emotional empathy, the old skool fan distrusts it
Perhaps. I prefer to think of it as preserving the old ways ala jam and Jerusalem.
 
So would you say Ipswich were lucky or just extremely clinical? I don’t think they’d be able to do it again!
I have no idea. When we beat em with a late free kick they were a bit ineffective I thought. I didn't see enough of them but over 46 games they created the best chances and scored them at roughly an average rate. It's kinda the point of xg, I suppose.

I posted boro's xg from last season on Saturday, I think

Boro. 69. 71

We beat our xg, though again we scored at very close to the rate our chances suggested we would.
 
I have no idea. When we beat em with a late free kick they were a bit ineffective I thought. I didn't see enough of them but over 46 games they created the best chances and scored them at roughly an average rate. It's kinda the point of xg, I suppose.

I posted boro's xg from last season on Saturday, I think

Boro. 69. 71

We beat our xg, though again we scored at very close to the rate our chances suggested we would.
Oops I was talking about Leicester.

Ipswich will roughly match their xg over the season. Don't think they will be that much over, it's likely to be an anomaly.
 
I’m a progressive not a traditionalist if you hadn’t already worked that out
Room for both. We should all be free to enjoy football in whatever way we choose. Stats are my thing. If you dislike that, ignore them.

I get frustrated by people who say they are nonsense or misuse them, but each to their own.
 
But we were like this for big spells last season and we didn't address it, we go on runs where it works and runs were it doesn't.

If we want a tilt at the autos, (already looking a stretch) or upper play-offs with a solid chance of progressing through them, we simply can not be this 'streaky' where we play our best stuff and only get a win ratio of 3 games from 9 from it. We must be better, we must be more ruthless when we are on top.

Our points against the bottom six last season was pretty poor, our opening to this season was spectacularly benevolent from the fixture computer. We have been the better team for the majority of most games this season, for little return in goals and points.

This isn't a one off period of games where we have been unbelievably unlucky, or the opposition defence and keeper are having worldies to keep us out. A lot of games we are simply not working the keeper enough, we try an extra pass rather than shooting, we shoot poorly, weak shots near the keeper or under hit / scuffed efforts.

This isn’t bad luck, a few games you could say so, but we have been performing like this against a lot of teams for 18 months, maybe even getting on for two years now.

Without Forss and Akpom carrying a sustained goal threat from the three behind we are powder puff and have not really addressed it.

Archer, Giles, Forss, Akpom and Ramsey are all much better players than we have available now, who scored when we were on top and playing well. With McGree and Jones and others chipping in too.

Lath and Azaz have been beyond poor as goal scorers, I accept they are playing their part in the team, but the 9 & 10 are there to score.

They are not, and it is a huge concern that is currently derailing our season. Unfortunately we have nobody to replace either of them as far I can see, until Conway / Gilbert are back fit, on one of those is an unproven punt.

We need to change something to get some more ‘real’ threat on goal, the bizzare signing of Burgzorg doesn't look like it will address any of our short comings, I feel pretty confident saying Coburn would be more of an asset to bring on if we are chasing games.

Great xg doesn't seem a huge positive to me, it says one of the most important parts of your team is performing very poorly, over a sustained period now.

How long do the people who think it is great and only matter of time give before wanting something to change?

If we are tenth / eleventh after 18 games and top of the xg table, is everything still rosy and it's just a matter of time before we start battering teams?

Oh and our injuries are still an absolute joke too! Which can't be helping things at all either.
Great xG just says you're creating a lot of good chances. So it's a positive in that respect.

xG is not a negative if you're missing those chances. The fact you're missing the chances is the negative.

xG alone only tells part of the picture. It doesn’t say "everything is fine". It also isn't useless.

It just tells a story, one that I think most would agree with whether you like xG or think it's hokum - we've created a lot of very good chances so far and missed more of them than you would expect to.
 
I think very rarely can you say you are unlucky if you are ahead on any metric if you lose. We were ahead v Stoke in the LC on xG and probably other stats too but we weren't remotely unlucky. We missed a load of good chances and defended poorly.

If the keeper has a blinder then maybe. Rotherham A last season when they scored from one chance, we should have had a pen and Johansson had a great game could be seen as unlucky. But even then we missed chances.
 
You probably shouldn't use stats to judge any single game b g. Well you can, but the conclusions may well be very wrong.
I was just replying to RW's point implying stats can be used to say a team is unlucky or lucky. I was giving the example of that one match where it may seem from the stats that we were unlucky but we weren't if you watched the game. I could extend that opinion over the 9 games but the post was long enough without analysing every goalscoring opportunity of the season 😁. We aren't underachieving versus our xG scoring because we are unlucky. We are underachieving because we aren't performing.

I get frustrated by people who say they are nonsense or misuse them, but each to their own
The problem is Laughing, you throw stats out all the time and whenever anyone quotes any stats that contend your opinion you just claim they are misusing them. It's not always the case. There's more than just you on this board that have a knowledge of statistics 👍🏻
 
I was just replying to RW's point implying stats can be used to say a team is unlucky or lucky. I was giving the example of that one match where it may seem from the stats that we were unlucky but we weren't if you watched the game. I could extend that opinion over the 9 games but the post was long enough without analysing every goalscoring opportunity of the season 😁. We aren't underachieving versus our xG scoring because we are unlucky. We are underachieving because we aren't performing.


The problem is Laughing, you throw stats out all the time and whenever anyone quotes any stats that contend your opinion you just claim they are misusing them. It's not always the case. There's more than just you on this board that have a knowledge of statistics 👍🏻
Your last paragraph just isn't true. I see a lot of poor statistical analysis and if someone wants to argue the point I'll stick to the facts.

When the analysis is good I wouldn't argue.

An example would be that we were poor at finishing last season. We weren't, we matched our xg over the season almost exactly. We scored at exactly the rate we should have.

You might argue that we missed loads of chances we probably shouldn't. The truth is what people refer to as sitters generally aren't. I think Azaz missed header at the weekend was. 3. Not really a sitter they get missed more often than they are scored.

Over this season we will, roughly, match our xg as we do every season. So will azaz and lath,assuming they play enough games to sort out the natural variance in stats.
 
You might argue that we missed loads of chances we probably shouldn't. The truth is what people refer to as sitters generally aren't. I think Azaz missed header at the weekend was. 3. Not really a sitter they get missed more often than they are scored.
Here's a good example of where you pick and choose when stats can and can't be used to good effect.

You have just said in a previous post that stats shouldn't used to judge a single game and here you are using a stat to judge a single chance because it fits your narrative that Azaz isn't playing poorly. You've been a big defender of his.

And this is where xG massively falls down. There's no way that Azaz should have registered as low as it did. It actually registered at 0.19 according to sofascore. Lath's registered at 0.17 unsurprisingly as it was from.a very similar location and also with his head. Laths chance was clearly much more difficult.

The 0.19 will be calculated from 1000s of headers from similar position. How many of them will have been totally free headers and a very comfortable height? Most of them will have been challenged, at awkward heights etc. Absolutely no coach or manager would be happy with players missing that chance 4 times out of 5 because it was clearly a chance that you would expect to score more than it's missed. Laths? Well it was more difficult than Azaz's as it was challenged and also was a bit more awkward in terms of height. 0.17 is probably about fair.

Obviously like any stat, the bigger sample, the more accurate it becomes and even over the match, the xG probably levels out to some extent as Doak's chance should never have been 0.43. It was much tougher than that. So maybe collectively 0.43 + 0.19 + 0.17 isn't far off.
 
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