Right, no more fannying around in spreadsheets. This is the news:
Collins John is back! Having seen his value fall faster than Andy Johnson in the penalty box, he’s back at ours for treatment. Is it a ruse though? Last year you’ll recall that Collins scored three against Man City up there, one of which was allowed. He also scored against the same opponents two years ago. How about that? Secret weapon?
Fulham linked with young Darlington goalkeeper. Okay.
Richard Dunne is 50/50 for the weekend’s game. Richard Dunne and I go way back. I lived in Ireland from 2002-2004, and a good mate of mine lived right near Lansdowne Road and we had tickets for many sporting events there (including Shelbourne vs Deportivo La Coruna!). It’s a fantastic old stadium, with terraces at one end and a stand that shakes when the Dart train passes through it. Anyway, back then Richard Dunne was not the colossus he is now. Or he was, but not in the same way. Richard Dunne was extremely wide astern. That’s all. He was having issues at the time and it’s great to see that he’s made such a success of himself, but back then he was very conspicuously big.
Harry Redknapp denies interest in Jimmy Bullard. The rumours are that he’ll stick with us come what may and re-evaluate things in January, but that could be as made up as the original rumours. So who knows?
We will owe Leeds money if David Healy scores a fifth goal. Not the highest expectations then!
There! Back to normal.
Based on discussions below, here are ‘dirty’ and ‘pressure’ points for all our games this season, as well as the Bet365 odds for the game on the right.
As you can see by my made up ‘pressure’ metric, we really did batter Reading. The idea that we should have changed the team for the Liverpool match is understandable, but it is very very clear why this was not done.
And to further discussions, to me the ‘dirty’ indicator seems to have little correlation with results. The ‘pressure’ one does. The games we felt hard done by are the games where our pressure score is higher than the opposition’s. Similarly, there are some games where we were fortunate to get away with what we got.
It seems fairly clear to me that you win football matches by creating chances, not by committing fouls. In away games this year we have out-fouled, out carded, out all sorts our opponents, but until Reading we had not outplayed anyone. That’s the difference maker (this is stating the obvious to the extreme, of course, but there’s no evidence that fouling people more or getting more yellow cards actually helps, which was the original point of all this).
And this is last season. What a battering we took on our travels! I was just behind the goal in the Portsmouth game, Niemi was in superhuman form that day. This all shows just how unusual the Reading win was. It’s eerie how closely this year’s home draw with Derby follows last year’s with Watford.
Long exploration, the conclusions of which might not be reliable… work in progress
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