It’s been a while since I confused myself with numbers, so try this: above you see the average goals for and against required to finish in each position for the last six seasons. Before you protest, goals for and against are a remarkably good proxy for finishing position, and by taking a medium term average like this we get a fair yardstick for what’s required to finish where.
As you can see, last year’s 38-60 goals for and against record was historically dangerous. We survived – just – but a repeat will be a very bad thing.
So the question is: how many more goals for and against can we expect this season?
The tempting thing would be to look at Roy’s performance last year, but that’s fraught with danger: for one thing he spent the early days in what we might call a ‘teaching’ phase; for another we can’t really judge the last few games by any rational criteria. They happened, we have no idea how, but they were somewhat special. So it’s probably best to stick with the overall F/A values as some kind of negative regression to the mean guesstimate for what our team was like last season.
Have we added much? We certainly have. Mark Schwarzer is a good goalkeeper. Antti Niemi, Kasey Keller and Tony Warner were alright goalkeepers. We have a season of Brede Hangeland now, and we might get another centre-back in. We have two more right backs. We ought to have someone who can tackle in midfield. You have to think that the goals against tally will decrease. By how much? 60 goals against was a lot last year… the average goals against for teams finishing 12-16th was somewhere between 53 and 55, so let’s say 54 and be done with it. I think our defence should be 6 goals against better. It seems reasonable.
What about at the other end? While we didn’t have a specialist centre-forward for much of last season, I’m inclined to think that the people who played up front did quite well. Clint got six in the August to December shift, which is pretty good, and McBride, Kamara and Healy all chipped in after that. We have Bobby Zamora and Andrew Johnson now, but I still believe that much of forward play is the chances your team makes, and we will be trotting out the same midfield as last season, for the most part. Zoltan Gera seems to have had about 8 assists per season in the last three years, so he’s certainly going to help here, and our new forwards are arguably a bit better than our old ones, so I think we’re definitely looking at an increase here. How much?
Does 6 goals more sound about right here as well? If you think that sounds low then I might agree with you, but this would take us up to 44, which is the 12th place goals for yardstick, so that seems quite optimistic.
Where are we? If, somehow, we can shave off 6 concessions and score 6 more, we’re looking at F44 A 54, which would leave us somewhere between 12th and 16th. Does this seem like a possible achievement?
I think it does. The team should be more solid at the back now Roy’s had a while in charge. I’m quite confident we can make our 6 concession target. Up front? I’m less sure of this. Gera, Zamora and Johnson ought to make a big difference, and ought to be able to score a few more goals, but I don’t see us playing a particularly open, high scoring game. Add to this the old truism that you have to improve to stand still in this league, and I don’t know that it’s a given that we’ll be scoring that much.
Either way, I hope this has suggested that improvements do not have to be huge (six goals at each end over a whole season doesn’t sound like much) and that we are well capable of a higher league position. But football’s a fecker sometimes and all kinds of bad things can happen without good reason, and it doesn’t take much to derail a perfectly promising season. As I’ve shown in the past with various monte-carlo simulations, a team that should finish 15th can easily end up anywhere between 7th and 20th through sheer luck alone, so there’s that.
Nevertheless, it’s fairly clear that a) we’re better and b) we should finish higher. Which is a good thing.
