23 down, 15 to go. It must be time to compare progress this season with last season again. You should know the rules by now, but if you’re new to this; I not only compare where we are now compared to the same number of games last season (chronological), I also compare the same fixtures with the 3 promoted teams replacing the 3 relegated teams (apples for apples).
It’s inescapable that we are 7 points worse of this year than
If you hadn’t seen this game and just saw the statistics below, you might think that Fulham had a good chance in this game and were unlucky not to get something. They weren’t and they weren’t.
The possession finished 55/45 in Fulham’s favour, but midway through the first half it was 43/57. I know this because I was poking fun of the official Fulham Twitter account when they were claiming it was “pretty even stuff”. No, it wasn’t.
However, we
Hopefully you’ve spotted that I include the number of good and bad passes in the Statshacks and maybe you find it interesting. Maybe you don’t. There’s a certain logic which suggests that the higher the number of passes, the more expansive the style of play. That’s crude and overly simplistic, but there is enough correlation that I thought I’d look at how we’ve been doing over the last few seasons.
One thing that’s immediately obvious when looking at
This doesn’t include the Arsenal game, but as we haven’t had an update in 2010 so far I thought it was about time to check out the latest Actim Index. Gabby’s dropped down a place to 5th, but it’s an impressive foursome ahead of him – Cesc Fabregas, Didier Drogba, Nicolas Anelka and Wayne Rooney. Not too shabby then.
5th Gabriel Agbonlahor – 350 points
15th Ashley young – 310 points
18th Richard Dunne – 304 points
24th James Milner – 293
Maybe not a classic, but pretty entertaining, especially in the second half, and a very even affair this one. Arsenal hit the woodwork twice, but otherwise it was Aston Villa doing most of the pressing. Let’s just take a quick look at the shots either side managed to fire off:-
The blue are on target. The red are off-target and the dotted red lines indicate the two shots which hit the post and crossbar. The grey lines are
Last month I took a brief look at how Aston Villa’s passing statistics stacked up against the other teams in the Premiership and although we’re just in the bottom half of the table in terms of the number of passes strung together, I think it was clear that we are simply efficient in our approach. To call us a “long ball team” is a mischaracterization.
Apparently Arsene Wenger has used this term to discuss the way we played against his
Martin O’Neill has set the bar pretty high for himself. Around this time last year I was able to proudly proclaim our best ever Premiership season at that stage with 41 points from 21 games. I also predicted that we wouldn’t trail off during the remainder of the season, so the least said about that the better I think. I’m due to update the comparison of this season versus last season series shortly, so I won’t get into that here,
I’m sure it’s something that is, and will be, looked at back at Bodymoor, but surely the fact that goals from set pieces are apparently drying up has to be an area of concern right now. We had 16 corners in this game and won 9 free kicks inside the West Ham half which I’m pretty certain all were used to either shoot directly at goal or at least deliver the ball into the box.
Throughout the game we had
I don’t know about you, but when you’re as easily distracted as I am it’s hard to get anything done. Earlier today I was researching some statistics when I stumbled on this fantastic graph which shows Aston Villa’s Goal Difference from the Premiership years plotted cumulatively.
No single statistic can accurately depict much in football, let alone going on for two decades worth of performance in the top flight. However, it’s inescapably true that the teams with the best