I’ve been doing a little research. I worked these same stats a while ago in the Luke Young vs Carlos Cuellar at right back comparison, so you should be familiar. However, this time I didn’t isolate games played in the same position – they’re both versatile midfielders – and I’m not comparing data from the same season.
It seems to me that we’re all optimistic about getting the Stephen Ireland from two years ago. For whatever reason, and
I finally got round to compiling manager performance data going back a wee bit further than 1992. 1946 to be precise; the first league season after World War II.
There’s very little narrative required, but I should explain the data is limited to the top flight only, seasons in the old Divisions Two and Three were excluded. All matches were recalculated on a basis of three points for a win. A handful of games without a permanent manager
I’ve been working on developing Statshack 2.0, but I have to confess that I left myself with more to do than I realised and despite a late night last night, it’s still not ready. Also, I’m not sure why, but the average position map data doesn’t seem to be working, so I’m using my own interpretation of the general positions the players took up for now.
System wise, it was more of a 4-4-1-1 than a 4-2-3-1, although they may
I spotted this wonderful post by OutByEaster? on Villa Talk late last night and re-tweeted a link to it, but as most of you would have missed that and it’s so good, I thought it worth dropping a quick post here to draw your attention to it.
It’s a long article, but it’s most definitely worth your time, but I’d suggest one or two minor caveats. The following paragraph is a little misleading, but it’s extremely timely since it follows
Ian posted an interesting comparison between the 2008/09 Aston Villa and Tottenham employee costs at Aston Villa News & Views recently and noticed an intriguing difference in the number of people employed by the clubs given their apparent similarities.
Tottenham’s wage bill has been a popular curiosity for Villa fans since they were evidently able to get through 2008/09 spending £10m less than we did on employees.
I share Ian’s confusion about how Tottenham can apparently run their operation with considerably less
I’ve been meaning to get to this for some time and as transfer hungry fans start rolling out the old memes, such as Martin O’Neill “has taken us as far as he can” and is “useless in the transfer market”, it seems as good a time as any. I want to put the last few seasons, and especially 2009/10, in a larger context so that the progress and trend can easily be seen by everybody. So it’s time
I seem to remember mentioning the Castrol Football Index a couple of months back as I had hopes that I’d be able to use it as a regular feature here in addition to the Actim Top 100 Index. Unfortunately, Castrol only post updates once a month, usually a couple of weeks in arrears, so it’s not been current enough for me to use as I hoped.
However, I like the way it works and they’ve just posted the final update
I’ve read a lot of criticism of Martin O’Neill’s technical nous, or lack thereof according to some. A lot of it has to do with formation, people want to see something new and sexy. They want to keep up with what the Man Utd’s and Chelsea’s are doing. It’s no secret that I’m a fan of 4-2-3-1, but you’ve got to have the personnel and all systems will ultimately boil down to the personnel employed. Square
I’ve been mucking around with the Actim Top 100 Index for a good few years now: I used to publish regular updates in an old forum before Aston Villa Central existed. It’s far from perfect, but it’s a pretty decent rule of thumb type of measure.
Someone once asked me whether the Villa players generally do so well because they play so many games. The short answer is yes.
However, they still have to do the business on the pitch