Luke Young’s recent interview caused a predictable little debate here and there about how Carlos Cuellar isn’t a right back, etc. etc. Yes, he’s a better defender, but “he doesn’t offer the same as Luke going forward”. Or words to that effect. Seems like a good time to put their stats alongside each other.
I’ve trawled through the 38 Premiership games from the 2009/10 season and pulled the metrics for the games each player played at right back
I haven’t had chance to get an End of Season Review post out for a little while, so I’m throwing this one in as a “quickie”. If you’re expecting to find Aston Villa at the bottom of this squad rotation table, you won’t be disappointed. If you feel so inclined, you could take a quick glance at the tables for the previous two seasons first. You’ll find that 2009/10, on this basis, was an improvement. Not
Here’s a little statistical curiosity which helps flesh out the picture I’ve been painting recently of relativity. Go back to February 10th and take a look at the table which shows the records of teams against clubs in the top half of the table only. We were second behind Chelsea ahead of our game against Man Utd, which was a draw and left our position intact.
Here’s the same table at the end of the season:-
Team
Pld
W
D
L
F
A
GD
Pts/Gm
Pts
Chelsea
18
10
3
5
40
18
22
1.83
33
Man Utd
18
10
3
5
28
19
9
1.83
33
Tottenham
18
9
4
5
25
24
1
1.72
31
Man City
18
7
5
6
30
24
6
1.44
26
Arsenal
18
7
4
7
33
26
7
1.38
25
Everton
18
6
7
5
30
31
-1
1.38
25
Liverpool
18
6
5
7
19
20
-1
1.27
23
Aston
I recently mentioned in flippant fashion that League attendance was down a little at Villa Park this past season, but since we had more cup games – leading to 2 trips to Wembley – and less European matches, I thought it worth looking at overall attendance this year.
Despite falling at the first hurdle in the Europa League, Villa Park still played host to 25 games this season, compared with 27 in 2008/09. When you consider that somewhere in the
As part of the 2009/10 Season Review, I thought it wouldn’t be bad idea to actually list all 52 games that Villa played during the season in order. I’ve highlighted the scores of the games that we lost – there’s only 11 – and provided links to Statshacks where available. There’s some summary statistics at the bottom. Plenty more coming, I’m just a bit slow getting to it.
It’s taken a little longer to pull this post together
A. 1933
Huh?
Simple. We finished 6th the last 3 seasons in a row. The last time Aston Villa achieved 3 back to back seasons finishing in the top 6 of the top flight English league was 1933. 2nd in 1930/31, 5th in 1931/32 and 2nd again in 1932/33. We all know that we’ve done better than 6th on many occasions since then, but we haven’t managed to string three top 6 seasons together. Until now.
Some people
We’ve been checking in on the Actim Top 100 Index all season long on a roughly monthly basis and I’m very happy to include the final standings in the 2009/10 Season Review series as Villa actually top out the team table with no less than 10 players in the 100. If that surprises you, wait until you see who came in right behind us!
Before I get to that, here are the 10 players who finished in the Top 100
Just in case you weren’t aware, I’ve been gathering the player ratings submitted to The Telegraph and Sky Sports by fans at least 24 hours after each game to compile the Player of the Month series.
To create the Play of the Year award I’ve taken the average ratings for players who have played some part in at least half of the league matches during 2009/10.
If you’re interested, Martin O’Neill has utilised 23 players in the league during the course of
This is obviously something that should have been done before we played our first game in May, let alone before the season was over, but there you go, it’s done now.
James Milner wins the Player of the Month award for the fourth time this season. Congratulations, James etc. (Can you tell this post is more of a formality?)
I won’t be doing a separate award for the month of May, but I’ll include the scores for the final 2 games