I’ve talked about this many, many times: possession football is all well and good, but if you don’t move the ball into position to score goals often enough, you don’t win many games. Our home record was 13th best in the league last season as we consistently struggled to roll inferior opposition over and that was to be the key challenge to address this season.
If Gérard Houllier learned anything from his position in the stands, it’s that grinding out
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It lived up to the preview, we got what we expected at the Britannia Stadium. When Stoke had the ball, they were direct and made effective use of possession. When they didn’t, they dropped deep into two well organised banks of four, the midfield almost on top of the back line. Very tough to break down.
During the opening spell, 15 to 20 minutes say, Gabby & Ash were struggling to get into the game, both occupying fairly
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Tactical analysis seems almost pointless, if ever there was a display based on mental qualities such as determination, commitment and spirit, this was it. The stats will speak for themselves, so I’ll just throw in a couple of factoids, tug my forelock and bid you good day.
Firstly, Stewart Downing. Not the best use of the ball when he saw it, but he struggled to get involved in the game. For once his central position in the average
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Apologies for the delay. This one hurts, it took some serious motivation to pull it together. I still haven’t seen the whole game, not sure I want to right now, so I can’t really comment on what went wrong. You’ve no doubt all got your own ideas.
I would like to pause briefly to look at the team passing maps side by side though. It’s frequently the case that this level of data won’t reveal much, it’s
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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
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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
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Keith Andrews hit a shot from a little over 25 yards out on the hour mark that forced Brad Friedel’s only save of the match. It was a fine save, but still reasonably routine that you’d expect most goal keepers at this level to deal with with comfort. That was Blackburn’s only shot on target during the 90 minutes, but they somehow managed to head back up the M6 with three points.
In reality, Hoilett shouldn’t have
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I wouldn’t blame you if you’re not that interested in the stats from this one, it might feel a little anti-climatic now I suppose. Nevertheless, I’ll chuck the usual statistics in and for the “feature stats” I’m going to break our passing down into 10 minute chunks graphically which demonstrates how the game evolved quite nicely I think.
Wingers
One quick point about Downing and Ash; they spent much more time on their natural wings during this game, they usually swap
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I intended to open this post talking briefly about the penalty, but once I dived into the subject I found it deserved its own post. This post got left on the back burner. I apologise, but I realise that you don’t really care about the statistics from this game; if ever there was a game where only one stat counted it was this one, right? Yup, we won, that’s all that matters.
So, let’s be brief then. I’ve
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