Our long passing game in stats

All courtesy of whoscored.com, some have been calculated from stats available

Possession - 39.9% (20th)
Pass completion - 64.6% (20th)

At present, Newcastle are the next side above us in both of those tables, having 2.4% more possession and 7.2% more successful passes. Some of this can be put down to us playing more long passes than any other team in the division (23.5% of our passes are long, next come Burnley with 21.1%).

Surely such a tactic, as it is used so often, must be a success? Well, er, no. Nearly 65% of our long balls are inaccurate, easily the worst record in the division. 47% of our long balls come from one player, Neil Etheridge, hitting 430 of our 920 long balls so far this season. His long ball inaccuracy rate comes in at 68.5%, only fractionally better than one goalkeeper in the top flight. 97.5% of Etheridge's passes are long, making it entirely predictable and giving the ball back to Etheridge for him to whack it long first time is a tactic that we have to vary at least. Teams know what's coming and how to deal with it. We also don't have the physicality to deal with some teams to win second balls and be more aggressive with such a tactic.

These are our 10 players who play the highest percentage of long balls - percentage of passes that are long / long ball success rate (there's probably a surprising name or two in there):

Neil Etheridge 97.5% 31.5%
Bruno Ecuele Manga 25.4% 31.6%
Joe Ralls 24.6% 45.8%
Sol Bamba 20.4% 40.2%
Greg Cunningham 16.8% 53.3%
Aron Gunnarsson 14.7% 35.0%
Joe Bennett 14.5% 35.4%
Sean Morrison 14.3% 31.0%
Josh Murphy 13.6% 20.8%
Junior Hoilett 13.0% 26.5%

Lee Peltier would come next on the list, but he's not a full back who plays many long balls, probably because of his 11% success rate.

Sadly, our short passing game is easily the worst in the Premier League as well, completing 73.5% of short passes, some 6% worse than the next worst team. We've attempted over 1,000 less short passes than Newcastle, who come 19th in that table, and over 1,300 less accurate short passes than Newcastle. Despite all of this, we have managed more shots on goal and on target than Brighton, Burnley and (just shots on goal) Newcastle.