Asked on a thread, how many points has Neil Etheridge gained us this year?

[Eric the Half a Bee]

Are there any stats like this available?
I know PL attackers have such stats for how many points their goals have gotten teams..so surely someone has the information?

I guess it would be a difficult one to gauge. A striker scoring a goal, simple or extraordinary, to change the result gets the credit for it. If a goalkeeper makes a routine save, does that constitute gaining points for the team? Does this extend to having to make a save that most keepers wouldn't make? Would punching away a corner that would have been surely headed in count?

Strikers miss easy chances; if goalkeepers fail to make easy saves or make mistakes, the result is usually conceding a goal. Often a good goalkeeper that rarely makes mistakes goes relatively unnoticed. When they make world class saves they then get more recognition. How do you judge all of that and determine whether a keeper has gained points for a team? You can't just do it on saves alone. It's tricky.

Perhaps there should be something like xS - expected saves. I'm not sure if xG allows for the division the team is in. 25 yarders are far more common in the Premier League than League 2, so to expect goals to be scored from similar situations in higher divisions doesn't work. It would be the same with xS. That would be an interesting, if not by any means foolproof, way of showing which goalkeepers are the best shot stoppers. Saying that, the Birmingham miss from the corner would probably have gone in 99 times out of a hundred. The finisher made such a hash of it that it would no doubt hugely boost a goalkeeper's xS stats, when that goalkeeper would have no right to them!