Reply With QuoteSpot on.Originally Posted by Maurice Swan
The statos on here take note
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Man City 76% wolves 24%
Result??? 0-2....................just shows....classic case of counter and CLINICAL finishes.
Spot on.
The statos on here take note
Yes, all of that Man City possession clearly counts for nothing, apart from a league and cup double last season, semi final Champions league etc. Man City do that to most teams.
It should be noted that Man City had more attempts on goal and on target but weren't clinical enough, though they usually have more attempts than they managed today.
I remember Liverpool having 40 attempts on goal against Sunderland some years ago and drawing 0-0.
I think most people realise possession stats are pretty meaningless on their own, though teams winning with so little possession are an exception.
Should we take note of their record breaking seasons for the past 2 years? You have to be dense to look at possession without contextSpot on.
The statos on here take note
Shit! You got me
Although they aren't a possession for possession's sake outfit and can be quite direct at times, Wolves will be looking to get that figure up and around fifty/sixty per cent when they next play, because they see twenty four per cent as too low as it would mean that they would not be doing as well as they want to be if they were only getting that much of the ball every week - results like yesterday's will always happen on an occasional basis, but normally they would mean there could only be one winner.
Two more nails in the coffin of tippy tappy shite. Hooray.
Route one is the game.
Sides are increasingly moving away from route one, even in the lower leagues.
Man city have been averaging 100 goals a season with that "tippy tappy shite". Which route one sides have been more entertaining to watch or more successful?
Weird to call Man City tippy tappy. And even weirder saying that style of football is ending after a team who blew everyone else away last year lost 1 match.
Also would you really rather watch a team playing like us than Man City of Liverpool?
It's mad how bias can affect people, some people on here now seem to support route one no possession football as a cause and hate any sort of passing just because of how City set up.
This is so true, can anyone tell me what is the biggest achievement of any side playing the way we do in, say, the last twenty five years?
Grown men letting bias like that affect their opinions always gets me, if we'd been playing like the jacks when they had Rodgers and they had Warnock managing them the same people would be slagging off "anti football".
No team is winning a champions league or premier league playing route one give the ball away football.
In fairness I don't thing Leicester were far off it when they won the league although they did have some good players
I can see where you're coming from, but imo that was fast counter attacking football and longer passes with purpose. Spurs do it quite a bit too. I think when we strated out promotion season we had a couple of games where we played well like that.
I wouldn't say what we are doing now is comparable at all though.
Leicester is probably the best example of something quite near to our approach winning a truly significant title or cup in the last quarter of a century. They certainly weren't overly bothered with what the possession figures looked like, but, as you say, there were many differences with how they played and how we have gone about our business this season and for most of the time when we were last in the Championship.
As already mentioned, Leicester came relatively close when they won the league.
That season, 20.2% of their passes were classed as 'long'; we hit 24.6% last season in the top flight. 37.1% of their long balls were accurate, compared with 34.7% of ours. Their shorter passing game was better than ours as well, where they managed 78.9% short pass accuracy compared with 73.4% that we managed. Overall, Leicester won the league with 44.7% possession - we had 39.1%
Overall possession and amount of long balls hit are crucial here. Leicester hit 2696 long balls the season they won the league, we hit only 2513, yet Leicester managed 3,143 more passes overall than us, meaning they managed more short passes than us in terms of all passes attempted.
This is crucial when you look at key passes. I have no idea how these are defined, but assuming the criteria to be largely constant, Leicester hit 390 key passes in winning the league, we hit 295. As a percentage of all passes attempted, Leicester managed 0.04% more key passes than us, which is virtually negligible.
It's entirely fair to say that had we managed more passes and kept hold of the ball a little better, we would have managed more key passes. As it was, we managed a similar level of key passes to Leicester despite being worse passers of the ball, both long and short. More of our key passes came from set pieces than Leicester, meaning Leicester managed more key passes from open play.
It's possible to use a long ball game to great effect, though success is the exception not the norm. That Leicester side was a one off, built on an excellent defence, Kante and Drinkwater being so effective in the middle and Vardy and Mahrez being unplayable up front. Other sides have done ok in the Premier League with possession stats of around 45%. When it plummets as low as ours was (worst possession stats in the PL for a decade), we end up doing too much defending and haven't got enough of the ball to make enough key passes. As it was, we nearly survived, but statistically we would have had more chance of staying up had we kept the ball and passed it a little better. That's not advocating tippy tappy, but it's advocating controlling games a little better rather than looking constantly for the long ball. It's difficult to compare us to any other teams as their passing stats aren't as bad as ours.
Exactly Eric, I've got no issues with long passes but long aimless hoofs to no one and giving up the ball so easily is what annoys me. Spurs and Leicester do it well, but there is a difference between a long pass and a hoof to an isolated striker.
Last season, Bournemouth hit the lowest number of accurate long balls. We hit the 2nd lowest number. Liverpool hit nearly 300 more accurate long balls than us over the course of the season, Man City over 200, so there's no harm in going long. What neither of them did was hit lots of aimless, inaccurate long balls. Only Burnley hit more inaccurate long passes than us.
The fact is, that as good as Leicester's achievement was, they wouldn't have had a hope in hell if they were competing against this Liverpool or Man City team.
I'd go as far as to say that if this current Leicester team were competing against the Leicester side that won the league, this Leicester team would finish higher!
Teams completely underestimated Leicester that season and believed the narrative that the wheels would eventually fall off. They never adapted tactics til it was too late and allowed them to have ridiculous amounts of space in behind game after game.
Completely agree, I could see them getting top 4 this season.I'd go as far as to say that if this current Leicester team were competing against the Leicester side that won the league, this Leicester team would finish higher!
They were also helped by the fact that the previous champions, Chelsea, went off the rails early doors, Man City never got going and got worse. Arsenal had a great chance to win the league that season but had too many poor results. In the end they ended up going head to head with Spurs with a large points advantage. I used to laugh at people who said Leicester would fall apart as they weren't used to winning things - Spurs were in exactly the same situation and, as expected, couldn't keep up in the end.
Leicester won the title with 81 points - the lowest since Man Utd in 2011.
The point really is about control and what we’re seeing from Cardiff is a lack of, so a victory when you play like that owes a lot more to good fortune than the teams (playing long or otherwise) who actually bother to put some thought into their passing...
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