305 – Thank You Jon Macken – Post 47

After 3 minutes of the game at Hartlepool on Saturday, Jon Macken scored a penalty for Walsall to put them one nil up and, in tucking away – indeed in that instance, in taking – the spot kick, do something that no Walsall player had done for 681 days. That left Huddersfield Town, 329 days after Gary Roberts put the seal on the 4-2 victory against Yeovil Town that sent them top of the league, as the team who have the longest penalty drought in the country.

Firstly, I wanted to know about the penalties Town had scored, but I wanted a little more than that. Hopefully this will enlighten me about the 12-yard phenomenon that I dreaded as a taker, but loved as a goalkeeper. The first thing I learnt was that the next time a Town player scores a penalty, it will be the 306^th penalty Town have scored in the Football League, which is 5.49% of the total tally (which is about right to me – one out of every 20 goals has been a spot-kick).

The current run, though, is nothing like as long as previous long runs without penalties; I knew we’d had at least one entire season without before, I remember the fuss when Paul Dalton broke the duck, but it turns out that this is the 16^th longest run (today is 334 days since Town went top against Yeovil, exactly 1 month shy of a year) without scoring a penalty. The longest ran for 735 days (that’s over 2 years, by a few days) and ended in a 2-2 draw at Portsmouth on 8^th Nov 1930; we’d have to go another 13 months without a spot-kick being converted to match that – 22^nd September 2012; which is a Saturday, so it could happen – I’d assume the dynamic runs of McDermott, Ward Hunt and Roberts would probably garner one by then, though.

The run that the 2-5 win at Crewe (Paul Dalton, as above) ended was the 3^rd longest run – see the first table here (the top 10 – end dates on the left, and take note of the game venues, of which more later) – and there’s been no shortage of occasions where Town have been whole seasons without penalties, something that the 2010/11 vintage have not yet accrued.

There was a few other things I wondered about when I was working through the statistics for this. One thing that I’d just always assumed, but never really known, was that there are more penalties now than there used to be. The game is quicker than it was, and players are far more likely to go to ground (lazy point, I know, but true) as well as referees far more likely to award spot-kicks. So yes, although the 2000s weren’t a golden era for Town converting penalties, there’s enough of a trend (black line) to suggest that there’s been a slow but gradual increase in the number of penalties awarded (well, certainly in the amount scored – I haven’t got figures for penalties missed outside the last few seasons), which looks set to continue for a while.

The other divides that are immediately apparent from the table I constructed were the disparity between penalties at home and away from home and, more strikingly, the results of the matches that penalties are scored in.

Town’s record in matches in which they’ve score a penalty is as follows. Played 298, Won 181, Drawn 69, Lost 48. That would be good for 612 points, at an average of 2.05 points per game. It pays, then, to get penalties awarded to you. (This much is obvious, though. This is a list of games in which Town have scored at least one goal – it makes sense they’ll have lost fewer) – that said, the most common of those penalty containing results are 2-1 victories (29) and 1-2 defeats (28), there’s only been 15 penalties that have been the only goals in Town victories, most recently Valentine’s Day 2006, when Chris Brandon scored at Blackpool. At Blackpool.

At Blackpool, then, being one of 97 penalties awarded away from home, compared to the 201 at Leeds Road/the McAlpine – just about double the amount. I thought it might be more than that, but certainly that confirms what you might think of penalties. A baying away end is far less likely to be rewarded than a baying three stands.

There’s a couple other curios I’d like to draw to attention. Penalties, if we were doing a Family Fortunes (Family Feud, for my US Readers) of what they mean, sometimes crop up as a nice way of completing a hat-trick for those players who have already netted twice. Unfortunately, I have no way of knowing the order of goals, but there’s been five occasions when Town players have netted hat-tricks containing penalties, so honourable mentions to Jack Malam (8-0 v Liverpool, 10^th Nov 1934), Peter Butler (4-1 v Scunthorpe Utd, 31^st Dec 1977), Joey Jones (4-0 v Cardiff City, 28^th April 1984), Dale Tempest (4-3 v Millwall, 17^th August 1985) and Phil Starbuck (4-5 @ Cambridge Utd, 26^th April 1994). Notably, and happily, all those games were won.

Secondly, there was a spell from 26^th November 1955 to 17^th December 1955 when Town scored three penalties in four games – the best such run in the club’s history. Vic Metcalfe got them all.

 Finally, I think you’ll like this, I certainly do. It’s a graph – big one – of the differences in days between when Town scored each penalty. Click on it for full-size appearance. So many thanks for Sam Parkin for breaking Walsall’s 681 day duck, and hopefully Huddersfield’s will be the next one to go. I’d plump for Lee Novak, I think.

21.74 – A Good Start (Pt 2 of 2) – Post 46

So we come to the first 10 games of the season. Now, as you’d expect, we cover about 50% of old ground here, but the two tables, at top and bottom, are far more revelatory of the seasons to come as, I guess, the better teams and weaker teams schedules ‘even out’ towards Christmas. By the end of 10 games, you’d expect a team to have gathered 21.74% of their points tally and, as before, the teams that are heading for promotion haven’t quite achieved that

ratio, and the ones that are heading for the drop haven’t quite fallen that far but, by 10 games, the gaps between the two are far closer which means that you’ve got a lot better idea by 10 games – particularly in seasons when there isn’t one team running away with it – of where you’ll end up.

So, looking at the table here you see that there’s only one season as before that the promoted teams were moving quicker than the average rate once (that – first – year that Leeds went postal and then collapsed) but the other four seasons has seen the top teams picking up on their first five games performance, but not quite looking like guaranteed promotion form (I find it strange

that the last two seasons have been the same, but that’s just me), a table that is repeated, in reverse, in the relegated teams table. The four fallers in 2006/07 fell away badly, as we’ve seen from the five game table, but other than that, they’ve not been far off the mark you’d expect – 24.55 is only around 3% above 21.74, and, as a secondary caveat to these teams, its also worth bearing in mind that a lot of these teams were recently promoted, so their early season form – particularly at home – is generally better than one would anticipate (or, in the case of Gillingham is 2009/10, is just good over the whole season).

What have we learned from these two posts, then?

Five games is still to early to draw any conclusions for the season, but by 10 games, the better teams will be beginning to show at the top part of the league, just as the weaker teams will be around the bottom somewhere.

Incidentally, I used the teams that got relegated for this chart, rather than those who gathered fewest points – Plymouth, notably, last season, skewed the figures a little, but only a little, with their creditable start.

10.89 – A Good Start (Pt 1 of 2) – Post 45

“I’m not going to look at the league table until 10 games in. Nothing’s really happened until then, and you can never tell after one game where anyone’s going to end up”

Well, now. Well, now. Is that the case? Remember Southampton’s slow start last season? Remember that Millwall were crippled by injuries and had to surge through. Remember also that Leeds were many points clear before their collapse, and Brighton were top of the league from very early on. So does that make a difference.

I’m going to take the answer to this in two parts and owe Jonathan Wilson (@jonawils) a massive debt of gratitude for the tools to solve this particular puzzle. I’m going to work with the seasons from 2006/07 to last year (five seasons, and fifteen promoted teams) to seek my answers, and hope to come to a conclusion.

How important is a good start? After 5 games, what sort of indication did we have that teams were going to prosper, or flounder? Mr Wilson worked his tallies out by comparing actual points tallies (% of final points totals) with the expected points percentages if they were gathered evenly throughout the season. I saw no reason to mess with his formula, though obviously, my sights were set a little lower than the top of the Premiership and my numbers a little more difficult to pin down.

As it happens, I was a little surprised by what I found – the variety was large but, by and large, the expected points tally (10.87%) was nowhere near matched, except in 2009/10, when Leeds’ start swept all before them, and led to the three

promoted sides gathering 10.90% of their total tallies in the first five games (as near as damn an average figure as you’re likely to find).

The other four seasons saw the promoted teams doing a bit of struggling while things levelled themselves out, from only 13 points (5.02%) in 2006/07 up to a more respectable 8.65% in 2010/11 – while Southampton dallied, Brighton and Peterborough’s houses got into order pretty quickly.

This can only help to illustrate that the extreme beginning of the season is really no indication at all of where teams will finish, as can checking what was happening with those teams who were going to drop out of the division in May, those four unfortunates. Well, I thought this was going to prove to be an opposite story at first, but it seems that Brentford’s glorious start and collapse was something of an anomaly, matched by the decent starts of

Bradford, Chesterfield and Rotherham to create the illusion that a good start generally meant a bad end to the season. Of course, as we’ve seen above, there’s a distinct regression to the mean with these early games, and the first five seem to go out of their way to prove that – 18.44% of their total tallies that the 2006/07 relegation vintage had gathered is almost double the rest of the tallies, and explains why the average figure (11.36%) is a touch over the 10.87% we’d expect if the games were equal across the season. The fact is, though, that 11.36% is a good deal higher than 7.60%, which indicates one thing very clearly – teams start a lot more evenly than they finish. The promoted teams gathered 100 point between 15 of them, while the relegated teams gathered the same figure amongst 20 – not a massive difference between 5 points and 6.67 points at the time, but that difference comes to translate into a lot at the end of the season – it would work out at a difference between 54 and 72 points, which is sizeable indeed.

Town then, don’t need to worry if they don’t set the world on fire at the start of the season. As we discovered last year, the best work is done after Christmas.

Next time, I see if 10 games into the season is more revelatory.

1 1 1 – The End Of The Beginning – Post 44

Saturday was the first day of the season and, however you spin it, a 1-1 draw at home is disappointing. I wasn’t going into the game expecting Bury to be brushed aside, I was thinking they’d put up some stubborn resistance but Town would probably have a bit too much in the end; (a Draw/Home scenario, possibly 2-1 or 3-1). Of course, that’s not how it panned out, and it made the season open with a bit of a damp squib.

But is it the end of the world. How likely is an opening day draw to curtail promotion hopes, or result in disappointment? Well, we don’t know. We won’t do until May. In the meantime, I’ve collated tables of the opening day results from the last five years for all teams promoted within the Football League (10 each season). I remember some of them – Southampton’s defeat at home to Plymouth, who ended up relegated, for example – Norwich’s 1-7 defeat was the stuff of legend, but they also lost 3-2 at Watford on Sky on the first day of last season. I don’t think it matters a bean, to be honest. A 1-7 defeat would instigate a bit of worry, and I’d expect changes, but a slowish start shouldn’t matter at all.

So here we go.

My prediction, for once, was correct. Hurrah!

It doesn’t matter a bean what you do in your first game, then. Promotion, if it is to be yours, will be yours.

Other than that Norwich 1-7 Colchester, which is a curio in and of itself, 50%, or five, as its also known, of the promoted teams in 2009/10 drew 1-1 in their first matches – Newcastle Utd and West Bromwich Albion against one another.

2.63 – Substitute For Another Point – Post 41

There are eleven players on a football team, aren’t there? Yes and no. Football, even at League One level, is increasingly a squad game. We saw it in action at Huddersfield last season, when the home formation and the away formation were both entirely different. This leads to the knock-on effect of squad players, and by virtue of that, substitutes being more valuable.

This summer sees the reduction of substitutes from seven back down to five, something I’m in favour of. I don’t think that teams need to have squads of 18 for league games, and it’ll balance things more in the favour of the smaller teams; no disrespect to them, but it seemed there was always someone being shown up last season for not having a squad big enough to field the full complement.

That said, this post is about use of substitutes, and my hypothesis would be that the better teams would use fewer substitutes because the games would already be going their way, and they wouldn’t need to change things as often during the games – though there is the gap-

narrowing ‘time-wasting’ substitution towards the end of the game.

The reality however, was the exact opposite. The better the team, the more players were replaced. There is a point here that the better teams aren’t just better XIs; they’re better throughout the squads, so a Southampton substitute would be more likely to effect a game positively than a Bristol Rovers substitute. This led to the top six averaging 2.68 substitutions per game (top mark to MK Dons, who made 2.83 – that works out as MK Dons only leaving eight substitutions unused throughout the season – a staggering figure). The bottom four (points-gaining teams; Plymouth don’t feature by virtue of having 10 deducted) averaged only 2.21 substitutes per game.

If I was losing games, I’d like to think I’d try to change it rather than keeping faith with something that isn’t working, which is what seems to have happened last season; Swindon, as you can see from the graph, made an attempt to do so, but they can’t change a pretty defined line of best fit (red line) taking the amount of used substitutes downwards in conjunction with the league table.

All that said, there is another side of this coin is that there is a completely different looking line of best fit (green line) in the table of how many players each team used last season – again, I thought the better teams would use more players, as there’d be more availability to bring in younger players, and test them in a successful outfit. Not so. The desperation for points must spread into the pre-game bath. The line is very definitely slanted upwards in terms of players used by the worse-performing teams (look at the dip to Rochdale, by the way – their 24, and Exeter’s 25, players used is an incredible feat given the positions they both finished in). Squad sizes, then, are getting bigger, in League One, and its not always to the benefit of the teams who have them – better to spend money on quality than quantity, says the numbers, and its hard to disagree.

The new development regarding numbers of subs available will give these graphs an extra dimension next season – it might well be worth shadowing in the lines of best fit to see if we’re averaging more or less now there’s a smaller pool to play with. I think – not that MK Dons can do much about it – we’ll see even more substitutes this coming season, and even more players like Novak and Tehoue who make more than 20 appearances off the bench.

97 – An Uneven Battle – Post 37

It struck me, when I was looking through the winning percentage of football clubs, that Chelsea’s % since 2000 would be incredibly high; so it proved – the sample I took was .737 over a few years, which is high indeed. Then I was reading my Bill James book on the way into work and this idea, the idea of league dominance crept into my head. One of the stats Bill uses is a five-year total of Win Shares to rank who has performed the best over a certain length of time. I decided to bring that idea over to football, but used both 3 years and 5 years as my bases, just to see if there was a marked difference.

Here is the Top 10 3 Year Winning Percentages, all time, in the English league – the year you see is the final year of the middle season.

Chelsea	2006	114	0.820
Manchester United	2008	114	0.803
Chelsea	2005	114	0.803
Chelsea	2007	114	0.794
Manchester United	2009	114	0.789
Arsenal	2003	114	0.789
Manchester United	2007	114	0.785
Chelsea	2008	114	0.776
Chelsea	2009	114	0.776
Arsenal	2004	114	0.776

That’s 10 teams, all in the last 10 years, more dominant than ANY teams, EVER. The first non-big four team is the Preston of 1890 (the invincible Preston the season before, and the title that season too). It all seems crazy that now, more than ever, we’re watching football that is almost written before we start. Look at the ratios of the top 3 – above .8 – that means they’re going to win over four out of every five games (draws not-with-standing); how is that possibly good for the game?

We’re here for Huddersfield Town though. I thought that we might have a chance, actually, of being pretty high in this comparison – winning three league titles in a row, and having two runners-up spots after that; but 97th is the highest spot we muster – the 3 years of the 3 championships – though admittedly the first one was horribly close. What we see then is that since, effectively, Jose Mourinho took over at Chelsea, there is very little interest in anything beyond the top two teams, and their paths to glory have been unimpeded until…well, until about now. We know Manchester Utd won the Premiership this season with a stonking home record and a lot of away draws – they actually sit level with the bottom of the table above on 0.776. Chelsea, though, are down to 0.732, and I think we can say with some certainty, that they’ll face more of a challenge from Manchester City than ever before next season.

I wanted to give the figures a bit of context, so I looked abroad for successful teams, my gaze first falling on the feats of the Grande Torino. Over two three year periods (centred on 1947 and 1948) the Grande Torino were 0.817 and 0.810 – which would bring them in second and third to the Chelsea team of 2006. The 1946 vintage were 7th, at 0.793. That confirmed my knowledge of how superlative that team were and much of a travesty it is that they’re not better known in this country. Never-the-less, there’s other movements going on, currently, that might just be as dominant as the Chelseas and Uniteds of the mid-noughties.

FC Barcelona have, focusing on their most recent La Liga season (2009/10) a winning percentage of 0.851; which, put into context means that, if their games aren’t draws (of which they’ve had 18) there’s an 85% chance they’ll win ANY game, not just home, but away games as well. That’s a level of dominance we’ve never seen before. The tragedy, and its a tragedy that is something like the argument tennis players have that they were playing in the time of Federer, is that Real Madrid’s score for that same period is 0.816 – good for third on the list by a mere 0.001 places.

This high-falutin’ nonsense isn’t something I often spend a lot of time thinking about, but the number astounded me when I saw them – for the teams today to be getting more and more dominant is a worry to me, its a worry not just about how bored I am seeing the same teams winning things, its a worry about the very state of the game that all things will run through these elite clubs – as if it doesn’t already.

Anyway, back to Huddersfield Town.

Outside the 1920s, the best performance over three years by a Town team surrounded the 1979/80 season, unsurprisingly, and saw the team having a % of 0.612; bang on level with Bradford City’s highest mark – centred a season later. On that same 0.612 figure, however, we see Lee Clark’s team of 2009/10. Time and again when I work out the numbers, this team is as successful as any Town team outside the 1920s and that 1980 Championship winning team. Another strong season, and that mark might even be surpassed – they’ll have to go some to get up to the 0.683 of the 1925 team, but I don’t see that its entirely out of reach.

Meanwhile, the lowest Town mark was centred on the 1987 season (old ground, isn’t it) at 0.383 – that’s a pretty atrocious mark, to be honest – only 287 three-season spells, out of more than 8,000 have been worse. Never again, let’s hope.

0.520 – If Football Was Baseball – Post 36

If you know me, you’ll know I love a bit of baseball. If you don’t know me, you’ve just learnt that fact. Its through baseball that I really developed my love of statistics, and probably as a result of those such as Bill James that I began this blog, attempting to explain a few things about the ‘other’ game that I love.

This post is about the recording of results (and, I’m sure you’ll notice) picks up from the same dataset as the last post I did. American sports balance their divisional tables differently to in the UK – largely because of the lack of draws/ties – and have them ranked by ‘winning’ percentage. It is this that allows the word ‘winningest’ to exist, which is a bad thing, but allows a fairer judgement of teams who have played different amounts of games, which is a good thing.

It was brought to my attention that the Atlanta Braves were had fallen to .500 over their history (they currently stand one game above .500¹ – 9990/9989) and, naturally, I wondered how this would apply to football teams. So I took my data set and applied the same rules, expecting to get a similar looking table to the one in the post before. I wasn’t disappointed².

Huddersfield Town fall in this table to 24th (which isn’t too bad) and the balance of power has shifted at the top – Manchester Utd being .001 ahead of Liverpool now; although that counts for 4 games above .500 (United having played 38 more); that figure will probably stay the way it is for a good while now, I’d expect, just as Arsenal will find it pretty difficult to overhaul New Brighton Tower’s three seasons of relative glory.

This table is standing as a post on its own, but the information in it will be used for something a little deeper over the weekend.

The columns, by the way, reading across, are games played, wins, draws/2, Winning % (the focus here), 50% of total games (for a formula), games above .500, and then % of games above .500

Manchester U		4290	2040	515	0.596	2145	410	9.557
Liverpool		4258	2017	517.5	0.595	2129	406	9.523
New Brighton Tower		102	48	12	0.588	51	9	8.824
Arsenal		4258	1931	534	0.579	2129	336	7.879
Birmingham C		4396	1834	607	0.555	2198	243	5.528
Stevenage		46	18	7.5	0.554	23	3	5.435
Ashington		328	109	71	0.549	164	16	4.878
Leeds Utd		3052	1269	399	0.547	1526	142	4.653
Chelsea		3880	1594	505	0.541	1940	159	4.098
Aston Villa		4394	1833	524	0.536	2197	160	3.641
Everton		4382	1794	545.5	0.534	2191	149	3.389
Ipswich Town		2862	1162	359	0.531	1431	90	3.145
Reading		3750	1523	466.5	0.531	1875	115	3.053
Newcastle Utd		4290	1766	507	0.530	2145	128	2.984
Wigan Ath		1462	576	198	0.529	731	43	2.941
Millwall		3696	1463	483	0.527	1848	98	2.652
Manchester C		4332	1754	525.5	0.526	2166	114	2.620
Sunderland		4424	1791	533.5	0.525	2212	113	2.543
MK Dons		506	205	60.5	0.525	253	13	2.470
Wolverhampton W		4540	1835	538	0.523	2270	103	2.269
Wimbledon		960	364	137.5	0.522	480	22	2.240
Sheffield U		4446	1766	549.5	0.521	2223	93	2.081
Stalybridge C		76	33	6.5	0.520	38	2	1.974
Huddersfield T		3894	1515	508.5	0.520	1947	77	1.965
Bristol City		4246	1652	550	0.519	2123	79	1.861
QPR		3630	1402	479	0.518	1815	66	1.818
Peterborough U		2346	889	326	0.518	1173	42	1.790
Brighton & HA		3712	1443	473	0.516	1856	60	1.603
Gateshead		1004	394	122	0.514	502	14	1.394
Preston NE		4592	1783	576.5	0.514	2296	64	1.383
Blackburn R		4450	1737	546	0.513	2225	58	1.303
Plymouth A		3706	1417	480	0.512	1853	44	1.187
West Bromwich Alb		4514	1749	554.5	0.510	2257	47	1.030
Brentford		3756	1432	483	0.510	1878	37	0.972
Norwich C		3610	1332	507	0.509	1805	34	0.942
Wycombe W		824	289	129.5	0.508	412	7	0.789
Bolton Wanderers		4484	1737	540	0.508	2242	35	0.781
Sheffield W		4406	1682	555	0.508	2203	34	0.772
Hull City		4090	1530	545	0.507	2045	30	0.733
Luton Town		3586	1362	455.5	0.507	1793	25	0.683
Burnley		4568	1759	555	0.507	2284	30	0.657
Southampton		3526	1324	462	0.507	1763	23	0.652
Bournemouth		3644	1362	482	0.506	1822	22	0.590
Chesterfield		4056	1551	499	0.505	2028	22	0.542
Derby Co		4486	1727	540	0.505	2243	24	0.535
Nottingham F		4402	1658	565.5	0.505	2201	23	0.511
Tranmere R		3718	1410	460.5	0.503	1859	12	0.309
Rushden & D		184	67	25.5	0.503	92	1	0.272
Swindon T		3738	1378	496	0.501	1869	5	0.134
Watford		3706	1374	483	0.501	1853	4	0.108
Crystal P		3148	1152	424.5	0.501	1574	3	0.079
West Ham		3528	1328	436.5	0.500	1764	1	0.014
Leicester C		4342	1600	566	0.499	2171	-5	-0.115
Northampton T		3740	1416	449.5	0.499	1870	-5	-0.120
Fulham		3906	1452	495.5	0.499	1953	-6	-0.141
Colchester U		2700	982	363	0.498	1350	-5	-0.185
Scunthorpe U		2765	997	378.5	0.497	1382.5	-7	-0.253
Middlesbrough		4140	1548	511	0.497	2070	-11	-0.266
Morecambe		184	64	27.5	0.497	92	-1	-0.272
Bristol Rovers		3708	1367	476.5	0.497	1854	-11	-0.283
Cardiff C		3632	1330	473.5	0.497	1816	-13	-0.344
Wrexham		3556	1318	447.5	0.496	1778	-13	-0.352
Rotherham Utd		3732	1389	463	0.496	1866	-14	-0.375
Oldham A		4046	1478	529	0.496	2023	-16	-0.395
Swansea C		3692	1372	458	0.496	1846	-16	-0.433
Tottenham H		3692	1372	458	0.496	1846	-16	-0.433
Bury		4484	1672	549.5	0.495	2242	-21	-0.457
Stoke C		4242	1571	527	0.495	2121	-23	-0.542
Yeovil T		368	141	41	0.495	184	-2	-0.543
Southend U		3772	1397	461.5	0.493	1886	-28	-0.729
Blackpool		4334	1587	548	0.493	2167	-32	-0.738
Bradford C		4234	1540	542	0.492	2117	-35	-0.827
Portsmouth		3594	1300	466.5	0.492	1797	-31	-0.849
Notts C		4618	1690	577	0.491	2309	-42	-0.909
Bradford PA		2190	837	238	0.491	1095	-20	-0.913
Mansfield T		3154	1142	405	0.490	1577	-30	-0.951
Grimsby T		4458	1668	513.5	0.489	2229	-48	-1.066
Charlton A		3512	1269	446.5	0.488	1756	-41	-1.153
Barnsley		4370	1565	563	0.487	2185	-57	-1.304
Gillingham		3544	1254	470.5	0.487	1772	-48	-1.340
South Shields		462	165	58.5	0.484	231	-8	-1.623
Shrewsbury T		2718	934	378.5	0.483	1359	-47	-1.711
Port Vale		4226	1498	542	0.483	2113	-73	-1.727
Coventry C		3620	1272	474	0.482	1810	-64	-1.768
Lincoln C		4376	1580	530.5	0.482	2188	-78	-1.771
Doncaster R		3466	1239	431.5	0.482	1733	-63	-1.803
Stockport C		4322	1550	530	0.481	2161	-81	-1.874
Carlisle U		3306	1182	402	0.479	1653	-69	-2.087
Cambridge U		1586	537	222	0.479	793	-34	-2.144
Walsall		3938	1403	479.5	0.478	1969	-87	-2.197
Torquay		3374	1160	446	0.476	1687	-81	-2.401
Oxford U		2020	679	282	0.476	1010	-49	-2.426
York C		3052	1062	387	0.475	1526	-77	-2.523
Barnet		724	241	100	0.470	362	-22	-2.970
Leeds City		380	140	38.5	0.470	190	-12	-3.026
Cheltenham T		552	178	81	0.469	276	-17	-3.080
Rochdale		3702	1252	480.5	0.468	1851	-119	-3.201
Dagenham & R		184	64	22	0.467	92	-6	-3.261
Aldershot		2484	837	324	0.467	1242	-81	-3.261
Chester C		3026	1023	388.5	0.466	1513	-102	-3.354
Wigan Borough		412	145	47	0.466	206	-14	-3.398
Leyton O		4106	1379	532.5	0.466	2053	-142	-3.446
Darlington		3614	1233	445.5	0.464	1807	-129	-3.556
Exeter C		3535	1175	464	0.464	1767.5	-129	-3.635
Scarborough		582	193	76.5	0.463	291	-22	-3.694
Nelson		412	154	36.5	0.462	206	-16	-3.762
Hereford U		1360	439	188.5	0.461	680	-53	-3.860
Maidstone Utd		134	43	18.5	0.459	67	-6	-4.104
Crewe A		3816	1303	444.5	0.458	1908	-161	-4.206
Southport		2200	723	284	0.458	1100	-93	-4.227
Macclesfield T		644	204	90.5	0.457	322	-28	-4.270
Burton Alb		92	29	13	0.457	46	-4	-4.348
Boston U		230	72	33	0.457	115	-10	-4.348
Hartlepool U		3714	1261	428	0.455	1857	-168	-4.523
Bootle		22	9	1	0.455	11	-1	-4.545
Workington		1194	385	155	0.452	597	-57	-4.774
Accrington Stanley		1650	587	158	0.452	825	-80	-4.848
Newport Co		2672	888	312.5	0.449	1336	-136	-5.071
Halifax T		3068	967	395	0.444	1534	-172	-5.606
Kidderminster H		230	72	29.5	0.441	115	-14	-5.870
Barrow		1924	624	207	0.432	962	-131	-6.809
New Brighton		884	287	93.5	0.430	442	-62	-6.957
Glossop NE		618	197	68	0.429	309	-44	-7.120
Aberdare Athletic		252	78	30	0.429	126	-18	-7.143
Durham City		286	95	27	0.427	143	-21	-7.343
Accrington FC		122	35	17	0.426	61	-9	-7.377
Gainsborough T		564	175	59	0.415	282	-48	-8.511
Merthyr Town		420	115	53	0.400	210	-42	-10.000
Darwen		232	75	13.5	0.381	116	-28	-11.853
Middlesbrough Ironopolis		28	8	2	0.357	14	-4	-14.286
Loughborough		158	34	20	0.342	79	-25	-15.823
Thames		84	20	8.5	0.339	42	-14	-16.071
Rotherham Town		88	24	4	0.318	44	-16	-18.182
Northwich Vic		50	12	2.5	0.290	25	-11	-21.000

¹Shut up. Not even close – .513 (10,272/9,374), which is good for 6th behind Yankees, Giants, Dodgers, Cards and Red Sox. Eat that, Southsiders.

²That’s not strictly true. I was disappointed to see I’d missed out Burton United/Swifts and Albion while I decided what to do with them and ended up forgetting to replace them in the last post.

20 – Four Seasons In One Day – Post 35

Every time I think about how I’d like Town to end up, I always think of Bolton Wanderers. They were always high up in the second tier and, though their Premiership venture did work out, there was always the feel that if it didn’t, they’d be back battling at the top of the Championship the next season – a top 30 club, in other words – and that’s how I see Town, really – albeit with little justification since I started watching them.

I want to see my team win games, and it doesn’t really matter, I don’t think, what level it is. I’d be happy to have a really good season in Division 3 this year, but I’d rather have two pretty good years at Tier 3 level than one boom and one bust year – build slowly, lest your balloon bursteth.

My query in this case, then, is which teams have been most successful, year on year, at whatever level they’re at. Logic, for me, would dictate that the teams who have been in the top flight the longest would probably be highest – struggling and relegation seasons would count against you (though a relegation could easily be balanced by a flying promotion, or a few steady years in the tier below). What I’ve done, then, is take every team’s average league season (ranging from 1 season (Stevenage) to 112 (Everton and West Brom amongst 10 others)) and panned it out over the ‘perfect’ 46 game season.

Remember, at this point, that 70ish points is ‘generally’ good enough for a playoff spot, and make judgements from there. As you can see from this table, your Mighty Terriers finish 20th out of 133 teams in this system, which was a surprise for me – I expected a finish somewhere far closer to the bottom.

Town’s position is just something to be proud of, I think. I’d like to think we might get above QPR next season (goal difference?) and possibly Wigan, too (the latter more likely than the former, due to the minimal effect you can have on 84 seasons of results on the strength of one. By comparison, there’s no reason we might not pull away from Brighton, Preston and Plymouth – I would hope Town should have a better season than they all do – Sheffield Wednesday? Well, they’re the team to beat. It will also be interesting to see if Crawley shoot straight to the top – I wouldn’t be surprised.

But look around – there’s some perennially big teams hovering around on their reputations – Everton, Villa, Manchester City, Sunderland and Wolves – all on 68 points (this is – I suspect – because so many seasons in the early days had a heavy swing of results being home wins; that many home wins would lead to a high points tally). Amongst them are the minnows, the New Brighton Tower and Stalybridge types who had decent seasons back when there was very few games, and as a result, pan out quite well.

Meanwhile, its no surprise to see that the lowest 112 season representatives are Notts County – their fortunes have been mixed to say the least over the last few years.

There’s other interesting outcomes, too – Coventry’s perennial struggle against the drop leaves them level with York; Stockport’s 100th league season will have to wait, while above them, Dagenham and Aldershot will try to impress.

The lowest placed current team is Accrington Stanley, though that includes their former guise (that was difficult decision making – essentially, provided there was no merger, I went with them being the same club; except in the case of Leeds City, which seemed to benefit their successors.

So there you go; constantly do well, and you too could be Liverpool or Manchester Utd. What didn’t you know already.

78.5 – Lee Clark And The Development Of A Manager – Post 34

Despite Lee Clark having been managing Town for two and a half years or so, his critics remain unconvinced by his record; the arguments are well-known, and summarised as such – he could have done better with the considerable resources at his disposal; the counter-argument is that he’s done pretty well anyway; personally, I can see both sides. I don’t think he’s been anything like bad enough for Dean Hoyle to sack him, but I’ve been a little underwhelmed, if not with recent results, with performances when I’ve seen.  

There is a third way. The League Managers association run a table of managers according to the performances of their teams, and for the 2010/11 season, Lee Clark was the 9th highest scoring manager on their list. Not bad for someone with only 2½ years experience however you swing it.

That LMA table didn’t really suit my purposes when I thought about Town managers over history; there’s so many more cup competitions now than before, and I couldn’t justify, however I looked, that a victory in a Football League Trophy tie counts even a tenth as much as a victory in a league game. My table, then, only counted league games. I thought about this for a while, and decided that it was unfair on the earlier managers who guided Town to FA Cup Semi-Finals (and even won the thing once upon a time) so I needed to balance that out a bit.

Thus, FA Cup games and League Cup games got a collective ranking (no home or away discrepancy; it doesn’t matter so much, and as much as clean sheets count for nothing, they’ve got to be included, too) of 10 points for a win, and JPT games got ignored because I really can’t justify their presence in this. This, I suppose, favours the managers of the teams outside the top flight, though in theory their game frequency should balance out their game difficulty. I tried it a few ways, and this was the fairest I got¹. The other points I’ll make here is that finals are worth 15/7.5 points. Managing in a final deserves extra kudos and, for the few Town have played in, I don’t see it’ll make any great shakes to the figures – even fewer have been won, of course. I also neglected to include the FA Cup Qualification rounds from 1910. Sorry, if you feel they should be factored in.

The results aren’t entirely surprising. There’s a small bunch near the top of very successful interim managers, headed by (look away now, Len Shackleton) the Board of Directors in 1921 (two games, two wins) and two stints of Gerry Murphy. Factoring out those managers who have been in charge of fewer than 10 games, we get a more accurate picture.

I was surprised to see Cecil Potter at the top of the list, but it makes a lot of sense after reasoning out that he largely inherited Herbert Chapman’s team and in his only season, led them to success. Ambrose Langley, too, oversaw a lot of success, as did, of course, Herbert Chapman himself. Then…Lee Clark. Ahead – importantly – of Neil Warnock. Ahead – interestingly – of Mick Buxton and (I guess Lee Clark would enjoy this himself) Bill Shankly.

Another feature worth noting is the improvement of Ian Greaves (albeit from only 12 games) from his first spell to his second, and of Peter Jackson from his first spell to his second; its also relatively useful to note that Mick Wadsworth, Stan Ternent and Andy Ritchie are all in the bottom half; which sort of plays out the popular opinion – and its no surprise to see Malcolm Macdonald at the bottom of the list, either.

There is, of course, the caveat that Lee Clark hasn’t actually won anything. Two good season in the third tier, with a third at a level his team could be expected to do well in to come is all he can put on his CV yet; the real test, I think its pretty obvious, will come when he has to go up a level, something Buxton had to deal with, and something Horton interited (Warnock, of course, left before he got chance). The table proves this to me; I’m happier that Town are in good hands now than I was before I worked it all out. Lee Clark, as ever, I wish you all the best. Top this table next season, and I’ll be absolutely delighted.

¹I’m not 100% sold on it, but I don’t see its possible to weight it any other way without some sort of ‘league position disparity’ at the time of cup games and I can’t see how that would fit in except in an analogue (stepped) system – maybe 15 points for beating someone 50 places above, 14 for 45 and so on; that would prove VERY difficult to obtain and work out, particularly for the earlier games. There’s also the budget issue, but that would be impossible to cover for every period of the club’s history.

2.03 – Kevin Kilbane And AMMP – Post 34

I saw Kevin Kilbane play a few times last season, and although there was a couple of amazingly good passes in the game against Sheffield Wednesday, his other performances were pretty forgettable – I thought he was awful in the playoff final; so much went astray, and he never seemed to be anywhere he needed to be.

One of the things I’ve been working with lately (which I posted some information from a wee while ago) is the minutes each player features for Town. Using that data set, now complete for the 46 league games, I can see how many points each player won; in terms of minutes on the field. Peter Clarke, having played all 90 minutes of all 46 league games, can claim 87 points, as can the two goalkeepers between them.

The formula I’ve used to work this ratio out is one I’ve called AMMP. It might sound complicated, but it only stands for Appearance Made / Minutes / Points, which is basically how I worked it all out. There is a maximum AMMP of 3 (because there’s three points for a win) and a minimum, as you’d expect, of 0. Given that most teams average about 1.5 points per game, I’d expect an average AMMP for a first team player to be about 1.40; allowing for substitutions throughout the season – Damien Johnson was the closest Town player to that mark, with an AMMP of 1.44.

That’s useful in a few ways, but most of all it can be used as a direct comparison. Ian Bennett registered 47 points, and Alex Smithies 40 – which means Bennett’s appearances counted for an average of 1.96 points, and Smithies for 1.82. These numbers for the goalkeepers are helped by each one only playing full matches, but I don’t think its too controversial to say that it suggests what people already knew – that Bennett had been a little better than Smithies when he got into the team.

So far, so obvious. There was never any great discussion about who should be playing in goal, though, that decision was pretty much made for Lee Clark. The more controversial positions were elsewhere; up front, at centre back (Kay or McCombe?) or in midfield. This is where we should be able to draw some differences with AMMP.

Looking at the second graph here (players arranged by squad number)

of the strikers AMMP; there’s a definite points advantage to Rhodes and Afobe both playing (though note how low the figures on the left are there – nothing higher than 1.2 for Jordan Rhodes. There’s a relatively straightforward reason for the lower scores in that Lee Clark loves to change his forward line relatively early in the second half – there’s lot of 76, 65 and 45 minute appearances made. After Afobe and Rhodes, though, the other four – Novak (31 apps), Lee (28), Garner (16) and Cadamarteri (11) – are much of a muchness, ranging from 0.82 to 0.94 AMMP – the highest being Lee Novak.

I can’t help but think that the fact that there is no striker even close to 1.5 may well be one of the reasons we seemed to struggle up front. Rhodes scored a lot of goals, but was regularly substituted. Afobe played a lot of (successful) games, but scored – relatively – few goals. Alan Lee and Lee Novak would be regarded as having disappointing seasons, yet they were equally effective as Garner and Cadamarteri, one of whom was shipped out in January.

Moving onto centre backs, then. Peter Clarke is a representation of the team, as I mentioned, as he played all 46 games. Kay played 27 and McCombe played 34, so we’re not looking at small sample sizes there, and there’s a very noticeable difference. Town were more successful when John McCombe played. I quite like Antony Kay as a player, and accept how gangly and ungamely Jamie McCombe looks, but the numbers don’t lie; Antony Kay’s 1.57 AMMP is a long way lower than Boom Boom’s 1.81 – both are a little below Peter Clarke’s 1.89, but it certainly seems that McCombe and Clarke would’ve been the better centre-back pairing over the course of the season – not sure how they would’ve been different given those three goals against Peterborough. I only used Clarke, Kay and McCombe because there wasn’t really evidence that any other players were anywhere close to first choice in this position throughout the season.

This, then, leads us onto the midfield, which is, I’d say, the positions that have caused the most debate. I’ve included,

because of their playing time/importance, eight midfielders. Four I’d class as wide (Roberts, Ward, Pilkington, Carey) and four central (Gudjonsson, Johnson, Arfield, Kilbane). There’s a happy mirroring with this, too. With an AMMP of 2.03, Kevin Kilbane stands alone as the midfielder who’s performances have earned the most points this season, followed by Danny Ward, Gary Roberts and an incredibly close call between Joey Gudjonsson and Scott Arfield (1.60 v. 1.59). Those four (you’d have to take Joey, I guess, being that 0.01 higher) would make a pretty impressive midfield four, particularly if Gary Roberts was in his early season form rather than later. It is worth noting that for all his goals, Anthony Pilkington didn’t get to play in too many winning Town teams, and Graham Carey was the least successful of all the midfield. There’s mitigating circumstances, mind you, in that Gary Roberts was, for a while, the only player who COULD play on the left flank, so he was the only chance.

For the record, I’ve include an AMMP graph for the whole squad here at the bottom. Chris Atkinson gets a rough ride, in my opinion, but there’s big performers in the defence – Naysmith, Clarke, Peltier… it was a good season.

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