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.

4 – Chasing A Winner – Post 30

It was suggested to me today that Town would have won or have had a better chance of winning more of the eight drawn home games they had this season if they’d pushed on a bit when level, and not looked to have settled for a draw when level.

 So I thought I’d see if the numbers checked out. Unfortunately, in terms of sample size, there was only three games that had a ‘decisive’ goal – the other five draws were 0-0, so we’ve got a relatively small sample size.

 Anyway, this is what I found out. Town drew eight home games, and during those games, they averaged a shot every 6.79 minutes; meanwhile their opponents averaged a shot every 13.09 minutes – almost half as often (that’s a combination of shots on and off-target, as you can see in the table here). 

Against Bournemouth, Leyton Orient and Brentford (note the red theme there), though, Town were left chasing a late winner – having (at most) 22 minutes to do so. In this situation, the amount of shots per minute grew even more disparate; Town averaged an attempt every 4 minutes, and Town’s opponents one every 36 minutes… they had one.

 Clearly, then, Town did push on for a win in all of those games – particularly Bournemouth, with 3 attempts in the 3 minutes they had left in the match, but it came to no avail. The flaw here was probably, I’d have to say, the difference between the first and third columns; Town averaged 6.75 shots on target per match, and 6.5 off target. If those numbers were skewed in favour of the shots on target, I think we’d be looking at a few more goals, and a few fewer draws.

 What we aren’t looking at, I think we can say, is a team who were ‘settling’ for a draw. Unable to get a win, perhaps, but not settling for a draw.

184 – Not On The Spot Update – Post 18a

With Huddersfield missing another penalty yesterday at MK Dons, the drought stretches on and the numbers get worse. Now only one team have failed to score a penalty more recently than Huddersfield Town. Take a bow, Walsall. First Everton, then Manchester Utd, then Shrewsbury, then Macclesfield all wiped their slates clean with spot-kick goals; only the Saddlers to go.

Now its taken 5 scored 2.

Walsall, if there’s any fans reading this, haven’t scored a penalty since 29th September 2009; some 572 days ago. That was converted by Darren Byfield, in the 66th minute of a 2-1 win against…Huddersfield Town. Strange.

53 – He Scores Goals, M’Lord – Post 19

Yesterday afternoon, Jordan Rhodes scored his 52^nd and 53^rd goals as a professional footballer. Good work for one so young, and important. He’s done it at a decent clip, too, within 128 appearances, all told, spread across four seasons and five teams (Oxford, Ipswich, Rochdale, Brentford and Huddersfield). Full credit to the lad, and he’s earned that Scotland U21 call-up.

This season he’s scored 20 goals for Huddersfield Town. Last season, he scored 23, so he stands a good chance of getting more than last year, despite missing – exactly – a month with injury. Goals and games don’t tell the whole story, though. When he was first breaking into the Ipswich team, he was playing minutes at a time – 31 in his first five appearances for Ipswich, so that’s 5 appearances gone in the time of barely a third of a match.

So I’ve broken his career down into a goals per minute ratio – it seems a more fair way of balancing it, particularly in someone who has played off the bench for a number of their starts, and even now at Town is generally substituted before 75 minutes; indeed, the longest run of 90 minute games he has had is 6, achieved twice last season, the first spell of which brought 2 goals, and the second only 1. Over the course of his career, Jordan averages a goal every 164.25 minutes he plays. That’s pretty impressive – the golden figure we have for strikers is a goal every other game, and that works out as slightly better than that. So, overall, one can only be impressed.

If we disregard his first season, 2007/08, on the basis that although Jordan scored once, he barely featured – his 12 appearances (Oxford 4, Ipswich eight) were spread over 383 minutes, which works out as a goal every, wait for it…. 383 minutes that first season. Not ideal, but understandable. After that, though, we’ve got three seasons’ worth of pretty usable data. 2008/09, when he played a short while for Rochdale before joining Brentford, both on loan, and 2009/10 and 2010/11, when he was, of course, at Huddersfield.

In pure goals terms, last season was the best – 23, with this year’s 20 and the year before’s 9 trailing a way behind. But digging a little deeper we see a bit more. Last season’s 23 goals came at a ratio of one every 188.13 minutes – just over that one every two game rate I mentioned above. This season’s 20, though, have come at a far quicker one every 120.60 minutes; roughly speaking, that’s just over 2 goals every 3 games; 2008/9’s 10 goals came every 158.30 minutes. This year, then, is the most productive season of Jordan’s life by ¼ – that’s a big margin – its brought his career minutes per goal average down from 190.70 to 164.25 – a gain of 26 minutes. Its looking good. But why?

Well, look back to that third paragraph; the clue is there – he’s not playing 90 minutes any more. From a purely statistical point of view, playing 75 minutes per game means there’s a number 15 smaller that we’re dividing by the number of goals, but that does have a knock-on. He’s fresher. Goals are coming more regularly than last season – in the 41 games he’s played in so far, Jordan’s scored in 16 of them (39%) – and that includes 2 appearances of 9 and 4 minutes – last seasons 55 games produced a score in only 18 (33%) – there is seven games left, and you wouldn’t put it past him to equal last year’s tally from a maximum of 7 games fewer than last year. Its also worth bearing in mind that Jordan isn’t a regular scorer of penalties; Gary Roberts has scored Town’s only 2 penalty strikes this season, and neither of those since very early season.

Last season, he averaged a shade over 80 minute per appearance (80.12 mins); this year, funnily enough, given the jokes about a standard 60 minute substitution, he averages just under that – 59 minutes (58.83 mins); there is a better balance, then, between games and goals – he’s not been forced to slog his guts out for 90 minutes, and we’re seeing the reward in goals, particularly those as good as yesterday’s second. He, as we found with Anthony Pilkington, is improving with every season. Long may it continue.

Some Jordan Rhodes facts you may not know.

• He scored the fastest ever headed hat-trick in League football, for Huddersfield Town, against Exeter City.
• His first goal in professional football came for Ipswich, after he came on as a half-time substitute for Gary Roberts.
• His dad coaches at Sheffield Wednesday.

Season	Games	Goals	Minutes	Minutes Per Goal (Season)	Minutes Per Goal (Career)
2007/08	12	1	383	383.00	383.00
2008/09	21	10	1583	158.30	196.60
2009/10	54	23	4327	188.13	190.70
2010/11	41	20	2412	120.60	164.25

Figures correct up to 27.03.2011

157 – Not On The Spot – Post 18

Huddersfield Town do not play their game against Notts County until Sunday, by which point, there will have been 157 days since they last scored a penalty. This is a pretty long time, to be honest. 66 League One penalties have been converted since then, by a combination of 22 other teams – there have even been four instances of teams converting two penalties on the same day. Not Huddersfield Town. Since Gary Roberts netted in the 75^th minute of their game against Yeovil, not a single spot kick has been dispatched by a Terrier.

Why?

Well, they’ve not been taking loads and missing them (though penalties have been missed during this time, most recently Jordan Rhodes at Bristol Rovers), but the 4-5-1/4-3-3 formation that has been played for much of the season doesn’t lend itself to people running with the ball in the box, which in turn doesn’t lend itself to those people being fouled. Gary Roberts himself, evidenced by his booking for diving last week, seems to be getting a reputation, and Anthony Pilkington, on the other flank, is far more likely to shoot at goal, as we saw last post out. So its not just bad luck or bad judgement, Town’s play isn’t penalty-favourable, particularly (though I’d still expect one more, at least, before the end of the season).

But it could be worse. Walsall, alone in League One, haven’t scored a penalty all season.

I’ve done a bit of checking over the football pyramid and, in the top four divisions in England, only one team that has scored one or more penalties, only one team’s last one was longer ago than Town’s. That team sit atop the Premiership at the moment, so its good company to be in.

There are, as comfort to any Walsall fans reading in, four teams without a single penalty goal all season; Walsall themselves, Shrewsbury, Macclesfield and Everton.

I ought to, also, mention here that 157 days is nothing compared to the penalty drought of almost two years that encapsulated the entire 1996/97 season, and was broken at Crewe, in a game I mentioned as one of my 5 Favourite Town games in Post 1b of the 30 Day Football Challenge.

17 – Bulging The Bag, Or Not Bulging The Bag – Post 16

Goals win football matches.

This is why strikers are worth so much money, because they can provide them, and goalkeepers so little because they only try to prevent them, and generally, at least once per game, they can’t. Huddersfield Town have been pretty lucky in recent times that the chaps who wear their shirts have been doing a lot more of the putting the ball into the net than they have of making the man in gloves dispiritedly pick it out of their own net while other players run around celebrating. This had led to a progressively improving league position and, generally, better results as a whole.

My pocket fixture list, as well as having a lot of cup games scrawled across it in pencil (this is another sign of a good side – the more games you play, the better you are), has the running total of clean sheets on it, started after the first three games could all be tagged on this list. The current figure stands at 17 from 45 games this season (Town are on course to play 58 games) which is a pretty decent return. The flip side of this, and something that has been apparent since around half-way through last season, is that Town seem to not score quite often, particularly at home – teams come to ‘park the bus’ a lot of the time, and we don’t seem to have the keys to unlock the door and drive it back into the car park. This season, that figure stands at 11 – a little under a quarter of Town’s games – which is quite high for a team looking for promotion, but this is a funny funny league, as evidenced in Post 14 (a table I will update with 10 games to go, and again at the end of the season).

 

Again, the most fitting time to begin this comparison seems to be in 2004/05, when Town’s stint in this division began, and Town’s figures on their own would mean nothing, so I’ve included, for context, the top and bottom teams in each division each season – sadly, Town are never the former, but happily, never the latter.

		LP	GP	CS	FTS	GPC	GPB
2004/05	Huddersfield Town	9	50	11	9	4.55	5.56
2005/06	Huddersfield Town	4	54	14	8	3.86	6.75
2006/07	Huddersfield Town	15	49	8	14	6.13	3.50
2007/08	Huddersfield Town	10	53	18	12	2.94	4.42
2008/09	Huddersfield Town	9	50	10	7	5.00	7.14
2009/10	Huddersfield Town	6	55	19	11	2.89	5.00
2010/11	Huddersfield Town	3	45	17	11	2.65	4.09
2004/05	Luton Town	1	51	18	7	2.83	7.29
2005/06	Southend Utd	1	50	17	14	2.94	3.57
2006/07	Scunthorpe U	1	53	26	6	2.04	8.83
2007/08	Swansea C	1	55	22	5	2.50	11
2008/09	Leicester C	1	55	23	10	2.39	5.5
2009/10	Norwich City	1	54	24	3	2.25	18.0
2010/11	Brighton & HA	1	40	17	10	2.35	4
2004/05	Stockport County	24	52	7	17	7.43	3.1
2005/06	Walsall	24	55	11	17	5.00	3.2
2006/07	Brentford	24	51	6	23	8.50	2.2
2007/08	Port Vale	24	51	7	18	7.29	2.83
2008/09	Hereford U	24	50	8	21	6.25	2.4
2009/10	Stockport County	24	51	7	23	7.29	2.2

Key; LP – League Position, GP – Games Played, CS – Clean Sheets, FTS – Failed to Score, GPC – Games Per Clean Sheet, GPB – Games Per Blank.

Trends there are pretty obvious to see; bad teams seldom defend well, and those that do (Walsall 05/06 matching Town’s 08/09 Clean Sheet rate) goals are a lot harder to come by – that’s why they end up relegated. There’s some interesting numbers there, too – Norwich only failed to score 3 times in the whole of last season; Town are on schedule to beat their highest number of clean sheets in this spell this season (though that 26 of Scunthorpe is probably out of reach).

Its also worth noting that, as often as it might seem Town have failed to score on a lot of occasions, that figure of 11 is lower than the number with which Southend won the league (strange season, 2005/06 was) and only one more than Leicester and Brighton – both of whom have been pretty dominant in their respective seasons.

Again, as with a lot of these in-play statistics, this is reactive to what happens, and I can’t say for certain that Town will keep another 4 or 5 clean sheets in their last 13 games – indeed, these numbers are at the mercy of the fixture list. What I would say is that Town’s numbers so far are well within the boundaries of teams being successful at League One level; the defence isn’t awful, the attack isn’t great, but then, this season, neither may well need to be.

2.17 – Goals after Goals? – Post 12

Last season, there were periods when Town were flying, and it felt like they were winning every home game 6-0 or 6-1, which was great fun. It wasn’t quite like that of course, but it does raise an interesting question. For me, scoring four is a good afternoon on the goalscoring front, and anything more than that is probably a bit of a tonking; you have to be pretty good to do that on a regular basis. I know, though, that a lot of people think that three or more is the same – its personal taste, I guess, and maybe depends on the football you watched growing up.

I wondered, then, whether these games with lots of goals came in isolation, or if teams showed a general run of being in good goal-scoring form. Was it luck, or was it a purple patch, basically. This took a lot of research (about a week of corroboration) and the results are relatively conclusive in this case.

 

Over the last two seasons, the number of occasions League One teams have scored specific amounts of goals is as follows.

8 goals	1 occasion (Home)
7 goals	3 occasions (1 Home, 2 Away)
6 goals	9 occasions (6 Home, 3 Away)
5 goals	28 occasions (21 Home, 7 Away)
4 goals	91 occasions (61 Home, 30 Away)
3 goals	216 occasions (131 Home, 85 Away)

 

This isn’t surprising; one expects teams to score more at home than away, and, tellingly, three of the 5 six goals or more scored away from home were scored at teams who were at a lower level than League One at the time. So home advantage counts, then.

Huddersfield Town have scored three or more goals on twenty-three occasions over the last two seasons, second to Southampton (whilst in League One – its reasonable to assume Norwich City would have got more, but they were promoted), and on fourteen of those occasions (all but three at home) they’ve gone on to score more than three. This gives us a pretty decent sample size for Town’s 3+ goal hauls over the last two seasons.

Last season, if Town scored three goals, they averaged 4.231 goals – so if you saw a third go in, you were more likely to see a fourth than not. More importantly, if Town scored a third in one game, the following game, they averaged 2.385 – though only scored exactly two 4/13 times. Plentiful goalscoring, last season, then, was not a rarity. This season, if Town score three goals, they average 3.900 (a drop of a third of a goal) and, in the next game, average only 1.9 goals (almost half a goal down). Still apparent that Town’s goalscoring is not primarily in isolated spikes, but more consistent than that – though moreso last season than this.

The longest run of any teams scoring three or more is three games; Southampton have done it, so have Brighton and Bournemouth, and Town did it the very first time they scored three last season – beating Stockport 3-1, Southampton, also 3-1, and Brighton 7-1; indeed, two of the three seven goal hauls came in August 2009 – the other was Colchester Utd at Norwich.

The figures when scoring four or more are less revealing, but still worth noting; basically, Town were more likely to score a ‘big’ score last season; only Macclesfield have been similarly put to the sword this year – the games after, again a small sample size, show Town scoring either an average of exactly 2 (in 09/10) or 1.83 goals (10/11) in the next game.

Town sit pretty well with Southampton in this regard; as successful teams, and regular scorers, sometimes things go right for them, and they net a lot of goals, but generally two goals is an expected return, home or away – you’ll win more games than you lose if you score twice a game, for sure.

How does it sit with the rest of the division, though?

Well, Town’s 3 Goal + Average is 4.09 over the two years; you can still say, if Town score 3, expect 4. The league as a whole averages 3.54 in this instance – so four or more is only slightly more likely than ‘just’ three. More importantly, having scored those three goals, Town average 2.17 goals the next game. The league as a whole averages just 1.41. So, if another league team has scored three or more in one game, they’re more likely to score only 1 goal next time out than they are anything else. There are, obviously, teams for whom that isn’t the case, but as a general rule, high-scoring feats are spikes of isolation.

 

That figure of 1.41 is slightly down for those teams who score 4 or more, to 1.38, which is a negligible change, as is a jump to 1.46 for those who score five or more. Teams who score six or more find themselves more on a par with Town’s average, at 2.22 – but that is heavily swayed by Town themselves, scoring 6 against Dagenham, and then 6 against Wycombe next time out.

What has this told us, then? Ultimately, the better teams in the division are those who score more goals more often. Anyone can score eight goals once (Leyton Orient, 8-2 v Droylsden) but unless you can score two or three on a regular basis, you won’t be able to challenge with the top teams. The same is true of teams who can only score big numbers of goals at home; it’s the consistency of scoring that’s the thing – lots of goals are needed often in League One.

Incidentally, over the last two seasons, Town have played 97 games and scored 170 goals – an average of 1.75 goals per game in all competitions; so slightly fewer on average than immediately after scoring 3 or more.