5.43 – Welcome To Donal McDermott – Post 38

Yesterday, Huddersfield Town unveiled two new signings, one more unexpected and exciting than the other. I mean no disrespect to Oscar Gobern, but we knew what to expect with his signing, but Donal McDermott, tormentor-in-chief for Bournemouth during the playoffs was unexpected and, coming off the back of the news that the previous next-best-thing wanted to move on, lightened the mood a little. I wanted to do a little statistical analysis about what we might expect, and, as luck would have it, the two players’ pre-Town careers haven’t been a million miles apart. You’ll remember I did a post about Pilks a few days after his injury. All the stats from then remain the same, and have been used here, though I’ve deleted the Huddersfield Town ones from a lot of them. Firstly, if we start with games played.

Before he signed for Town, Pilks had played 91 games (all for Stockport); Donal has played far, far fewer – only 38 appearances, and a good proportion of those off the bench – similarly, Pilkington’s 19 goals overwhelms McDonald’s 7.

However, where they are even is in games PER goal – Pilkington’s 19 came one every 4.79 games, and McDermott’s came at an only slightly less impressive 5.43 games per goal; coincidentally, he has the same ratio for games per assist, too, which outstrips Pilkington’s, which was at an assist every 7 games when he joined. Pilkington was scoring at a goal every 8 games, and McDonald at one every 8.29 games – again both very similar.

Here’s the chart (obviously, Pilkington is at the top)

The only other thing I wanted to look at was McDermott’s AMMP – which was 0.67 to Pilkington’s 1.50 – they were both hamstrung by team-mates here; Town’s best run came with Pilks out of the team, and Bournemouth’s run-in was pretty poor in terms of points, so McDermott lost out there.

The stats, then, say that we’re getting someone a little more raw than Pilkington was, but perhaps with a shade more emphasis on assisting goals than scoring them. However it end up, he’s an exciting signing, and I wish him all the best – as I will to Pilkington when he leaves the club. Good move by Lee Clark, and full thanks to Dean Hoyle.

4.00 – Congratulations to Pilks – Post 27

On 17th April, Anthony Pilkington, whose continued improvement as a football was discussed earlier on these pages, was named to the PFA League One Team of the Year. It’s a tremendous achievement for the lad, even if most of the votes possibly came as a result of his goal against Sheffield Wednesday on Sky in early January – the month the votes were cast. He was joined by a motley crew of other success stories of the season, 5 from Southampton, 3 from Brighton and 1 each from Peterborough, and a Plymouth/Charlton switch (though I’ll take him as Plymouth, because that’s where most of his playing time before voting was).

2004/05 – 3.27

2005/06 – 5.45

2006/07 – 8.27

2007/08 – 2.27

2008/09 – 4.72

2009/10 – 4.54

2010/11 – 4.00

Pilkington is the first Huddersfield player in the TOTY since Efe Sodje was in the League Two team in 2003/04, but he joins former Town ‘favourites’ Phil Jevons (while with Yeovil), Joe Skarz (this season, at Bury) and loanee David Graham (the year he pipped us to promotion from Division 3 with Torquay); not a lot of representation, though, I’m sure you’ll agree. Why? Well, for a start, Town have been pretty average. That’s important. I want to know the figures of whether Town’s 8th or 9th placed finishes would rule them out of the reckoning. The average finishing position for a player in the TOTY is 4.5. Here’s a table of the averages season by season since our return to League One. Other than in 2007/08, when nobody outside the top five made the list, there’s been at least one representative of teams who weren’t challenging for promotion – a berth Bradley Wright-Phillips fills this year – but I don’t think anyone can argue that any Town player was (for a season) the best in their position until perhaps last season, when I think there was a few in blue and white who were unfortunate to be ignored. The other interesting feature about this year’s team is the proliferation of Southampton players – 5 – to Brighton’s 3. This has never happened before; every other season, the top team has led the way in terms of players selected – the most being Luton’s 6 in 2004/05. So what? What conclusion to draw? The only conclusion I can draw is that Brighton are under-represented (I’m surprised Kazenga Lua-Lua doesn’t make the list, given the judging took place in January) and Southampton over-represented – possibly by a player each. Pilkington has been Town’s most consistent player, and I don’t think anyone else can argue that they’re worth of selection – not in terms of effect on the most games. Congratulations to Anthony, and may it be the first of many.

198 – The Rise and Rise of Anthony Pilkington – Post 17

On my 29^th birthday, Huddersfield Town played Rochdale and won 2-1. Hurrah. However, during that game Anthony Pilkington was injured badly enough to rule him out for the rest of the season, and probably a bit of the next season as well which is a damned shame. His goals, most obviously, but all-round performance, have been key to Town’s success this season and last, and he has looked every bit a player who would thrive in the division above, where hopefully he will be playing with Huddersfield Town next season. Let me use this space to extend my best wishes to Anthony on a speedy recovery – his early Twitter reaction to the operation seems positive – and to Huddersfield on their performances without him in the squad; the 0-1 victory at Bristol Rovers was a good start.

This post is not about Pilkington’s injury, though, so much as Pilkington the player, and how valuable he’s been since he started out in the game – now approaching 200 games (198) at first team level. Being an unsolicited viewer of statistics, there is only so much I have access to – it would be nice to be able to see full Opta stats to back up my ideas about Pilks, but I can only work with what I have, so I’ll draw my conclusions from that. My assumption, and gut feeling, is that Pilks was performing well at Stockport, and has gradually found his feet since his move across the Pennines, though obviously I’ve not really seen enough actual games to count too much on that.

1.      Note on Appearances.

The main reason Huddersfield Town signed Anthony was to play football matches, obviously, and he’s been pretty good at that so far; 40 this season before the injury, 51 last season… that’s a lot of games. In fact, he’s been first choice since he broke into the Stockport first team – only missing one game (a cup defeat at Watford) that first season, and playing 37 games the next. His stats for each season, then, aren’t based on small amounts of games – even the season he transferred saw Anthony play 46 games between the two clubs.

So one of the things I was going to think about, relative win records when Pilks plays/fails to play, is rendered relatively useless by the small number of games that he failed to play in.

2.      Note on Methodology.

The method I’ve decided to use to rank Anthony’s efficiency is to see how well different seasons rate in terms of certain positive aspects, and tally them up against each other; five seasons of play so far makes a five-point system, so in each case, if a season is the best in a category, it scores 5, and if it’s the worst, it scores 1. Its not perfect, I know, but it can give a better overview than just tallying things up. I have, of course, averaged these things out, too. As a very rough example – Pilks played 24 times in 2006/07 and 51 times in 2009/10 – that’s more than twice the amount of opportunities to score goals, or notch assists, so these figures are averaged out to a ‘per game’ ratio.

3.      Categories used

Games Per Goal – how many games it is, on average, between goals. The lower the figure the better, obviously. Best; 2010/11 – 2.86 games per goal             – best by almost two games. Worst; 2008/09 – 5.75 games.

Games Per Assist – how many games it is, on average, between assists. Again, the lower the better. Best; 2009/10 – 4.25 games per assist. Worst; 2006/07 – 12 games per assist.

Shots Per Game – how many shots Pilks has per game. Higher the better. Best; 2008/09 – 2.22. Worst; 2007/08 – 1.3.

Shots Per Goal – how many shots it takes Pilks to score. The lower the better. Best; 2010/11 – 5.86. Worst; 2008/09 – 12.75

So, what do we find. Well, Pilkington’s performances in each category have been very different across the seasons; 12 assists last year compared to only 7 this, for example (albeit in fewer games) and 14 goals this season to 9 last. There is a general trend, though. And an important trend. Every season he’s played, Pilks has finished in a higher league position than the previous one, that is assuming nothing catastrophic happens in the last two months of this season. Every season, too, he has scored more goals than in the previous season. Those facts alone outline the story. Pilkington, and the by virtue of this, the teams he plays for, is improving all the time.

The balancing I did working this out shows that his overall performance across the four categories has improved, every season, too. Anthony Pilkington has been a better player, in a better team, every season of his career so far. This is why losing him is such a blow, and its so important that he comes back next season, because we’ve every reason to believe he’ll come back better than ever, and if he does, and is, we’ve can assume Huddersfield Town will be a better team because of it.

Get well soon, Pilks.

Season			App	Gls	GPG	Ass	APG	Sho	SPGl	SPGm
2006/07	Stockport C		24	5	4.80	2	12.00	40	8.00	1.67
2007/08	Stockport C		37	8	4.63	5	7.40	48	6.00	1.30
2008/09	Stockport C		30	6		6		64
	Huddersfield T		16	2	5.75	3	5.11	38	12.75	2.22
2009/10	Huddersfield T		51	9	5.67	12	4.25	70	7.78	1.37
2010/11	Huddersfield T		40	14	2.86	7	5.71	82	5.86	2.05
			198	44	4.50	35	5.66	342	7.77	1.73