134 – Lee Peltier’s Goal: Post 1

Lee Peltier scored his first goal for Huddersfield Town on Tuesday night. He has been with the club for more-or-less a season and a half and, as much as its quite a long time before a goal, his contribution to the team has been more than healthy in other areas. This post, though, is designed to focus on the things that have happened from the moment Peltier first took to the field in blue and white stripes (well, technically in that red & navy away shirt at Southend) until he netted in the 90th minute against Cambridge Utd on the 16th of this month.

The first statistic is that Town had played 76 games, Cambridge being the 77th, 55 in season 2009/10, and 22 in the current season – though Peltier had only featured in 69 (50 last season/19 this). 134 goals had been scored in that time (in all competitions) and Lee Peltier had scored zero of them. He’d assisted two goals – one in each season – and had a small number of attempts on goal – 6 on target (3/3) and 9 off target (4/5) but none of those shots had hit the net, or even the woodwork.

A quick breakdown of those 134 goals is as follows:

31 – Jordan Rhodes

18 – Anthony Pilkington

16 – Theo Robinson

15 – Lee Novak

12 – Gary Roberts

7 – Antony Kay

6 – Peter Clarke

3 – Michael Collins, Nathan Clarke, Robbie Williams, Jamie McCombe, Scott Arfield, Graham Carey, Own Goals

2 – Danny Drinkwater, Neal Trotman, Benik Afobe

1 – Robbie Simpson, Nathan Eccleston, Joey Guðjónsson

And then, of course, came Peltier’s name joining that last group (before Gary Roberts added his 14th).

There’s a couple of questions that come about from these points. Firstly, a third of the way through this season, Peltier has had more shots than he had in the whole of last season – why is that? Secondly, all the goalscoring figures except Anthony Pilkington and Jordan Rhodes’ are lower than one would expect for this stage of the season – why is that?

Of course, the only important statistic that came out of Peltier’s goal is that it brought Town level against Cambridge, and allowed them to progress to the 2nd Round of the Cup, where the opposition will feature a favourite non-prolific player of mine, Nat Brown (76 games/0 goals – he scored his first on his 78th career appearance, for Lincoln at Chester), so that’s all that we can really get out of it.

Additional points.

Two other not-very-prolific full-backs have netted over the last two weekends, sandwiching Peltier in the middle. He’s in good company.

14th November 2010 – Bacary Sagna, of Arsenal, scored his first goal for the club since 23rd March 2008 – his tally is now 2 in 110 games.

20th November 2010 – Patrice Evra, of Manchester Utd, scored his first goal for the club since 29th November 2006 – his tally now 2 in 147 games.