78.922 – An Opus To Pre-Season In Three Parts: Part I 2008/09 – Post 40a

I like pre-season games. Those of you reading who’ve seen me at games this year as far afield as Guiseley, Bedfont and Dronsfield would attest to that. I love the unknown footballers playing under very little pressure. I find it entertaining and you get to see some wonderful goals (Bradford Park Avenue’s first against City was wonderful) by players you least expect to score them.

At the end of the day, the games don’t really mean anything. No Arsenal fan is appeased by winning the Emirates Cup and no Brentford fan, happy though they may have been to beat Stoke City, would trade a pre-season victory against a top-flight team for even one victory in the league when the business really start.

But.

But.

But the games must mean something, right, or else they wouldn’t be played. They do. They’re there for building up fitness for players, and trying out trialists. My question here, though, is borne from the relative successes of Huddersfield (5 games won in a row for the first team) and Brentford (who beats someone 0-10?!?). Do positive results carry through into the season, or is it just a case of ‘Well done lads, now let’s do something different when it matters’.

Here I attempt to find out.

I have, over the course of this 3-post epic, taken League One Pre-Seasons from 2008-09 to the present day; which in hindsight, was probably a mistake. It was very, very difficult to find results from friendlies from July 2008, but I think I got them all in the end. Allow a game or two either way for that one, I think. What I did, then, was table the games up (all pre-season games, be they first team or development squad or reserves or whatever, because at that stage, there’s all sorts of inter-squad chicanery and, I also reasoned, the teams are playing teams balanced for their levels. Stockport Reserves aren’t playing Barcelona, they’re playing an equivalent team to the first team, who should be of slightly lower ability) and balance the games in a points per game system, which was compared to the actual results in the league the subsequent campaign.

I expected that the pre-season figures would probably be more positive than the league because I know the trend is for teams to play against weaker opposition, which makes sense; big teams bring in the money, little teams bring in the confidence; this is borne out by a 29% increase in ppg in pre-season to regular season, which is a far from

inconsequential amount (over the course of the season, if that were played out all round, teams would have around 13 points more on the board). The number of games, however, is worth bearing in mind, as it ranged from 3 (MK Dons) to 14 (Stockport – though their reserves and development squads played a good number of those).

I want to mention a specific game, too – Stockport’s first pre-season game at Cammell Laird. County won the game 2-3, with the first goal scored by a certain Anthony Pilkington, which highlights how long ago this was. The Lairds then netted twice before Stockport pulled level, the equaliser by then trialist Lee Novak.

For 2008/09, we were in a League One with a dominant Leicester City and a not quite fit for purpose Hereford Utd. In 46 games, the two teams averaged 2.087 and 0.739 ppg respectively. Over their pre-seasons, the figures were pretty well on, as well, Leicester’s being 2.000, and Hereford’s at 0.875. These figures would suggest that their fans might well have known what was coming for them as early as July. However, scratching below that lovely coincidence, we see Cheltenham Town, in 23rd place (RS), and with an average of 0.848ppg. Their pre-season was something of a triumph, winning 5, drawing 4 and losing 1 of their 10 games – a 1.9ppg – double what they would go onto attain. By the same token, Peterborough (boo) in 2nd spot, lost 3 of their 5 pre-season games, leaving a 1.200ppg, which they would surpass by .735ppg in the regular season for a 1.935ppg. These stories, I’m sorry to say, are the more common theme. Northampton, in 20th, were the closest two figures, ranging between 1.000ppg in pre-season and 1.065ppg in the regular season.

We are, of course, here for Huddersfield Town, sitting relatively pretty in 9th spot in the regular season figures, averaging just over 1.478ppg, which is average indeed, what with 1.500 being exactly half of the points offer. This pre-season was an inauspicious one, though, with the Hartlepool Centenary Tournament accounting for two of the three defeats, and Emley (8-0) accounting for half of the wins. It meant that Town’s ppgd (points per game differential) was 78.922% – good for fourth worst in the league – the best being Cheltenham’s.

What 2008/09 suggests is that although pre-season can be a decent indicator of what’s to come, it isn’t necessarily so. You’re just as likely to have a good pre-season and fail as a bad one and succeed, so we can’t judge too much from it. It also points out that the teams themselves don’t really care about it, or else they’d keep better records of them somewhere.

Next up, 2009/10, and what trends emerge from that, or continue from this.

19 – Starcodes and Barcodes – Post 32

A friend of mine raised a question by e-mail the other day that I only knew half the answer for.

He wondered who were the last team to win the top division wearing blue and white stripes. My initial thought was ‘Sunderland were the last wearing stripes, but there’s only a couple of blues and whites it could be’. Turns out it was one of the others. This got me thinking about the scarcity of stripey teams winning the top flight, and I wondered if it held firm throughout history. Certainly this year, there’s one red, one blue, one hoops and one (traditionally) striped shirted team¹ celebrating with a lovely trophy. I also wondered whether we could include Chelsea’s shirt as striped, because it has – recently – had stripes on it; the pedant in me said ‘yes’, but the realist said ‘don’t be such a pedant’. So I won’t.

Here’s a brief overview of kit types winning the various leagues, broken down into percentages – I have taken the kit to be the kits at the time; for a lot of them, they’re traditional, but for others, there’s wee descriptions if they’re not what you expect, though if you’re the kind of person to be surprised by a Rotherham kit from 1950/51, then you probably should look for alternative methods of surprise (viewing daylight, for example).

Firstly, and to set this article into its proper context, Huddersfield Town recently released a new kit. It has blue and white stripes, but white sleeves; to this date, the club have won five divisional titles, each time wearing blue and white stripes – which carried onto the sleeves. That’s not to say the new shirt will prove unsuccessful, just that teams wearing unusual designs have seldom been champions in the past (though the Wigan shirt of 1996/97 was certainly unusual). Anyway. Onto the numbers.

Looking at 112 champions of the Premiership/Division 1, there is an overwhelming trend.

Halves	3²	2.68%
Plain	69	61.61%
Sleeves	21	18.75%
Stripes	19	16.96%

Knowing that the last team wearing stripes was Sunderland, some seventy-odd years ago, there’s been a massive swing in favour of ‘plain’ kits; indeed, 16 of the last 20 titles have been claimed by the plain shirt brigade; in the shapes of Manchester Utd, Chelsea and Leeds. Arsenal’s three titles (sleeves) and Blackburn’s halves make up the numbers. Block colours are certainly the way to go in the top flight, and of those, 39 of the 69 titles have been won by teams in plain red; numbers being made up by blue (14), white (9), gold (3 – but within a 6 year period), sky blue (2) and salmon (1) – step up the Everton team of 1890/91.

Halves	4	3.73%
Plain	64	59.81%
Sleeves	6	5.61%
Stripes	27	25.23%
Hoops	3	2.80%
Penguin	1	0.93%
Bar	1	0.93%
Sash	1	0.93%

There is only 107 years of 2nd division history to work with, but again, there’s a swing towards the plain – 64 of the victorious teams wearing shirts of the one colour – but the stripes and the plains are closer together (the sway being more than made up for by the sleeves only racking up six titles in Tier 2. At this point, I ought to explain that the penguin shirts are the plain shirts with a ‘v’ on the front of them, largely favoured by Birmingham City (or Brescia, if you swing that way) on this occasion in the 1920/21 season – they have returned to the design a few times, but without matching that success; meanwhile the ‘bar’ refers to a plain shirt with a single stripe on it – generally horizontal (Middlesbrough) but they do exist vertically – I suppose Ajax would wear a loose version of that. The sash is a relatively unused shirt variety – though we had two, I think this season; one throwback to this one – Crystal Palace – and one Manchester City away shirt. Its basically a plain shirt with a two-stripe diagonal across it.

Colour breakdown for the 64 plain shirts is as follows. Blue (17), White (17), Red (13), Sky Blue (8), Yellow (4), Claret (2), Gold (2), Tangerine (1) – you’ll be unsurprised to note that that’s Blackpool.

Hoops	3	5.88%
Plain	26	50.98%
Sleeves	7	13.72%
Stripes	14	27.45%
Bar	1	1.96%

The disparity between plain and stripes is even narrower in the fourth tier as the top – with the sleeved shirts making a bit of a comeback; Millwall, in this instance (and surprisingly for me) are the ‘bar’ it was white on blue in 1962/63. Colour breakdown of the plain shirts in Division 4 goes as follows – Blue (10), Yellow (6), Red (4), White (3), Gold, Green, Navy (1). Its interesting to see how the plain red shirts – though there is no shortage of teams in predominantly red shirts (Morecambe, Stevenage, Swindon, Orient…) dominance is a lot less in the lower divisions, and the leading teams are in blue – albeit plain blue.

Halves	1	1.89%
Hoops	3	5.66%
Plain	35	66.03%
Quarters	1	1.89%
Sleeves	5	9.43%
Stripes	8	15.09%

To the slightly thorny third division, and I’ve split it into two; one for a unified third, and one for the (combined) North and South versions. There have been 53 incarnations of this, won most recently by Brighton in stripes (hurrah!), though they beat Southampton in stripes (hurrah!) and Huddersfield in stripes (hurrah, though also boo) into 2nd and 3rd place. Vintage year for verticals it was. That hasn’t been borne out over the fullness of time though, as no other shirt variety has even reached double figures of victories. The breakdown of plain shirts is as follows; White (10), Yellow (5), Blue (8), Gold (3), Red (3), Green (2), Navy Blue (2), Claret (1), Sky Blue (1). It becomes interesting (to me) that the plain shirt colours get so much more varied as one goes down the leagues – obviously, we know there’s teams like Plymouth in green, Norwich in yellow and Coventry in sky blue, but that they’ve all tasted lower league success at one time or other is good.

Halves	1	1.67%
Hoops	7	11.69%
Penguin	1	1.67%
Plain	27	45.09%
Quarters	1	1.67%
Sleeves	6	10.00%
Stripes	17	28.39%

The 60 years of North and South divide as follows – the widest variety so far – and a pretty good performance by the stripes; this division is also the only division that has seen stripes of three colours – horizontally, the red, black and yellow of Bradford Park Avenue in 1927/28. The plain colour breakdown is thus; Red (10), White (8), Blue (5), Green, Gold, Navy Blue, Yellow (1 each). So we’re back to as we were. In all four divisions, teams in plain shirts have been more successful – and the gap isn’t even close a lot of the time. Now, while I’m sure this doesn’t have any bearing on whether, for example, Birmingham City decide to adopt the penguin on their shirts, it might mean that for a teams who are slightly more transient in terms of stripes (Hull City and Gillingham spring to mind) would fall into a bigger category if they decided to go plain instead of stripey.

I maybe ought to point out at this juncture, that there is a lot more teams playing in plain shirts than there is stripes, as well, so it is to be expected that they lead the way, but I’m surprised to note quite how dominant the plain shirt has been in all the divisions, and how the different colours have had different levels of success at different levels. Anyway, here’s the grand (383) totals.

Bar	2	0.522%
Halves	9	2.349%
Hoops	16	4.176%
Penguin	2	0.522%
Plain	221	57.681%
Quarters	2	0.522%
Sash	1	0.261%
Sleeves	45	11.745%
Stripes	85	22.185%

What can I say? If you want a divisional winner, more than 50% of the time, you ought to look for a plain shirt. Sad days for those in stripes, but worse news for Crystal Palace if they keep the sash. Liverpool, despite two titles in halves, probably did the right thing, too.

¹Brighton’s 2010/11 kit may well go down in seaside folklore, but it was a bloody ugly jobby, for damned surest mustard.

²All three being Blackburn Rovers.

Thousands of thanks to http://www.historicalkits.co.uk for my information.

17.94 – Average Shirt Numbers – Post 10

Watching Arsenal last night, something occurred to me. I blame Nicklas Bendtner. His 52 shirt, and the 53 of Wojciech Szczeny are two of the higher numbered shirts we see regularly in England, and illustrate the move away, not just from the first 11 (I guess Arsenal haven’t fielded an honest 1-11 since long before the days of Thierry Henry, who was always 14) but from the squad of 25, too. I know Italy has always allowed differences – Pagliuca wore 77, for example – and there’s a long line of famous players who preferred to wear 25 (Zola, Kanu, Adebayor) which would push the average shirt number up. At Huddersfield Town, though, there’s never been a huge squad, and the higher numbers are, as at Arsenal, generally players who join late, or come through the youth system – Liam Ridehalgh’s 29, for example.

 

Is this a good thing or a bad thing? We’re always told that a settled team is a good thing to have, particularly at League One level, and that must indicate a preference for the team that starts the year as the first team to stay as the first team for the duration of the season, give or take – allowing for new signings, and injuries – a few different faces. If that is the case, a 1-11 team averages 6.00, obviously enough, and Town’s average shirt number of the starters, up to 2000/01, was 6.00.

 

After that date, though, we’ve seen a world of difference. I ought to add a precursor to the Town squad statistics. I think they’ve actually been skewed by circumstance in certain ways. That circumstance is, surprisingly, the retirement of Ian Gray. His retention of the number 1 shirt despite starting infrequently ensured Matt Glennon wore 27, which he kept during his stay at Town, and then Alex Smithies couldn’t wear 1 because he wasn’t first choice, until he became so and started wearing 1 (last season); I have done a separate tally to account for that, but that’s just for interest rather than to draw conclusions.

 

	Total Nos	Total / 11	Average
2000-01	6673	136.18	12.38
2001-02	11970	210.00	19.09
2002-03	7886	157.72	14.34
2003-04	8492	157.26	14.30
2004-05	7375	147.50	13.41
2005-06	5975	119.50	10.86
2006-07	7052	143.92	13.08
2007-08	7249	136.77	12.43
2008-09	7766	155.32	14.12
2009-10	6904	125.53	11.41
2010-11	5130	197.31	17.94

 

I was surprised (we’re looking at that figure on the right (2010/11 correct up to today) for the average shirt number of a first team player).

 

I knew we’d had the Team Of 35, so I knew there’d be a few years when the number was pretty high, but for 10 of the 11 seasons since Town moved to squad numbers to be over 11 was a real surprise. Its worth noting that the two most successful seasons – 2003/04, 2009/10 – were the two with the shirt numbers being the lowest – which is certainly a nod to the consistency of the more successful teams (this is particularly impressive when taking into account that Jordan Rhodes (17) and Anthony Pilkington (19) both played more than 50 games last season, of 55 in total) in terms of team selection.

 

Overall, though, the whole thing seems to be a little bit of a mish-mash so any conclusions drawn from it would need backing up some other way. This season’s figure being so high already at 17.9 does suggest, to me, at least that Lee Clark’s been relying on loan players a little too much – Pilkington is in the 11 shirt this year; it is inflated a little by the unforeseen injury to Gary Naysmith, though. His 3 has been replaced by 29 quite often this time around.

 

The Matt Glennon Anomaly

	Total Nos	Total / 11	Average
2006-07	5778	117.92	10.72
2007-08	6414	121.02	11.00
2008-09	7220	144.40	13.13

Look at these figures from 2006-2009 when Town didn’t have a number one – suddenly something else become more obvious to see; Ken Davy’s non-injection of funds into the club. The players that were available were by and large not supplemented by loans – 06/07 and 07/08 particularly bad in that respect, clearly. This sways my opinion a little. Knowing how difficult these team were to watch, and seeing how they were left to fend for themselves without augmentation, I think I’d have to say I support improvement to a new level each transfer window, which would make the exact figure I’d prefer being a little higher than the under 11 I’d thought originally.

166 – Got Your Number: Post 6

Every time I buy a Town shirt, I get Marco 4 printed on the back. Every time, that adds £10 to the cost of the shirt  – £5 for the number and £1 each for the letters. It’s not the earth, but it makes me feel better. I don’t know if I could wear a players’ name and number – what if they left? What if they were awful? What if they were Michel Ngonge¹? Anyway, some people do do that – I’ve seen loads of Stewarts and Booths wandering round Huddersfield in my day, and every time I see them, have a compulsion to wonder how much they paid. A Booth 23 would cost £15 (although often you can get both numbers for £5, truth be told) and a Stewart 9 would cost £12.

So I got to wondering, just out of idle curiosity, which player would have cost Town the most over the years. Now, there’s no way of knowing who has used the most shirts, if Kenny Irons ripped one, or Ken Monkou wore short sleeves one game, so I had to modify my wondering to cover the supporters. If you’re buying a shirt, there’s a drop-down box from which you can choose the names and numbers of the first team squad if you so wish. Town have been wearing shirt names since 1999/2000; a cursory remembering of Wayne Allison scoring at Stoke attests to that, so there’s now 11 years of players to choose from. So, if I’d bought a home shirt every season, and had a player’s name and number on it, who would be the most expensive to get on, and who would be the cheapest?

My initial thought was that the most expensive would be Holdsworth or Worthington – lots of letters, and lots of time at the club. I was wrong. I thought the cheapest would be loan players, but again, what happens with a lot of those is that their numbers come in after the first team squad, so they’re higher.

What did I discover? I discovered that, if I was buying a Town shirt over the last 11 seasons, the worst thing I could do in 1999/2000 would be to get that season’s number 24 on it, because I’d have to get another 8 shirts with the same name, and always (except once) would be in double figures of shirt numbers. The name? SCHOFIELD.

It would cost £166 to get a Town shirt for every season of his stay at Town with his name and number (24 to start, then 7, then 11) on it. Following him came Jon Worthington at £132, and rounding out the top 5, firstly through longevity, Andy Booth at £130, then Andy Holdsworth, though long-namedness and short-numberedness at £95 (five seasons for Holdsworth), and finally Michael Collins at £87.

Cheapest would be only £10, covering only one shirt, of course. That shirt would have one of Bevan 1, Booty 2, Donis 7, Evans 3, or Hayes 9 – though I’m sure you could convince the staff to do you a Lee 19 shirt for this year for only £8.

So now you know.

¹Michel Ngonge is my ‘Town mockery figure of the week’.