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.

4.06 – A Brief Appreciation of Jordan Rhodes – Post 43

Jordan Rhodes has scored 35 league goals for Huddersfield Town. 19 were in 2009/10, and 16 were in 2010/11. That’s a more than respectable tally – indeed, only Rickie Lambert and Lee Barnard have scored more in League One over that time (though Grant Holt has scored around 2,000,000 in that time, largely against Jordan’s former team Ipswich). Now, that fact alone points to the fact that there aren’t many strikers of his quality around the divisions – if someone scores goals, they’re given a chance higher very quickly indeed now – witness Charlie Austin, scorer of 19 goals in 2009/10, and even Billy Paynter, with 26 that season, even though it seems to have been an anomaly in a sea of otherwise average goal-scoring seasons. Jordan has remained in League One and will be looking to score a similar amount this time around – if he is successful, his run of three 15 goal League One seasons will be the longest active streak (Rickie Lambert currently owns that, but of course will by plying his trade a division higher this time around).

Now, this isn’t what I want focus on in this mini-post. I want to draw focus to the shots per goal figure that these strikers have carried with them. A value per goal, if you will. It was something I did an extensive post about on the then-extant 606 when Jermain Beckford left Leeds to go to Everton – he required a lot of shots, at that stage, for his goals to come; far more, when I worked it out, than Simon Cox and Rickie Lambert did for the same tally. He has adjusted bit-by-bit to the Premiership.

Anyway.

In his first season, Jordan’s 19 goals came from 106 shots (53 on, 53 off target) which was a rate of a goal every 5.58 shots – good for only 10th best in the division, behind such goal-fiends as Charlie Austin, Nicky Forster and, erm, Ian Harte. Last season, Jordan may have only scored 16 goals, but they were from far fewer shots (partly because he didn’t play as often) at only 4.06 shots per goal. Thinking about that, scoring a goal every four attempts, is impressive indeed; counting that slightly over half were on target, that’s 16 goals out of 36 shots that found the net – a goalkeeper success rate of only 20/36 (or 56%) and leaving him third in League One, behind only Craig Mackail-Smith (of course) and Ashley Barnes, neither of whom will provide competition this season.

There’s a few interesting nuggets on the table – Rickie Lambert being so ineffective last season (?), Ian Harte…just generally – but this is a slight going over of old ground (refer to my minute-by-minute Jordan Rhodes post a few months ago) with a reminder of something I’ll be keeping a close eye on this season – expect updates, then, every goal that Jordan scores with all players on the same or more goals – obviously depending on circumstance. The conclusion I would draw, though, is that Jordan appears to be improving every season, and hopefully will do the same again. Will be interesting, too, to see the seasons Bradley Wright-Phillips and Gary Jones have, particularly BWP.

2.33 – Pre-Season Odyssey Part Two – Post 40b

We’ve already seen, according to figures from 2008/09, that pre-season games don’t have an over-strong bearing on the rest of the season to come – I was going to collate the 2009/10 and 2010/11 figures, but I don’t think, given what we saw, that it would be worth anybody’s while, but the 2011/12 pre-season might be worth casting an eye over. Not that it’ll give us any pointers, but its always¹ interesting to see what other teams have been doing.

So that’s what I’ve done. Looking at first team fixtures only (and so discounting any of the games that I’ve actually seen, and my apologies to Alfreton Town, whose 14-0 victory will go uncredited), I’ve tried to rank League One pre-seasons against one another as objectively as I can. There’s only so much balancing you can do with this, so I’ve tried to rank it so that games against ‘higher’ teams are worth more than those against ‘lower’ teams, but not so much that figures get impossibly skewed.

Knowing what I know, I ought to warn you that these figure will, more likely than not, bear absolutely no relation to what you will see when the season actually kicks off on August 6th, but with the pre-season Town have had, I’m hoping it will carry through (though heaven help the development squad).

Right, then, on with the chart.

Here we go. Doesn’t that make interesting reading. Top of the Pre-Season pops are the mighty Cherries, bouncing back from playoff disappointment by walloping teams they might have got to face in the league had they won. They’re followed closely by Brentford, whose new Bee-style away shirt has been particularly successful so far and are one of two teams (along with Rochdale) to defeat Premiership opposition, in the form of last season’s FA Cup Finalists Stoke City.

Meanwhile, both Charlton and Yeovil Town have defeated Bristol City, which, while you can’t guarantee such things, suggests they might be worth considering for a cup upset this season; all eyes on their Carling Cup tie against Swindon in the first midweek game of the season.

Its also worth noting the difference in the number of games played between 4 and 8 – will be interesting to note how much match fitness that will bring Notts County, as to whether their mammoth pre-season will leave them in better stead than the results suggest, or if Bournemouth’s briefer one will result in them being a little off the pace early doors. Again, only time will tell; as with all pre-season things, we’re working on supposition. One thing that I would expect to see continuing is the goal tallies; not as extreme (the top two both won 0-10, which I suspect we won’t see in season) as this, but Oldham and Sheffield Wednesday would be teams – Gary Megson, anyone – whose games I would anticipate not being packed full of net-bulging action.

So there you have it. The best pre-seasons might not make the best seasons, but at least the fans have enjoyed them in the sunshine. The worst ones might not necessarily bring disaster, but I bet the fans of those teams who’ve only won one game aren’t particularly confident for the year ahead.

My prediction? I’d be very surprised to see the top six like that at the end of the year, but the bottom four aren’t a million miles away from what I expect it to be.

Incidentally, there are three games still to go, as I make it; Charlton play Carshalton, Yeovil host Southampton and another game that I don’t have to hand takes place.

¹Perhaps this ‘always’ is being generous, but go with me, it’ll make the rest of the post work.

6.515 – Another Point About Substitutes – Post 42

It struck me, while discussing the number of substitutes in League One yesterday, that I might be missing something quite obvious; its about those time-wasting substitutions at the end of games, and how they might skew the figures. I know, for example, that Paul Tisdale played about a minute for Exeter at the end of their season, and his one appearance (which was about 90 seconds long) counted in the figures. So I needed to try something that would balance it out a bit more; I was drawn, as often in these circumstances, to percentages.

Basically, what percentage of a teams’ playing time was taken up by substitutes? There’d be a maximum of somewhere around 27% (3 players coming on for 90 minutes a time) but I didn’t expect we’d trouble double figures, to be honest. What I didn’t expect to find is that Huddersfield Town topped the table for time played by substitutes, with 6.515% of the total league game time being taken up by replacements – this figure being in no small part due to Jordan Rhodes’ seeming inability to fulfil his 90 minutes whenever he played and the willingness of Lee Clark to remove Benik Afobe from the fray.

My thinking was, then, that the more successful teams would use their substitutes later, just to waste time, and the worse teams would use them sooner, so as to try to change things. I was, as yesterday, misguided.

Look at the percentage line (in red) dipping massively from almost six to just over 4.5, despite the wild inconsistencies (Sheffield Wednesday, with their huge squad, showing up there) from individual team to team. I took into account, for this, the total minutes played (11 x 90 for each game, less the minutes lost for sendings off) and balanced that into percentages with the total time played by the substitutes. Those of you who read yesterday’s post won’t be surprised to see MK Dons featuring so highly; the top three being Town 6.515, Sheffield W 6.432, and MK Dons on 6.430. It’s a fair bit, that, really; its about 65 minutes of game time every match being played by a substitute. Because this table is a bit more compact, I’ve put it in at the bottom. Enjoy reading it, and well done to Oldham and Dagenham, who had the most faith in their starting XIs last season, or the least faith in their substitutes, depending on how you sway. The three columns, if you’re interested, are total minutes (including playoffs), total substitute minutes, and % of Total Minutes that were played by Substitutes.

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.

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.

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.