We’ve tried to get one step ahead of the Championship by delving into some of the underlying numbers, Benjamin Bloom has all you need to know, with odds from Betfair throughout.
Angle of attack – Right sight provides
In an idyllic total football dream world, a team’s attacking balance would be absolutely perfectly split left, right and centre. There’s probably a much longer debate about whether an even split is actually the best case scenario. Plenty of teams have a preferred side of the pitch, but can draw a wary defence across to cover the perceived danger and quickly switch to the other side in order to utilise the element of surprise.
Leaving that debate to one side, the ‘attack sides’ data can give a very basic illustration of where on the pitch a team spends most of its time attacking. Looking at the teams that prefer to attack down the right-hand side gives us the following top three: Coventry 41%, Nottingham Forest 42% and Luton 43%. These teams are all in the top ten in the current table so perhaps a concentrated attack does work to a certain extent.
Coventry frequently line up with a back three and one up front. This means a wing-back (Todd Kane), an inside forward (Jamie Allen) and in an ideal world, the right-sided centre-back (Dominic Hyam) can get forward down the right-hand side. At Forest, Steve Cooper has switched between a back four and a back three, but with the glaringly obvious conclusion that both systems pair star men Brennan Johnson and Djed Spence down their right-hand side. Luton boss Nathan Jones tends to be fairly fluid in his use of his squad, what does stand out however is that right full-back/wing-back James Bree is second in the Hatters squad for minutes played this season and third in the division for crosses per match.
Cardiff v Nottingham Forest – Djed Spence first goalscorer 20/1 (Betfair)
The xG Files – Blades defensive disparity
Focusing on the ‘xG against’ column this week leads Sheffield United to pop up as an interesting case, with some conflicting information probably worth delving into. United are 14th in the Championship for goals conceded with 32 in 25 games coming out at 1.28 per game, their actual league position is two places higher in 12th. The biggest disparity comes when throwing in an ‘xG agains’ position in the division of 4th, clearly way higher than our previous two markers.
In terms of an explanation, the most obvious mitigating factor is the three games in hand the Blades have. If we take their current points per game of 1.44 and attribute that to a hypothetical three extra games they could have played, that adds an extra 4.32 points on to the total and would take United up to 9th.
The second explanation would be the change of manager; can we attribute their defensive record to Slavisa Jokanovic and not Paul Heckingbottom? To a degree, under Heckingbottom the Blades have conceded 1 goal per game and under Jokanovic it was 1.36. There is a difference but under Heckingbottom it still requires two goals per game to be scored to win on average.
The final explanation is our old friend ‘underperformance’, although as usual there are two possibilities. The ten-place difference between Sheffield United’s ‘xG against’ and goals conceded ranks could mean they’ve been the victim of some ruthless finishing, their defensive and goalkeeping performance has contained errors, or all of the above. Rather than dip into the numbers I’ll conclude by mentioning this week’s signing of new goalkeeper Adam Davies from Stoke City and leave it at that.
Peterborough v Sheff Utd – Sheff Utd win to nil 12/5 (Betfair)
Stoke snipers
Stoke City lead the way for goals from outside the box this season. The Potters have scored 11 long-range goals, Swansea come in second on nine and QPR complete the top three with eight. Before we dig into the accuracy of Stoke’s shooting, let’s give some praise to the players responsible for leading the long-range stats.
It’s no surprise to see Mario Vrancic and Nick Powell both with two outside of the box goals. Vrancic is a free kick expert and Powell has made a career being not quite a striker and not quite a midfielder. Slightly more surprisingly Stephen Fletcher also has two contributions despite being known as a penalty box striker who’s good in the air. Where Stoke do particularly well is sharing out the long range goals, with Ben Wilmott, Lewis Baker, Tom Ince, Tyrece Campbell and Jacob Brown all on target from outside the box this season.
I’ll be totally honest now and say I was expecting to find out that Stoke were top of the pile because they’d had absolutely loads of attempts from outside the box. To their credit that’s clearly not the case, Stoke are 11th in terms of number of attempts from outside the box with 113. This translates to an impressive hit rate of 10.2%, and contrasts favourably with teams much higher than them in the shooting accuracy stakes. Nottingham Forest top the attempts list but their 35 more long-range shots have produced seven goals fewer than Stoke with a more modest hit rate of 2.9%.
Huddersfield v Stoke – Lewis Baker to score 6/1 (Betfair)
Respect for the intercept
Some Championship defenders are having a lovely time this season. Think about the Fulham centre backs, they could probably spend much of the remainder of the season in the opposition half watching the cast of attackers ahead of them breaking lots of scoring records. What about the Swansea wing-backs, they play so far forward they can barely even be described as defenders within Russ Martin’s philosophy.
Don’t worry though, there are still plenty of defenders in the Championship doing their old school ‘head it, kick it’ duties. As you can imagine the majority of these players reside in teams that perhaps have less possession, operate in a more defensive system or frankly conceded a lot more chances.
A quick glance at the Championship interceptions per game rankings highlights those defenders deep in the trenches and putting themselves in the way of anything headed towards their goal. Looking at players with over 1500 minutes played, coming in third spot is Barnsley’s Michal Helik. I think we’d all agree he fits into the bracket of a defender playing in a team struggling badly and conceding stacks of chances. In second place is Millwall’s Shaun Hutchinson, a stalwart at the Den and very much in the bracket of a player who plays under a sometimes defensively preoccupied manager in Gary Rowett. Leading the way in the Championship for interceptions is Birmingham’s Kristian Pederson, I’m not entirely sure how well he fits into any of my neat categories, so let’s give him some credit for being in the right place at the right time in Blues’ defensive line.
Derby v Birmingham – Birmingham clean sheet 9/4 (Betfair)
Odds correct at the time of publication. 18+ Please Gamble Responsibly. Visit begambleaware.org
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