The dribblers…
Arsenal completed 20/30 dribbles yesterday taking Arsenal to the top of the Premier League Dribbles table with 13.3. Man City are 2nd with 12.1 and Chelsea are 3rd with 11.7.
Pepe is indisputably Arsenal’s dribble prince. He’s 2nd in the League in dribbles won with 30, just 11 behind Zaha. He also has 1 goal and two assists so far this season, Zaha just one assist.
5 – Dribbles by Guendouzi (of 5)
5 – Dribbles by Pepe (of 7)
5 – Dribbles by Saka (of 5)
Most of those dribbles were in the opposition half:
The concentration of dribbles in the 18 yard box is excellent, however despite 9 attempted dribbles between the LB, Willock, Martinelli, Guendouzi, and Lacazette, just 2 were successful: Guendouzi in the 81st minute and Kolasinac in the 59th.
And it was certainly a function of Sheffield’s defense yesterday that they shuttled players out wide for crosses. All of Arsenal’s key passes come from wingback play and wide areas:
7 – Key passes by Arsenal
2 – Key passes by Chambers
2 – Key passes by Kolasinac
1 – Key pass by Pepe (corner)
1 – Key pass by Saka
1 – Key pass by Lacazette
The Goals…
Arsenal have just 13 goals this season, 7 have been scored by Aubameyang. Moreover, Auba has scored 7 goals on just 17 shots for an unsustainable 41% finishing rate.
Pepe missed a big chance yesterday versus Sheffield United but it was only his 2nd missed big chance of the season. And including his penalty Pepe has only gotten three big chances so far this season.
This is actually a major problem with Arsenal. While it is frustrating to watch players miss big chances and especially so when they go out for a throw-in the problem at Arsenal is that they simply aren’t creating enough chances. Players are going to miss big chances, the trick is to keep creating them over and over again and Arsenal are not hip to that trick.
Unai speaking to the press after the match said that he felt like his team created enough – just 9 shots – and that the problems were that Dean didn’t award a penalty (on Sokratis) and that Pepe missed his chance. He went on to praise Arsenal for winning, and I kid you not, more corners than Sheffield United. Congrats, everyone, we won the most corners. In fact, Arsenal have the most corners of any team in the League, 71 and we are tied for first in the League in assists off corners with 2.
I tend to think that corners are a low percentage play and that we aren’t even really that good at them. And when we look at the stats that really matter, Arsenal’s players have only created 13 big chances (13 big chance key passes) this season. Pepe leads the team with 3 but to give this some context, Kevin de Bruyne alone has created 10 big chances this season.
And before we think that Özil is some panacea, under Unai Emery, Ozil has created just 3 big chances in both domestic and Europa League games.
I remain convinced that we cannot judge players harshly or positively as long as Unai Emery is in charge. His “system” is reactive, passive, and plays almost exclusively to the wings. Arsenal are struggling this season because opposition managers have worked out Emery’s rather simplistic attacking plan.
Even the “play it out from the back” tactic is a failure. The idea behind playing it out from the back is to create spaces for forwards and midfielders. So, you pass around at the back, pull the opposition into pressing, and quickly transition up the pitch with a simple ball over the top or quick vertical pass. But we don’t seem to have the understanding of how to do that effectively. More likely, we end up passing ourselves into corners and then booting it long or out of play.
In the first half, when Arsenal didn’t have a midfielder who could control possession high up the pitch, Arsenal spent more time passing in our own third than in their final third (88 v. 74). This inability to progress the ball also gave Sheffield United an advantage in our half and they completed 92 passes in our final third versus just 32 in their own.
In the second half it was hard to tell if bringing on Ceballos changed the game or if Sheffield chose to sit back. Either way, we had a lot more of the ball but didn’t create significantly more: 4 shots in the first half and 5 in the 2nd.
And there wasn’t any more quality as the match went on from an Arsenal perspective. Arsenal created just one shot in the first 20 minutes (the Pepe chance) and that had an xG of 0.6. For the remainder of the match, Arsenal created 8 chances (in 75 minutes) and they had a combined xG of 0.35. This is where I think xG needs a rethink on the consumer side. Most of the chances in the final 75 minutes were of the low percentage variety. Aggregating them gives us a 0.35 xG but not a 35% probability of scoring. The probability of scoring on those final 8 shots was significantly lower than 35%. I haven’t yet figured out how to solve that probability question because I think it’s more complex than a simple die roll but I was going to ask my friends the mathematicians.
League stats…
13 – Goals scored (7th in the League)
8 – Goals scored at home (4th in the League)
5 – Goals scored away (14th in the League)
8.6 – Shots per game away (16th in the League)
0.39 – Non-penalty expected goals difference (8th in the League)
-0.73 – Non-penalty expected goals difference away (10th in the League)
12.14 – Expected points (10th in the League)
30 – Successful dribbles by Pepe (2nd in the League)
40 – Tackles won by Ricardo Pereira (leads the League)
38 – Tackles won by Wilfred Ndidi (2nd in the League)
17 – Tackles won by Matteo Guendouzi (Leads Arsenal, 39th in the League)
31 – Interceptions by Ndidi (leads the League)
13 – Interceptions by David Luiz (leads Arsenal, 43rd in the League, Guendouzi has 12 INTs, BTW)
611 – Accurate passes by Rodri (leads the League)
495 – Accurate passes by Guendouzi (leads Arsenal)
35 – Saves by Leno (leads the League)
xG is the probability for each shot, right?
In that case:
P not scoring = 1 – xG
so
P of scoring no goals in a match = (1 – xG1)*(1 – xG2)…*(1 – xGn) for n chances.
I think.
I think that’s right but I want to check.
Interesting post Tim. I have always been a fan of players who are good at dribbling. However, in order for the dribbles to be effective, they have to somehow be an integral part of creating a dangerous situation in front of the opposition goal or dribbling becomes another meaningless stat. Same thing with passes completed, key passes and the other stats you mentioned. In the end the only stat that actually means anything is goals scored because that is the end product that all of the other stuff is supposed to lead to.
With regard to this Arsenal team the biggest issue is we don’t have the talent needed in the midfield to play the type of football everyone seems to want. You can’t try to move the ball down the middle of the pitch and playing flowing attractive football if you don’t have the midfielders who can execute that strategy. Guendouzi is an energy player but he is a “tweener”. Same with Willock and Torriera. They are not attacking creative midfielders who have endproduct in their game and they are also not defensive midfielders. Their skill set is somewhere in between those 2 types of midfielder and its clear they are not very good at advancing the ball forward effectively or changing defense to attack quickly. The ball tends to stall in the middle of the pitch and we end up pinging hundreds of useless short pass without any real purpose. I am 100% confident that what we are seeing is not what Emery wants us to do but obviously he can’t find a way to get the players to effectively execute his strategic plan and if things don’t improve quickly the club will have to move in a different direction
Yesterday’s match was particularly depressing to me for some reason. I mean, maybe it’s because it was so unsurprising? I knew when Sheffield United scored that we’d lose the game, and watching us in that second half running around uselessly, I started to wonder whether I had suddenly inhabited a character in a Pynchon novel. Was I seeing a football game when in fact there was no game? Is this W.A.S.T.E.? It certainly was a waste of my time.
I know I’m probably the only one left here who has a shred of hope that Emery will get things cooking with gas. But I do. Based on not much. Glimpses here and there. Part of me thinks this is just part of being a fan. You always hope the next game is better, and it’s what kind of keeps you going, enjoying the sport, the club, etc. It takes a lot for my arms to go Kermit. But perhaps that hope is my brain saying, “they’re stuck with Emery for the season, so might as well find a way to enjoy it” (where one way of enjoying it is the aforementioned hope that the next game will be better, we’ll get better generally, etc.).
Beyond this irrational desire, I do tell myself it’s still October, but if past is prologue here, we could be sitting in a very uncomfortable position in December. We’ll see.
Speaking of dribbles, at one point in his short story, “Cathedral,” Carver describes a man smoking weed, as follows: “He let the smoke dribble from his mouth.” Always loved that line. Perhaps I’m a bit like that narrator when I watch Arsenal. ” ‘Well?’ he said. ‘Are you looking?’ My eyes were still closed. I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t feel like was inside anything. ‘It’s really something,’ I said.”
I was watching the game yesterday, and thinking we could really use one of 3 players… prime Wilshere, Santi and Rosicky. Ferryers in midfield. As Tim showed, our dribbling is mostly out wide. I dunno… we should look to take Oxlade Chamberlain back. He’s playing in his preferred position in the middle for Liverpool, but he’s not getting minutes. That’s the kind of player with the kind of skillset the team needs.
Our playing it out from the back is hilarious. I actually laughed out loud in frustration (yes there’s such a thing) a few times. We’re terrible. We faff it around, lose patience, kick it long and lose it. To the most rudimentary pressing from the opposition.
Xhaka cant take if off the CB, turn and ferry. So he knocks it back to the CB. Guendouzi is slightly better equipped but he sometimes turns blindly, and can be a ball hog in positions and situations in which it’s too dangerous to be one. Ceballos, who is two-footed, can, but Emery either doesnt start him regularly, or plays him up top.
Emery’s favourite player is the one gumming up the works when it comes to PIOFTB. Xhaka can pass you off the park if you give him time and stand off him, but few teams are going to afford Arsenal that luxury. Theyve rumbled us. They know that we cant deal with with even light pressing.
He’s not coming back (Oxlade-Chamberlain), not at the moment anyway.
He may have implied this in an interview or two but his reason for leaving is likely that he felt he had stalled in his development (and that self-assessment would pass the eye test for many fans). While our current state probably means a lot of playing time, he passed up on Chelsea (and more money) because he was going to continue operating out wide there, and there’s no guarantee we’d play him centrally.
Also, while playing for us right now might mean increased game time, were you a young player looking to develop in 2019, would you rather play for Klopp or Emery? Minutes aren’t everything, really – tons of highly rated young players getting a lot of time on the pitch right now will have half the career of Phil Foden, most likely (not a reference to his trophy haul at City, to be clear).
This. Xhaka is sand in the gears. We see that when it’s Torreira/Willock/Ceballos in the Europa League games. He is incapable of picking up the ball off the back four when playing a high press. It totally drowns our attempts to play it from the back. And Emery doesn’t adjust the tactics so that Xhaka has a quick and obvious one-touch outlet when the ball is played into his feet. Instead I watch the team waiting for him to find space himself. You want to prevent Arsenal from building up through the middle? Man-mark Xhaka out. Force Kolasinac and Chambers to carry the ball forward – mission accomplished because a cardinal rule of football is “don’t let the other team build through the middle”. We have to build through the flanks at least until we manage to get it into the opposition half and then – only then- do we find Guendouzi or Ceballos to pull the ball back into the middle.
It’s bad. I am amazed that Emery can’t see the difference between the Europa/Carling Cup dynamism in midfield and what he’s getting when he starts Xhaka/Guendouzi. It should always be Torreira/Guendouzi/Ceballos with Willock coming in the second half for one of those three as added energy.
Sell Xhaka.
Couple of thoughts. There was a stat doing the rounds last night that the last time we won an EPL game we were losing at half time was in 2011. Let that sink in for a while.
Aside from Emery’s simplistic attacking plays we are very light on quality midfield personnel. Have been ever since Santi got crocked. I was tres disappointed in the Summer when we recruited Pepe rather than a quality CM who can marshall the midfield. The current set are either too inexperienced or too limited and its clearly hurting us in both attach and defence.
The thing about Arsenal is…..
……I kind of just don’t care right now.
I haven’t watched a single game this year because by all accounts none of these games are worth watching from an entertainment or fun perspective.
I’ve no delusions of us winning the league any time soon so I’d like to at least be able to enjoy watching most of the games. That’s been enough for me for years but even that’s not there now.
It’s looking like another one of those times where we’re going to end up wasting the good ‘title winning’ players we have like Auba, Laca, Pepe, Ozil, Bellerin, Leno, etc because we’ve a manager who refuses to play to any of their strengths. 🙁
The Europa games have been great fun to watch because the young guys apparently know a secret that the senior team despite their reputations and salaries don’t seem to get under Unai Emery: how to to play football.
Right now, unarguably, there is no “F” in “AFC”. Unless you mean f&$ked.
I rarely talk tactics in my comments but I promise you that on current evidence, you, me or any of a dozen people on here including Tim of course, would get a better performance out of the senior men’s team than the current coach. Yes, I am as serious as a heart attack when I write that.
Which is all long form for saying I truly don’t understand what is going on right now.
The Europa games are the only ones I enjoy watching these days. I wish Emery would translate that uninhibited spirit to the Premier League fixtures, even if I get, psychologically, why that would be hard to do. Nonetheless, that kind of caution will be his own undoing in the end. Most of the fans want him out. Does Raul want him out? Who knows.
In fairness to Emery, European games are more open and less physical. They let you play football. I suspect that Emery’s First XI would do well in Europe. Xhaka looks a different player in internationals, for example, where he has time and space to express himself. He gets neither in the premier league. That is why when I criticise his play, I take pains to point that he’s not a good player… for THIS league. Ozil too is very well suited to European football, but I suspect that he’ll be “rested” again on Thursday….
The younger guys are also hungry. They look at Saka’s breakthrough, and take encouragement from that. I think that Emery should play Pepe on Thursday. Get his confidence up, and perhaps get a goal.
(reply to Bun… post failed to load first time).
The Europa teams we face (and have faced in the last few seasons) are so inferior to us that we get a false sense of our true level. Look at what happens when we face a decent team (Atleti and Chelsea).
I just enjoy the games for what they are amd dont draw any conclusions ie youngsters should be promoted etc.
Regarding the math, it depends a little on how you model it. If we want to find the expected value for the number of goals scored, and we think that shot events are independent of each other, then the math would be to take the sum of the value of an event multiplied by its probability. Because the value of a goal is 1, that means it is mathematically correct to add up the probabilities of the events.
Another way of thinking about it would be to suppose we took n draws from a binomial distribution. For simplicity, assume that each shot has the same probability, p, of being a goal. Then if we take n shots, the expected number of goals is np, which is equivalent to the method above where all shots have the same probability of being a goal.
The expected number of goals is not exactly the same thing as the probability that you score exactly x number of goals. If we are interested in the probability that Arsenal scored 0 goals from their shots, and we’re still thinking of the shot events as independent draws, then the probability of Arsenal scoring at least one goal is 1 – p(Arsenal score no goals). Again, for simplicity, assuming that all shots had the same probability, p, of being scored, then p(Arsenal score at least once)= 1 – p(Arsenal score 0 goals) = 1 – (n choose 0)*(p^0)*(1-p)^(n-0) = 1 – (1-p)^n. If Arsenal took 8 shots that had a cumulative xG of 0.35 and we assume the shots were all equally like to go in, then the probability each shot would score was 0.04375 and the probability of Arsenal failing to score would be about 0.3.
More generally, we can allow the probability of each shot to vary by using Bernoulli trials. If all of the shots are independent, the probability of the first shot scoring is is p_1, the second p_2, …, the nth shot p_n, then the probability of scoring no goals would be 1 – sum((1-p_1) + (1-p_2)+…+(1-p_n)).
In terms of presenting the xG results, it might be better to present a distribution of the probability of each team scoring 0, 1, 2,… goals. We can run many simulations using our values of p_1, p_2,…, p_n to calculate this distribution. We could even incorporate the underlying uncertainty from the xG model. Most xG calculations report the mean probability of each shot being scored, but the model that calculates that has uncertainty and it is possible to take a draw from this probability and plug it into our goals scored simulation.
See… it’s not that simple!
Another word on playing it out from the back… Emi Martinez does it more authoritatively than Leno. See for yourself on Thursday. I think he’s close to a first team pick. Leno better not get injured. Nothing against the German… he’s a superb shot stopper and a good goalkeeper. But he, like the back and MF, struggle to build from the back.
Holy sh?t I missed Tim’s birthday and accompanying post. Happy Birthday Tim. Yes you are still here and you have Avie and my goodness isn’t that something?
I think faith is crucial but I don’t like religion. So I’m left scrabbling around for something to have faith in, and I haven’t found it yet, might never. It’s easier to find something to be faithful to instead. And that’s a problem because we are flames of negative entropy and energy conservation is built in, so we do the easiest thing always, so I just ended up being faithful to my own weaknesses. I really don’t know how to get on that cycle of being faithful to my strengths, but I put a lot of work in this year and it seems to be paying off, so that’s the only advice I have really, to work at being good and strong even though you don’t see it. I really wish that belief in self or anything else wasn’t so damn numinous.
Oh yes, Arsenal. It’s so obvious that Xhaka is slowing us down when we need to be fast. So joyless and frustrating to watch.
Hi Tim,
I will admit straight away (and without pride and with quite a lot of embarrassment) that I’m not great with numbers. I love the idea of them, but I don’t instinctively ‘get’ them.
As I say, I’m not proud of that, but it’ll be interesting to me to see if you getting xG to a point that makes it easier for the likes of me to understand…
“We were whacking it from 25yrds in hit-and-hope fashion with Hollywood strikes”
or
“We were unlucky with a bunch of shots that ‘should’ have gone in”
or
“Jeezus – we just didn’t even have the shots!”
Its the narrative to the match that i saw, which is why I appreciate what you and others here do (ie with stats, narrative and with the coaches etc on here who explain tactics I get the same “ahh, yes, now I get it”).
Anyway, lots of words, not much meaning, but just saying I appreciate what your community provide
damn – no edit feature!
What I meant to say was that even if the answer is “actually I’ll just say that there were 8 chances with a mean average of 0.02” then we the audience do the work of using our biases(!) to say “yep, it was a tough defence” or “ffs we were desperate” or “hmm, [player x] was busy but wasteful” etc etc etc.
We get to add in all the data not within the algorithm
[jeezus, this is still muddled – I’m as bad with words as I am with numbers!]