da bwin： This article is part of Football FanCast’s The Chalkboard series, which provides a tactical insight into teams, players, managers, potential signings and more…
da heads bet： Statistics can play as much or as little part of your life as you desire them to in football.
They can either mean absolutely nothing if you believe that ‘the result is all that matters’, or they can give you a great excuse to point and say ‘this is why we’re doing terribly’.
We’ll let you make your mind up on what you make of this latest one.
On the chalkboard
The website Experimental361 has detailed how the Championship table should look based on the expected goals ‘xG’ of the teams and their games so far this season, and it makes for some rather interesting reading.
For those of you who don’t know how ‘expected goals’ work, it is essentially a way of working out how many goals a team should be scoring based on the difficulty of a chance, such as the angle of the shot, how good the assist was or what the type of opportunity is.
What the figures show, is that Forest have essentially been incredibly lucky with how the season has played out so far.
If you look at how Sabri Lamouchi’s men have done, they should be much further down the table than they currently are and remarkably sit in 17th place for expected goals.
It just goes to show how you need to be clinical whenever you are presented with your chances but also that good fortune goes a long way.
Take Lewis Grabban for instance, who may take a lot of shots on goal (4.4 per goal), but at least he buries them every now and again.
Compare that to Patrick Bamford at Leeds United for example who needs almost double the number that Grabban does (8.5 per goal).
Although what it does also indicate is that Brice Samba and the rest of the defence have been leading an incredibly charmed life if they have kept so many of the opposition’s efforts at bay. They’ve kept three sheets so far this season and boast the second-best defence in terms of goals conceded in the division.
The question is though, will they be able to keep it up for the rest of the campaign? We’ll have to see.