Nice write up.
The glaring thing that stands out for me is the lack of a clean sheet again. I'd be interested to know from those with far greater statistical skills than me, what data there is behind that.
Certainly we're never going to break into the top 6 if we're having to score 2 or more every game to get 3 points...
I don't have an explanation for this, but our distribution of goals conceded last season was a little weird. We had the 10th-best defence in terms of goals conceded, but only 5 teams kept fewer clean sheets than us over the season (unsurprisingly they were all teams down the bottom - Reading, QPR, Barnsley, Bolton, Sunderland). So we didn't concede
many goals... but we pretty much always conceded at least one. Cardiff had the best defence in the league and averaged 0.89 goals conceded per game, we averaged 1.2 per game - so the margins were pretty fine over 46 games, but Cardiff managed to keep the opposition to 0 on 19 occasions and we only did it 10 times. That works out as a lot of points.
Could be bad luck, poor game management, loss of concentration... or a combination of all of those things, plus something else.
I felt we were unlucky at times last season in our defending (expected goals, total shots faced, etc, suggested we should have conceded WAY less than we actually did, compared to how other teams fared) but that's not the case so far this season where we've given up some massive chances in our first four games. There's probably only the QPR game where the opposition didn't create a properly great chance, and even then they peppered us with shots.
I really love this analysis
Beans . It's fast becoming a must read to rival
Roygbiv 's 'View From' and
Deadbat 's reports.
Interesting stats on Leonard, I thought he played really well when he came on without being flashy, a very disciplined performance borne out by his stats.
It was impactful too, just what we needed really after Woodburn had struggled to get involved. I see him more as a rotation player than a starter but that was an impressive 45 minutes from him - as I say, the fact he can play multiple positions and allow us to switch things up mid-game is a real benefit.