Cooper has been very much an average Championship keeper this season, according to the numbers. He is 10th in the Championship for "Goals Against per 90" (1.34), while having the 9th highest "Shots on Target Against" (135). He is also 17th for "Save Percentage" - he's saved 68.9% of shots on target faced this season (that's out of 27 goalkeepers considered for this stat on fbref) He has 45 goals conceded from 34 games - for comparison, the 2 other goalkeepers who have made the same number of appearances this season, have conceded 43 (Kaminski @ Charlton) and 46 (Stolarczyk @ Leicester).
But let's not forget that during Selles tenure, we conceded 12 goals in 5 games. Take those out of the equation, and he has 33 goals conceded from 29 games - that works out to 1.13 goals conceded per game - only 4 goalkeepers in the league have played 30+ games this season and have a lower figure.
Part of his being so good for us last season, was due to the defence in front of him (particularly in the first half of the season) being as good as, if not better than him. You seemingly find it concerning that his performances have worsened since Souttar's injury - considering our failure to replace Souttar, I think that's wholly predictable. We were a much more porous side as a result of his absence, allowed opponents more opportunity to score, and thus without Cooper showing a significant uptick in shot-stopping ability, we were always going to concede more.
Goals against per game is as much a result of the whole team's defensive performance as it is a measure of how good a goalkeeper is. I know it's got its detractors but this is where xGA is a much better measure.
On Fotmob, we're fifth worst for goals conceded against xGA*. On the stats, we should have conceded 51.7, in reality it's 59 so an underperformance of 7.3. I looked at the last 8 matches to exclude those played by Adam Davies and his results were actually relatively good: -0.08 per match (he's conceded 11 goals against an expected 10.33). That means that the underperformance of 7.3 is almost entirely down to Cooper.
In his 34 matches, Cooper conceded 48 goals (not 45) but three were OGs so they're excluded from the analysis, rightly or wrongly. He should have conceded 38.2 (41.2 including OGs) so he's at -6.6 over his 34 matches, or -0.2 per game. In essence, Cooper was conceded 6 goals for every 5 he should really have let in. That's backed up by the -6.8 goals prevented on Fotmob's player stats which looks at shots on target.
What makes that all the more surprising is that last season, Cooper was 4th or 5th on the stats as we conceded 36 against an expected 46.4. Cooper's personal goals prevented last season was +5.7. It's not so much his performance this season which was a concern, it's how far he's fallen from his first year at United.
There's also psxGA which reflects the accuracy of the shot after it was taken (as opposed to xG, which reflects the
chance) but I don't know of any non-paywalled sites which have that data now fbref has been shut down.
*worse than us are Birmingham (-8.5), Portsmouth (-9.0) & West Brom (-12.8) with QPR (-13.2) leading the way. Hull, for what it's worth, should have conceded
14 more than they have.
**Wednesday are pretty much bang in line. Should have conceded 84.6, have conceded 82. They're as shit on the statistics as they are on the results
