ucandomagic
Well-Known Member
Interesting game at Stoke – new important characters influencing the game. Soumare always looks a bit like Bambi on ice to me, not quite sure which direction his legs are going – but I remember thinking like that about an early Bash – and Soumare was an important influence last night. Also, Cannon actually became what I hoped he was when he arrived – not a team player but clinical – a hard on-target shot when the chance arrived.
So – I’m going to drift away a bit from my normal graphs and charts and focus on the playoffs. Table 1 shows the points achieved by 6th and 7th places over the last 11 seasons. On the playoff possible lines on my graphs I always use 71 as playoffs possible and 78 as certain, but Table 1 shows that to be realistic you can’t be precise – last year Bristol City were 6th with 68 points and in 2015 Wolves were 7th with 78!
Table 1:
Graph 1 shows our progress this year against my usual playoff possible line. However, I’ve also included on Graph 1 the comparison against our 2021/22 season when we had a bad start with Slav and then Hecky took over and we finished on 75 points in 5th place. I usually plot the other seasons comparison on a separate graph, but I think Graph 1 is also interesting to see how the 21/22 season looks against this year’s playoff possible line – basically Hecky’s dashed green line dances around the playoff possible line and finishes just above on 75 in 5th place.
Graph 1:
On Graph 1- with 29 points after 24 games - we are 4 points behind the 33 points we had in 2021/22 and 9 points behind the 38 points on my playoffs possible line. We are also 9 points behind Watford, currently in 6th place. So although 9 points seems quite a big gap, just 4 points behind Hecky’s total means that if we repeated his 42 points from the remaining 22 games we would finish on 71 points – which could be just enough for 6th.
There is also the question of whether 2021/22 was a different quality level from this season – but on 33 points from 24 games Graph 2 shows that Hecky was in 12th place, after an away draw at Preston – and 33 points this season would see you in 13th at the moment, just 1 point behind 10th to 12th, all on 34. So, the seasons to date are running to a very similar pattern.
Graph 2:
So the conclusion from all of the above is that not only are the playoffs possible for us, they are genuinely a reasonable target because we have done it before ourselves, from a very similar position. I haven’t got the current xgTable, based on every team’s xg performance in every game – but I do know we are in the Top 6 in that table on about 39 xgPoints - so if we maintain that general performance we will climb the table.
I felt that if we got 7 points from Wrexham, Stoke and Leicester we would be on our way, but that 5 should be our minimum target from those games. We got 3 from the first 2, so if we could get 3 from Leicester on Thursday I would nearly be back in my comfort zone!
Every season is a roller-coaster, but I wouldn’t have it any other way!
UTB & Slava Ukraini!
So – I’m going to drift away a bit from my normal graphs and charts and focus on the playoffs. Table 1 shows the points achieved by 6th and 7th places over the last 11 seasons. On the playoff possible lines on my graphs I always use 71 as playoffs possible and 78 as certain, but Table 1 shows that to be realistic you can’t be precise – last year Bristol City were 6th with 68 points and in 2015 Wolves were 7th with 78!
Table 1:
Graph 1 shows our progress this year against my usual playoff possible line. However, I’ve also included on Graph 1 the comparison against our 2021/22 season when we had a bad start with Slav and then Hecky took over and we finished on 75 points in 5th place. I usually plot the other seasons comparison on a separate graph, but I think Graph 1 is also interesting to see how the 21/22 season looks against this year’s playoff possible line – basically Hecky’s dashed green line dances around the playoff possible line and finishes just above on 75 in 5th place.
Graph 1:
On Graph 1- with 29 points after 24 games - we are 4 points behind the 33 points we had in 2021/22 and 9 points behind the 38 points on my playoffs possible line. We are also 9 points behind Watford, currently in 6th place. So although 9 points seems quite a big gap, just 4 points behind Hecky’s total means that if we repeated his 42 points from the remaining 22 games we would finish on 71 points – which could be just enough for 6th.
There is also the question of whether 2021/22 was a different quality level from this season – but on 33 points from 24 games Graph 2 shows that Hecky was in 12th place, after an away draw at Preston – and 33 points this season would see you in 13th at the moment, just 1 point behind 10th to 12th, all on 34. So, the seasons to date are running to a very similar pattern.
Graph 2:
So the conclusion from all of the above is that not only are the playoffs possible for us, they are genuinely a reasonable target because we have done it before ourselves, from a very similar position. I haven’t got the current xgTable, based on every team’s xg performance in every game – but I do know we are in the Top 6 in that table on about 39 xgPoints - so if we maintain that general performance we will climb the table.
I felt that if we got 7 points from Wrexham, Stoke and Leicester we would be on our way, but that 5 should be our minimum target from those games. We got 3 from the first 2, so if we could get 3 from Leicester on Thursday I would nearly be back in my comfort zone!
Every season is a roller-coaster, but I wouldn’t have it any other way!
UTB & Slava Ukraini!
