Our defence - shots on target.

[Woodwardfan]

Perhaps the stats are the same for all teams and might just be relevant.

Of course they are relevant, we are not dealing with life and death here, just a snapshot of one of the reasons we might be doing well.

Successful sides stop the opposition scoring and score more goals themselves.

 

[BornOnShorehamStreet]

Clarke said on Saturday Wilder impresses on them the need to start defending from the front, which can clearly be seen in him and Sharp chasing and closing down, enabling us to have a much better chance of winning the second ball when the first one is more rushed.

Even young Brooks is getting the message now

 

[PokerBlade]

If stats were never relevant you couldn't pick out the number of goals to decide games, and you couldn't put together a league table over a season.

The problem, especially as you get into nuanced stats like shots on target per game, is noise in the data and large amounts of statistical variance. For example, a naive reading of the stats itt could lead to the conclusion that a team should simply shoot more, some of those will be on target, and more shots on target means more goals. But that leaves out the quality of chances: Clarke scored four goals in a game, but only one of those shots was from as far out as the penalty spot. And the couple of games in which we've scored four goals skew our goals for stat far more after sixteen games than it will after forty six.

The encouraging way to read the stats is that by and large they're taking the form they did last season: few shots against, a good conversion rate for.