With six league games under our belt, I felt it was a good chance to look back at the comparison to last season, and see how we are faring up. There have also been a few stats, that were released by the D3D4 podcast, that I think make for very interesting reading.
One Season Is A Long Time In Football
It is the 31st August, we have just finished our 6th game, a poor 3-1 loss to Grimsby Town. We sit 21st in League Two with -5 goal difference, we are not a happy set of fans. We had only managed to score 3 league goals, and fans were fearing a season looking down the league, rather than up it. We looked disjointed and all the pre-season optimism had gone.
Now we look at the league table as it stands today. We have double the points, we have scored 4 more goals, and conceded 3 fewer, and we have a positive goal difference too.
Goal difference is something that is a sour point for us. We have not had a positive goal difference since the season we reached the play-off’s, and even before that, we had a couple of seasons in the negative side of things.
Stat Attack
The D3D4 podcast released some interesting stats, that show that actually, our creativity is not as bad as we think. So far this season, we have entered the opponents box a total of 96 times, which is the 4th highest in the division. The only teams above us are Harrogate, FGR and Cambridge. Cambridge are currently top of the league, and have racked up 15 goals so far. Harrogate have started the season really well, so it is no surprise to see them up there, and let’s face it, Forest Green probably racked up a fair chunk of theirs against us.
The other stat they released, was chances created, where we are joint third with Harrogate. The two teams above us? FGR and Cambridge. Forest Green have created 39 chances, which when you consider they had close to 30 shots against us (I know a lot won’t count towards this stat) then I don’t think we are doing badly.
Analysis
So what does this data tell us? Firstly, our attack is massively improved from this stage last season. But looking deeper, it also shows us how difficult our start has been. In our 6 games so far, 4 of them have been above average in chances created. The only two who are low on that list, are Grimsby, and Leyton Orient.
It shows that, considering we have conceded very few goals, our defence is looking good, holding these teams at bay. It looks for even better viewing when you look at the mistakes that have led to those goals too.
From what I have seen, we have limited teams by not giving them too many golden chances. Yes there have been costly errors, but apart from that, we aren’t an overly leaky team.
My big problem with this, is that we are near the top of goals created, but goals scored we are not. In fact, we are very mid table with the number of goals scored. Taking chances created to goals scored, we have converted 21% of these chances created. That doesn’t sound too bad, but looking at the list, and doing some basic maths, even teams like Southend have a better chance conversion.
I get frustrated at this, but then take a moment to remember where we were last season. We were barely scoring, and we were barely creating either. So yes, the good news is that we look a better attacking unit. Add a couple more goals, and we will be deadly. It can’t be that difficult when you create as much as we are… can it?
