James Milner's Passing Stats Against Bolton.

I've recorded most of James Milner's passing attempts from a screen grab of the FourFourTwo Opta powered app from Manchester City's trip to Bolton in August 2011. A game which is fast becoming the most analysed match of all time. Each pass has been assigned a likelihood of completion based around the success rates of the 1,000 or so passes made by the other 26 participating players from the fixture. The origin of each pass and the position of the intended target is the primary driving force for the calculations.

Milner's attempts have been split into three roughly 30 minute periods for no other reason than to make the plots more easily viewed. It may be that the splits show an ebb or flow of attacking or defensive intent or an increase in adventure followed by a more cautious final third. But it's easy to be wise in hindsight or see patterns that have only descriptive validity. Therefore I am merely presented the passing charts to give a feel for the estimated difficulty of a wide range of passes.

The midfielder was heavily involved in most areas of the pitch and is an excellent choice to display a varied passing repertoire. He completed an above average number of his pass attempts (53 against a predicted 47) but he was also adventurous enough to misplace 10 passes and create two goals.

Difficulty Of Milner's Passes At Bolton, KickOff Until 30th Minute. 2011/12.

Difficulty Of Milner's Passes At Bolton, 31st Minute Until 60th Minute. 2011/12.

Difficulty Of Milner's Passes At Bolton, 61st Minute Until 94th Minute. 2011/12.

The main purpose of the three graphics is to give the opportunity to eyeball a large variety of different passes and to see  if their associated completion expectations appear reasonably sensible, but on a narrower scale they also highlight Milner's contribution to City's 3-2 victory at The Reebok.

The expected increase in difficulty of completions as players move from their own goal towards their opponents is well demonstrated by the figures. Obviously the physical act of passing a ball five yards is the same wherever it is undertaken on the pitch, but the level of difficulty changes because of the environment.

Tactically few teams press high up the pitch and if they do the pressers are always outnumbered by the passers. Also, once we also acknowledge the ability of the passer to chose his pass, it's unsurprising to see most passes made entirely within a player's own half have expected success rates of mid to high 80's and above.

Based on this limited dataset passes made from the flanks towards the centre circle appear as the most risky passes made from wholly within a player's own half (although a completion is still as likely as Chelsea beating Stoke at The Bridge). These type of attempts, if intercepted presumably offer excellent counter attacking possibilities, so opponents may be prepared to gamble on an interception knowing that the risk is far outweighed by the potential reward.

The balance between passer and would be interceptor or tackler begins to become more even as the advancing player puts the centre circle behind him and length of pass and direction begins to have an impact on completion rates. Players appear to be able to comfortably circulate the ball in areas between the two arcs, but increased pass length quickly drops expectations to below coin toss levels, as does any attempt to deeply penetrate the penalty box. The best passers of the ball will be operating in these more advanced areas, but they will be faced with more numerous and more skilled tacklers and defenders. So the skill levels of the contestants both begin to rise compared to less advanced passing zones.

As noted in previous posts, passes to the flanks aren't defended as vigourously and backward passes, even from very advanced areas usually have a high incidence of success.

Data from a single game is sufficient to lay down a framework with which to begin to analyse passing outcomes. With a greatly extended database, it should be possible to begin to discern team tendencies as well as the strengths and weakness of individual players and the part they play in a team's wider passing agenda. If we can further develop the models to include the presence of defending players it may also be possible to determine if players are passing poorly because they are simply poor passers or because they are good passers who are making flawed decisions around their choice of pass.

Bolton v Manchester City. Overall Team Passing Using MCFCAnalytics Data.

In this post  I looked at the individual passing statistics for Nigel Reo-Coker during the first half of the Bolton Manchester City match from the start of last season using the xml data from MCFCAnalytics. Account was taken of the starting and finishing co ordinates for each pass made by Reo-Coker to determine the difficulty of each attempt. Comparison was then made to all the other pass attempts made on the day to see if he over or under performed compared to an overall standard. The higher the expected completion rate associated with an individual pass, then the easier it should have been to complete.

Below I've charted the passing records for each team's starting eleven from the game and compared their actual number of successful passes to the number of expected completions when the difficulty of each individual pass is accounted for. I've also listed the average difficulty of each player's attempted passes. Generally the longer the attempt and the deeper the intended target is into the opponents half of the field, the more taxing the execution. Therefore it's unsurprising to note that both keepers, who hit a disproportionate amount of long balls, overall tried to execute the most difficult passes for each side. Pass difficulty is expressed as how likely it is that the pass is completed, so the lower the figure in the "Pass Difficulty" column, the harder the pass attempt.

Passing Record Of The Bolton Starting Eleven Verses Manchester City.2011/12.

Sorted in descending order of difficulty.

Player.	Successful Passes.	Expected Completed Passes.	Average Pass Difficulty %.
Jaaskeliainen.	21	15.3	37.3
Steinsson.	15	18.9	66.8
Knight.	14	17.5	72.8
Eagles.	29	26.5	73.5
Petrov.	35	38.4	73.8
Cahill.	21	18.8	75.1
K Davies.	19	30.2	77.4
Reo-Coker.	39	41.2	77.7
Robinson.	36	34.2	77.7
Klasnic.	25	27.5	80.7
Muamba.	13	15.7	82.5

Passing Record Of The Manchester City Starting Eleven Verses Bolton.2011/12.

Player.	Successful Passes.	Expected Completed Passes.	Average Pass Difficulty %.
Hart.	15	18.3	52.3
Richards.	29	28.7	71.6
Milner.	52	47.0	73.2
Kolarov.	37	36.7	76.5
Dzeko	20	19.3	77.1
Silva.	61	54.1	77.3
Barry.	44	41.6	78.5
Aguero.	22	24.3	81.1
Lescott.	29	28.2	83.0
Toure.	60	53.5	83.7
Kompany.	35	33.5	83.8

The immediate stand out feature of each table is the under performance against expectation of the Bolton players and the over performance of City. Only four players from the host side beat expectations, while only Joe Hart and the recently signed Aguero fell below average. Numerically, City were also far superior in terms of passes attempted.

Passing statistics are a double edged sword because they quickly provide copious amounts of data ripe for analysis, but they also can quickly overwhelm the senses. A game map containing every pass often merges into a mass of block colour that lacks definition. Even passing wheels for individual players can soon become cluttered and confusing. Therefore in an attempt to mimic the player influence plots, I've tried to produce for each player one single pass that attempts to encompass the essence of his passing contribution in a single game. I've combined the average start and end point for each player's passes in an effort to highlight where each player is seeking to influence the game. In conjunction with the figures in the table above as well as raw passing numbers, we may be able to distill each individuals passing contribution in a few powerful numbers and graphics.

Passing Profiles For Bolton's Starting Eleven Verses Manchester City.

Passing Profiles For Manchester City's Starting Eleven Verses Bolton.

The starting position for each pass summary is denoted by the players name and the length of the line equates to the average pass length. Direction indicates whether a player is passing predominately in field or towards the flanks and in the case of central midfielders their most likely pitch position is used as the origin of the pass.

Hart and Jaaskelainen's plots are similar, but there are subtle differences that do inform. Hart's overall pass length is shorter than his Bolton counterpart and also more pronounced towards the flanks. Jaaskelainen is more route one and deeper, but his overperformance against the expected norm partly justifies this approach or at the very least reveals it as a deliberate and practiced tactic.

Overall both pairs of fullbacks attempted, on average, difficult passes. This is partly unavoidable because many of their pass attempts will have been from the restricted flanks into the more vigourously defended central areas of the pitch and they will probably be longer in length. Steinsson's attempts were generally from advanced positions, but his completion rate was poor, even after allowing for the difficulty of making a completion. However, he fared no worse than many of his colleagues.

As with the keepers, the central defenders appear similar, but Lescott and Kompany attempted much easier and shorter passes from deeper in their half compared to Knight and Cahill. They appear to be primarily defenders who pass the creative burden quickly onto teammates. The Bolton pair in contrast had a much more advanced passing position and chose to play the ball into deeper, more difficult areas. On the evidence of their expected completion rates, Cahill was much more comfortable with this approach than was Knight on this particular gameday.

Toure appears to have principally functioned as a circulator of the ball, his influence was centred around halfway and he attempted and over completed copious amounts of simple passes in a contest where City were never required to ever chase the game.

Milner, Silva and Dzeko's "typical" passes each arrow from wider to more central and advanced areas and are again in stark contrast to Bolton's creative intent where only Eagles performs a similar function. Klasnic and Kevin Davies both make more passes outwards towards the flanks, either by design or necessity. Overall an easier pass to complete, although Davies' completion rate suggests a bad day at the office for the Bolton striker.

Aguero shares with Petrov the distinction of playing the ball on average back towards his own goal albeit from a fairly advanced area of the pitch, possibly indicating an afternoon spent holding up the forward passes.

Passing data often contains much that is merely recycling the ball between players before a more decisive and effective action is attempted. Using an approach that largely cancels out much of this type of pass we can try to illustrate the main thrust of each individuals passing intent and highlight who was trying to do what on the day. By further reference to their actual success rates compared to an league average norm we can then begin to see how successful they were in those attempts, before moving onto more granular details that should highlight individual assists that may be atypical of an otherwise lacklustre showing.