Tuesday, 1 March 2016
Projected Goal Differences Prior to March 1st Matches.
Monday, 22 February 2016
How Roberto Martinez Could Have Been Everton's Most Irreplaceable Player.
Midtjylland's boffin driven win over Manchester United last week along with Rasmus Ankersen peerlessly owning BT's Jake Humphrey in the post match interviews has inevitably put football analytics back in the media spotlight.
Intelligently written prose combined with rigorously derived statistics has a relatively sparse, but nonetheless impressive history in the mainstream British media.
The Guardian's Sean Ingle regularly delivers well written narrative, backed up with accessible use of numbers, often with a slice of contemporary culture thrown in and Daniel Finkelstein's eponymous Fink Tank has long provided an outlet for some of football's best, lab coated number crunchers.
Nerdy clichés aside, it's encouraging to see analytics becoming an accepted part of football reporting. It may not appeal to every taste, but it certainly doesn't seek to wholly replace more subjective approaches. It has only ever mostly been intended to complement and enhance.
But just as analytics has had to learn to walk before it could break into its current brisk canter, some of the emerging mainstream efforts fall well short of the bar set by The Times and The Guardian.
Analytics occasionally over turns "established" knowledge. But this mostly occurs when simple common sense could have eyeballed the flaws in the narrative anyway.
2-0 is a "dangerous" lead that few would turn down given the choice and it's rare to hear a fan base inwardly groan when an opponent is reduced to ten men and they instantly become "harder" to play against.
So analytics does have a record of going against the grain of irrational popular sentiment. But this should not mean that the more outlandish the numbers driven claim, the more likely it is to be true.
Saturday's article in the Telegraph, "The Player Your Premier League Team Cannot Do Without" caught the eye on Twitter, as well as being shared over 2k times.
The premise was simple, the unnamed journalist found the player in each Premier League team, subject to six or more appearances who was that side's "winning-est" player. In plain English, the player(s) who had the best win% in matches they had taken part in at each Premier League club.
The list contained a motley crew of rarely used fringe players mixed with the occasional legitimate star.
Typifying the former and with all due respect was Everton's Leon Osman, although Vardy and Mahrez will no doubt be surprised to learn that Nathan Dyer is the player that Leicester can ill afford to lose this season.
34 year old Osman's six appearances has yielded four wins for a winning-est percentage of 67% compared to Everton's baseline figure of 31% in the Premier League this season.
Player contribution to team success is a well trodden and problematic path in sports analytics, more so in football where the individual, repetitive elements present in other sports, such as baseball and basketball are partly absent.
Nevertheless, the likes of Jorg Seidel and Dan Altman have produce measures that aim to untangle individual player contribution to team success. Neither, I would hazard would consider Osman indispensable to Everton's cause.
We could pick holes in the Telegraph's approach by pointing out that wins, especially over a small number of games in a low scoring sport is a very blunt measuring tool. We've already discarded draws, for example which contribute around 25% of results.
Similarly, if we are looking at very small sample sizes in a statistically noisy environment, then we are often going to get extremes of good or bad percentage based outcomes through chance.
Manchester United's win% without Smalling is zero%, he's missed one game all season, the 2-1 loss at Bournemouth.
Even more damning, we could point out that three of Everton's Osman inspired wins, 6-2 v Sunderland, 4-0 v Villa and 3-0 v Stoke had already been largely completed when he entered the field of play.
He played for one minute at Stoke, 16 against Villa and 12 against Sunderland, during which no further goals were scored or to be fair conceded. But it is a performance that manager, Roberto Martinez could almost certainly have replicated had he chosen to sub himself on rather than turn to Osman. Thus making himself a prime candidate to for Everton's most irreplaceable player under The Telegraph's deeply flawed methodology.
Familiarity with your data can help to avoid such faintly ridiculous conclusions and pushing Osman into the six games or more requirement on the basis of sixty seconds plus injury time at Stoke suggests that this particular "data cruncher" wasn't.
But another way to avoid publishing nonsense under the guise of stats is to spell out your conclusion without recourse to any of your data driven evidence.
"Osman's win% is 67%" sounds good, but "Based on Leon Osman's six Premier League appearances, five as a sub and one as a subbed off starter, I conclude that he is the player Everton cannot do without" should have been sufficient to spike this depressing addition to the analytics portfolio before it saw the light of day.
Intelligently written prose combined with rigorously derived statistics has a relatively sparse, but nonetheless impressive history in the mainstream British media.
The Guardian's Sean Ingle regularly delivers well written narrative, backed up with accessible use of numbers, often with a slice of contemporary culture thrown in and Daniel Finkelstein's eponymous Fink Tank has long provided an outlet for some of football's best, lab coated number crunchers.
Nerdy clichés aside, it's encouraging to see analytics becoming an accepted part of football reporting. It may not appeal to every taste, but it certainly doesn't seek to wholly replace more subjective approaches. It has only ever mostly been intended to complement and enhance.
But just as analytics has had to learn to walk before it could break into its current brisk canter, some of the emerging mainstream efforts fall well short of the bar set by The Times and The Guardian.
Analytics occasionally over turns "established" knowledge. But this mostly occurs when simple common sense could have eyeballed the flaws in the narrative anyway.
2-0 is a "dangerous" lead that few would turn down given the choice and it's rare to hear a fan base inwardly groan when an opponent is reduced to ten men and they instantly become "harder" to play against.
So analytics does have a record of going against the grain of irrational popular sentiment. But this should not mean that the more outlandish the numbers driven claim, the more likely it is to be true.
Saturday's article in the Telegraph, "The Player Your Premier League Team Cannot Do Without" caught the eye on Twitter, as well as being shared over 2k times.
The list contained a motley crew of rarely used fringe players mixed with the occasional legitimate star.
Typifying the former and with all due respect was Everton's Leon Osman, although Vardy and Mahrez will no doubt be surprised to learn that Nathan Dyer is the player that Leicester can ill afford to lose this season.
34 year old Osman's six appearances has yielded four wins for a winning-est percentage of 67% compared to Everton's baseline figure of 31% in the Premier League this season.
Player contribution to team success is a well trodden and problematic path in sports analytics, more so in football where the individual, repetitive elements present in other sports, such as baseball and basketball are partly absent.
Nevertheless, the likes of Jorg Seidel and Dan Altman have produce measures that aim to untangle individual player contribution to team success. Neither, I would hazard would consider Osman indispensable to Everton's cause.
We could pick holes in the Telegraph's approach by pointing out that wins, especially over a small number of games in a low scoring sport is a very blunt measuring tool. We've already discarded draws, for example which contribute around 25% of results.
Similarly, if we are looking at very small sample sizes in a statistically noisy environment, then we are often going to get extremes of good or bad percentage based outcomes through chance.
Manchester United's win% without Smalling is zero%, he's missed one game all season, the 2-1 loss at Bournemouth.
Even more damning, we could point out that three of Everton's Osman inspired wins, 6-2 v Sunderland, 4-0 v Villa and 3-0 v Stoke had already been largely completed when he entered the field of play.
He played for one minute at Stoke, 16 against Villa and 12 against Sunderland, during which no further goals were scored or to be fair conceded. But it is a performance that manager, Roberto Martinez could almost certainly have replicated had he chosen to sub himself on rather than turn to Osman. Thus making himself a prime candidate to for Everton's most irreplaceable player under The Telegraph's deeply flawed methodology.
Familiarity with your data can help to avoid such faintly ridiculous conclusions and pushing Osman into the six games or more requirement on the basis of sixty seconds plus injury time at Stoke suggests that this particular "data cruncher" wasn't.
But another way to avoid publishing nonsense under the guise of stats is to spell out your conclusion without recourse to any of your data driven evidence.
"Osman's win% is 67%" sounds good, but "Based on Leon Osman's six Premier League appearances, five as a sub and one as a subbed off starter, I conclude that he is the player Everton cannot do without" should have been sufficient to spike this depressing addition to the analytics portfolio before it saw the light of day.
Tuesday, 16 February 2016
Pulis' Road Block.
A Tony Pulis side was at it again on Saturday afternoon.
WBA traveled to Everton, points-wise becalmed in the high 20's following a win-less run since the first game of the New Year. It's a run that inevitably befalls lower table teams at some stage of the season and drags them gradually, in the minds of the supporters at least, into the relegation mire.
Based purely on shot data Everton routed their visitors 33 attempts to 5, 6 to 1 on target, but Pulis has never been respectful of raw counts and the Baggies won three points with a 1-0 win.
No one has played the payoff between creating few Ben Woolcock "big chances" while allowing lots of long range attempts in return more than Pulis' Premier League teams, most notably Stoke.
WBA's winner, bundled in from a couple of inches out following a near post flick on from a corner proved enough on the day to outscore 33 attempts of which around half were from outside the area and just one from inside the six yard box.
Gradually accrued superior expected goals defeated by the relative certainty of one virtually unmissable opportunity.
Back in his northern hinterland, Pulis' "stats busting" win failed to garner the press accolades that he won when lifting the manager of the season award for similar performances that rescued a slightly fallen southern giant from an imminent return to the second tier.
Stats that are beloved of the advocates of the beautiful game, possession, pass completion, open play as opposed to putting it into the mixer set play deliveries have been the natural habitat for Pulis' contrarian approach.
If there was a coveted stat associated with "playing the game the right way", a Pulis team were inevitably the ugly outlier, cutting their cloth accordingly.
Saturday's win exhibited another Pulis staple that rarely nudges the dial in one direction or another for the vast majority of Premier League teams.
15 of the 33 Everton attempts were blocked, saving Foster the trouble of making additional saves, without the inconvenience of having to deal with any wicked deflections.
Few teams stray for from the league average in terms of blocking shots, even when shot type and location is incorporated into the model. And while single seasons in which Pulis demanded his Stoke team make around 10% more blocks than expected from a location based model may not provide compelling evidence for an atypical, coach driven tactical quirk, the season on season blocking over performance for his teams perhaps does.
Even when faced with Everton's 33 attempt barrage, 15 blocks is excessive. The average Premier League team would most likely block around half that number and succeed in blocking 15 or more in only around 1 in 100 such games.
So we perhaps have more evidence to add blocking to Pulis' statistical reign of terror. And judging by the enthusiastic way in which Robert Huth, a graduate of the Pulis school of defensive arts, threw himself in the way of some of Arsenal's shots on Sunday, some aspects of Pulisball are gradually seeping into the mainstream Premier League playbook.
WBA traveled to Everton, points-wise becalmed in the high 20's following a win-less run since the first game of the New Year. It's a run that inevitably befalls lower table teams at some stage of the season and drags them gradually, in the minds of the supporters at least, into the relegation mire.
Based purely on shot data Everton routed their visitors 33 attempts to 5, 6 to 1 on target, but Pulis has never been respectful of raw counts and the Baggies won three points with a 1-0 win.
No one has played the payoff between creating few Ben Woolcock "big chances" while allowing lots of long range attempts in return more than Pulis' Premier League teams, most notably Stoke.
WBA's winner, bundled in from a couple of inches out following a near post flick on from a corner proved enough on the day to outscore 33 attempts of which around half were from outside the area and just one from inside the six yard box.
Gradually accrued superior expected goals defeated by the relative certainty of one virtually unmissable opportunity.
Back in his northern hinterland, Pulis' "stats busting" win failed to garner the press accolades that he won when lifting the manager of the season award for similar performances that rescued a slightly fallen southern giant from an imminent return to the second tier.
Stats that are beloved of the advocates of the beautiful game, possession, pass completion, open play as opposed to putting it into the mixer set play deliveries have been the natural habitat for Pulis' contrarian approach.
If there was a coveted stat associated with "playing the game the right way", a Pulis team were inevitably the ugly outlier, cutting their cloth accordingly.
Saturday's win exhibited another Pulis staple that rarely nudges the dial in one direction or another for the vast majority of Premier League teams.
15 of the 33 Everton attempts were blocked, saving Foster the trouble of making additional saves, without the inconvenience of having to deal with any wicked deflections.
Even when faced with Everton's 33 attempt barrage, 15 blocks is excessive. The average Premier League team would most likely block around half that number and succeed in blocking 15 or more in only around 1 in 100 such games.
So we perhaps have more evidence to add blocking to Pulis' statistical reign of terror. And judging by the enthusiastic way in which Robert Huth, a graduate of the Pulis school of defensive arts, threw himself in the way of some of Arsenal's shots on Sunday, some aspects of Pulisball are gradually seeping into the mainstream Premier League playbook.
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