Santi wrote:Sims wrote:Santi wrote:LegendaryKeown wrote:For those saying Emery's football isn't... errr... exciting, can you tell me what's so different from Arsene's keep the f***ing ball approach? It's not like we're playing hoofball now
Would be interested to see the stats tbh, think we play a lot more long balls now.
Up to Auba mostly and out to the advanced full backs from the other side of the pitch. Plus if you compare to anything other than Wenger's last 2-3 years then this football is dog.
our xG this season after 19 games is ~28 goals with 41 scored
at this point last campaign our xG was ~38 with 34 scored
so our quality of chance has lowered or our standard of finishing has increased exponentially
Last season seems far more sustainable, got any trend in those stats over time? Would be worried that the finishing will dry up this season.
You can check the trends
here.
In terms of whether or not our finishing will dry up this season there's a good argument to say that Auba will not maintain this for the season. He's only ever over-performed xG once since 2014/15 and that was by 0.6 goals, which is minimal. For comparison, Kane has overperformed xG by at least 2.27 in
every season since then. Of course, this doesn't necessarily say everything about their performances. Auba's talent is his positioning and poaching, so his finishing ability isn't as important as it is to Kane since he gets better chances.
But long story short the statistics say that Auba isn't likely to maintain his current goalscoring form unless we create more chances for him.
On the other hand, Lacazette usually overperforms xG (and there was a
StatsBomb article which claims hes among the best finishers in the world.) and he's carried on that form this season. It would be unreasonable to expect Laca to score more frequently than he's currently doing based on the service he gets, but it is reasonable to expect him to carry on this rate based on his past performances.
The rest of the team has 18 goals from 13,78 xG (ignoring own goals). This is mainly down to Ozil and Xhaka who together have 5 goals for 1.59 xG. Obviously, Xhaka's 2 goals have been low chance free kicks. Ozil's 3 goals have simply been precise finishes, and based on how few shots he takes it's difficult to say for certain whether or not we can reasonably expect him to maintain this. What we can say is that he's performed this well before in 2016/17, so there's no reason to think he can't do it again.
So to summarise, Laca is scoring above xG but that isn't abnormal for him. The rest of the team is scoring abov xG but that is because of Xhaka's freekicks, Ozil's finishes and and inflated number of goals from OG's. Lastly Auba is scoring above xG, and this is potentially worrying as he has never maintained that over a full season.
tl;dr, create more chances for Auba and there's no reason we can't replicate this scoring form in the second half of the season.