This post and your moniker suggest you are preparing for the building of a phoenix club.
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Or we just declined gradually over the season and the change of manager made no difference.
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There’s always a way to cherry-pick the stats to suit a narrative - especially when you extrapolate like you’ve done. I’m basing my assessment on rolling output vs xG, which was unsustainable and declining a fair while before MB left. As for Shrewsbury away, we were great - but that Shrewsbury team was awful, not exactly the greatest barometer of our own quality.
Yes, I seem to recall everyone chanting ‘This winning run is unsustainable…’ at the time. And the ‘This can’t possibly go on’ thread on the old Gasroom. It was as clear as day that everyone who really knows about football was thinking it even if no one said it at the time.
Except possibly trev.
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You literally said “We’d been dropping off for a good couple of months before Dodds came in”
I was making the point that the “drop-off” before Dodds was from the best ever points finish the league would have seen in it’s history to averaging 6th place. Yes, we dropped off but no football team has ever sustained what we did in October/November for the whole season. We were always going to drop off.
I used two months buckets, because you said “a couple of months” hence I did the comparisons for 2 months at a time.
I’m not really fussed about xG - yes, it can be an indication that you are not creating as much but in reality actually scoring goals wins matches. Something we were doing for fun under Bloomfield.
“There’s always a way to cherry-pick the stats to suit a narrative” - indeed there is, which is quite humourous as you deliberately left Shrewsbury out of your comment about us being poor in December, when in fact we scored 7 goals in two consecutive away games.
It could then be interpreted that you suggest Shrewsbury shouldn’t count as they were shit!
For me, the argument that our form had dropped before Dodds arrival needed to be clarified. Yes our form had dipped compared to October/November but I don’t think that is a fair comparison although it is factually correct.
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The elephant in the room about the last couple of months dropping off, might, just might, have been because of what was going on with Blooms behind the scenes and the constant rumours of him linked to other jobs before finally taking the Luton job.
Cos I’m sure that was having an affect on the players as well as Blooms.
I for one have privately mused that Fred in particular didn’t look like himself almost exactly from the moment Blooms was strongly rumoured to be leaving.
Almost like Matt chased him all summer before finally getting his man and Fred coming to us specifically for MB, only for that reason to walk out the door.
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To be fair, I don’t think “Flymo Frank” was ever a fan of Matt Bloomfield, from the day he was appointed until the day he left.
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Not enough “control”
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Waited all summer for it, but the no returns policy for players and staff was in place, till it suddenly changed.
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People are looking at our good run of form the wrong way - if you look at the stats everything was going in (we outperformed our xG by a massive 15 goals under Blooms), it was an illusion, we weren’t creating the chances to normally get that many goals. In some ways that ruined the season, everyone thought we are much better than we were and expectations shot up.
Signing a million players in Jan, failing to sign Morley and undermining a good, popular manager did not help. But the drop in form from the unusual purple patch was inevitable.
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I can’t work out if that’s satire
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Same here. I haven’t seen enough from @FromeBlue over the years to have compiled a sufficiently detailed dossier to carry out my usual level of psychoanalysis.
And you think I’m joking.
Reality is an illusion. An equation is reality.
This obsession with football stats is verging on madness. People telling you what you’ve seen with your own eyes is nonsense.
Just bore off.
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Life’s an illusion, love is a dream
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Don’t know bout you, Chris, but I’ve looked at life from both sides now and I still can’t make up my mind. I’ve probably left it too late.
I became thoroughly pee’ed off on Gasroom 2 with a seemingly exponential obsession with applying statistics to something as basically simple and readily understood as a game of football and it’s been a relief that the young man who based his original username on, shall we say, a discredited former full back, does not seem to be quite as omnipresent now. Up the Wyc indeed. On the wick, more like it.
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That’s my point, you think you were watching a top 2 creative side because every shot was going in. But you weren’t, you were watching a side destined to finish 5th.
Likewise teams who create a lot but can’t score appear worse than they are.
If you don’t think a 15 goal deviation from xG is significant, whatever your opinion of xG, then you can carry on thinking you were watching a top 2 side in blissful ignorance.
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Why would anyone want to watch football like this? We’re wrapped up in an amazing run, everyone’s getting excited and some dullard pops up with, ‘Err, actually guys, the xG says we’re gonna come fifth’.
Is this why our crowds were so bad? People stopped coming as the xG disciples had spread the word that there was no point? That dreams were banned? ‘Save your money for the play-offs guys, the equation hath pronounced’.
What is it about xG and various other metrics that convinces people to present their hypothesis as fact? It’s baffling. Next thing you’ll be proposing reducing a five day Test Match to 10 overs per side decided by the Duckworth Lewis Method.
If that’s football, it’s not for me.
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I wasn’t watching football like that, the season has now finished and good run was in 2024.
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But you’re missing the point - I suspect deliberately. Noone has said don’t watch football with passion and excitement, believing that the run would continue and promotion was a possibility.
What’s being pointed out is, with hindsight, it can be thought of that we were overachieving. However, eventually things caught up with us - there were several extenuating circumstances for that - and we finished up roughly where the stats would have predicted.
Get used to it - stats are the new kid in town, holding hands with data.
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Ainsworth and O’Neill didn’t use numerology, THEY USED THEIR HEARTS
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