TFC's Tactical Autopsy Thread

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Spurs are allowing opponents better chances than at any point in the last eight years - why?Spurs are allowing opponents better chances than at any point in the last eight years – why?

The last time we heard from Ange Postecoglou, after the 2-1 home defeat to Wolverhampton Wanderers, he had to insist that he was “not a magician” and that only hard work on the training ground would get Tottenham back to where they want to be.

There will have been two empty weeks for Spurs between Wolves and their next game, at home to Crystal Palace on Saturday. The hope is that when they return, they will have fixed some of their recent problems and deliver a rousing final third of the campaign.

An objectively successful 2023-24 season is well within Spurs’ grasp. They are fifth in the league with a game in hand on fourth-placed Aston Villa. Win that, and the gap shrinks to two points. We do not know yet whether the Premier League will get a fifth Champions League place but it may well break that way.


Putting league position to one side, Spurs are on course for a 71-point season, as many as they got under Antonio Conte in 2021-22 or during Mauricio Pochettino’s last full season in 2018-19. Squeeze a bit more out of the last 13 games and they will finish with their best tally in at least six years. Not bad for their first season under a new manager playing a new style, with half of a brand new team and without Harry Kane.

However, it is impossible to avoid the feeling that the wind has slightly gone out of Spurs’ sails in the last few months. Their record is not bad — 11 points from the last six league games, only two defeats in 10 — but anyone who has been watching will know the performances have dropped since the start of the season, even with the return of their best players from injuries and international duty. The defeat to Wolves felt like more of an overdue correction than a shock.

It is easy to get wrapped up in the short-term news cycle issues affecting the team, about individual performance and selection — but look in detail at Spurs’ season and one question jumps out: how can Spurs maintain their league position when they give up so many chances?

By most metrics, they concede far more goalscoring opportunities than you would expect from a team trying to qualify for the Champions League. They are conceding more chances this season than they have at any point over the last seven years, which has not been a golden spell in their history.

Our main metric here is expected goals (xG), which measures the quality of a chance. It is the best metric we have of performance level and, therefore, the best long-term predictor of results.

This season, Tottenham have conceded a total xG of 43.58, or 1.74 per game, according to Opta. If you ranked all 20 Premier League teams by xG against (xGA), only seven teams would place worse than Spurs. Their figure is far closer to the worst team in the league (Luton Town, 2.09 xGA per game) than it is to the best teams (Manchester City 0.96, Woolwich 0.71.) According to xGA, Spurs are conceding more chances than Manchester United (1.67 xGA per game), Bournemouth (1.62) and Nottingham Forest (1.5).


This season stands out for Spurs, whose average xGA per game of 1.74 is by far their worst over the last eight seasons. It is a big leap from the previous worst (1.46) in 2019-20, the season Pochettino was sacked and replaced by Jose Mourinho. This season’s figure is very close to being double what it was in the peak years of Pochettino: 0.89 in 2016-17 and 0.90 in 2017-18. Back then, Spurs had, statistically, the best defence in the country, conceding just 26 goals in 2016-17. It seems unlikely they will get back to that level soon.


Looking in more detail at Tottenham’s record over the last four seasons, we can see how their numbers have changed and why this campaign’s xGA is so much higher. The below chart shows the 10-game rolling average of Spurs’ xG and xGA since the 2020-21 season.

After Postecoglou took over in the summer, Spurs’ average xG shot up and their average xGA went down, with his team creating better quality chances than their opponents for the first quarter of the season. (This is represented by the blue shaded area). For these first 10 games, of which Spurs won eight and drew two, their xGA is roughly at the level it was for the start of last season, or much of 2020-21. In short, the opening part of Postecoglou’s reign was defensively solid.

tottenham_hotspur_rolling_npxg_ribbon.png


The turning point came after 10 games, after the nine-men of Spurs lost 4-1 to Chelsea on November 6. From that point, you can see Spurs’ 10-game xGA average shoots up and even exceeds the worst moments under Mourinho, Nuno Espirito Santo, Conte or Cristian Stellini. Spurs were in xG deficit for a while (the red shaded area), with more xGA than xG. But in the last few games, their xGA average has started to come back down again.

What does this tell us? First, the Chelsea defeat was a defining moment. Up to that point, Spurs were doing well defensively — their xGA per game of 1.27 was the sixth-best in the league.


The issue was not just that Spurs conceded a total xG of 4.12 to Chelsea, it was also that centre-back Micky van de Ven sustained a hamstring injury, putting him out for the next two months. Defenders Cristian Romero and Destiny Udogie were sent off, prompting suspensions. Midfielder James Maddison picked up an ankle injury that put him out for almost three months and, suddenly, Spurs were without half of their team.

When Romero suffered a hamstring injury in December, Spurs’ defence was hit further. Single-game xG figures rarely tell the whole story but Spurs went on to concede 2.15 xG at Wolves in November, 2.57 xG at Manchester City and 3.58 xG at Brighton & Hove Albion in December.

Those numbers were unsustainable for a successful team and, in hindsight, it is remarkable they managed to maintain consistent results. Since Van de Ven and Romero returned to the team for the Manchester United game on 14 January, Spurs’ have conceded 7.96 xG over five games — a healthier per-game average of 1.59. That puts them ninth in the league over that period. Not quite as good as the first 10 games of the season, but better than their overall average.

Spurs are 25 games into the season and still in a good position, which tells us that the xG numbers do not have a flawless predictive power and that Guglielmo Vicario is a good enough goalkeeper that he can subvert the data.

Opta ranks all goalkeepers in the league by the number of goals they have prevented, by taking the xG on target (xGOT) they have faced and subtracting the number of non-penalty goals they have actually conceded. Using this ‘goals prevented’ metric, Vicario is the best shot-stopper in the Premier League this season. Having conceded 30 non-penalty goals from an xGOT of 36.7, it can be inferred that Vicario has ‘prevented’ 6.7 goals, which puts him ahead of Aston Villa’s Emiliano Martinez (5.7) and Wolves’ Jose Sa(4.8) at the top of the ranking.

We can also look at how Spurs are conceding their chances. It is easy to point at some of the structural aspects of Postecoglou’s style — the high line, the full-backs pushed on — and say they are the source of Spurs’ issues, but Opta breaks xGA down into chances conceded from open play and set pieces. From open play, Spurs’ xGA figure is 10th-best in the league but from free kicks and corners, it is the fourth worst. Only Villa, Manchester United and Burnley have conceded more than Spurs’ 10.11 xG from set pieces.


Nor do Tottenham’s defensive issues necessarily stem from a lack of effort without the ball. Spurs come out at the top of Opta’s pressing stats. Postecoglou’s side have registered the most high turnovers in the league this season (266, ahead of Liverpoolsecond on 260). Using ‘passes per defensive action’ (PPDA, a proxy of a team’s pressing, with a lower number indicating a higher intensity), we can also see Spurs are one of the most aggressive pressing sides in the league, with a PPDA of 9.4, only marginally higher than Liverpool in first (9.0).

So, Spurs’ xGA is higher than before but their xG has gone up, too. Their xG per game this season averages at 1.76, the seventh-highest in the league. That is the best it has been over the last eight seasons, even better than the 1.72 from the 2017-18 season. If Tottenham can continue to create and convert chances at a good rate — while tightening up the defence — they should win more games than they lose.

The numbers tell us a story but our interpretation of them will ultimately be decided by what happens on the pitch. You can look at these figures and argue that Postecoglou’s style exposes his team to more risk than any previous Spurs manager — but then there are those low xGA figures from the first 10 games of the season, which suggest that his system is not inherently cavalier. Postecoglou’s Spurs can work in a way that is tight at the back and still exciting going forward. With a ‘keeper as good as Vicario, they can also limit the damage done by the chances they do concede.

Maybe the question is whether the spike in chances conceded was a feature of the way Postecoglou sets up his team or just a glitch caused by injuries and suspensions. Spurs’ numbers over the middle third of the season are not those of a team who qualify for the Champions League but they have started to improve again.

If all that hard work on the training pitch over the last two weeks pays off and Spurs tighten up at the back, then maybe this worrying spike will be consigned to the footnotes of history.
 

From The Athletic

Tottenham win the ‘high-line derby’

Even without John McGinn’s dismissal after 65 minutes, Tottenham Hotspur’s tactical approach came out on top against Unai Emery’s Aston Villa in the race for fourth spot and a guaranteed place in next season’s Champions League.

Both sides have played with very high defensive lines this season, with no Premier League team provoking more offsides than Villa (131) or Tottenham (93) — and only Manchester City averaging a higher defensive line than the pair in 2023-24.

spurs_villa_pl_offside_height.png


Sunday’s clash was a window into the positives and negatives of a high defensive line. From Spurs’ perspective, they were able to squeeze the pitch when Villa had the ball — which allowed them to swarm around their midfielders to win the ball high up. This was crucial in their second goal (scored by Brennan Johnson).

Only Manchester City have won the ball back in the attacking third more often than Tottenham this season, with their high defensive line being crucial in closing the gaps to successfully regain possession.

tottenham_poss_won-1.png


In contrast, the negatives of Villa’s high line were exposed with Spurs using the flanks to stretch the width of the pitch and force Emery’s defenders to retreat towards their own six-yard box — only to exploit the space vacated between the defence and midfield, with two well-worked cutbacks for Spurs’ third and fourth goals.
 
According to this report we are 11th in the world for pressures per game, 2nd in the PL to ManC.

But when it comes to possession retained under pressure we are 18th in the world and 4th in the PL behind ManC, Arse and Brighton.

 
According to this report we are 11th in the world for pressures per game, 2nd in the PL to ManC.

But when it comes to possession retained under pressure we are 18th in the world and 4th in the PL behind ManC, Arse and Brighton.


We’re very competent at both and those stats show that. Not really bothered if Southampton or Columbo FC do it better .. they wouldn’t in the Prem. Being 2nd to City for pressures per game is very promising.

Those elements are there. The numbers behind our defending on the other hand…
 
This is a bit long winded, but kind of confirms what some of us have been saying.

We are one of the best at creating attacking overloads, but not great at turning those overloads into good chances.

Definitely need better quality attackers.

 
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This is a bit long winded, but kind of confirms some theories I have about us.

We are one of the best at creating attacking overloads, but not great at turning those overloads into good chances.

Definitely need better quality attackers.


Yeah, this much is obvious.

Its why when things have clicked at times this season, we've looked the best team in the league but it's not clicked often enough because the quality of our attackers isn't of the level required.

It's also why you need to be able to give managers time so they can weed out the players not suited and bring in the right quality that's not always possible within a few windows

Good read, thanks
 
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