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Is that based on any Jose game you’ve ever seen?
I've never seen Ndombele and Lo Celso in the same starting eleven with Kane and Son also in the same line up since Jose has been in charge.
We played expansive football against Villa. Created more chances than we have in any game this season and STILL conceded 2 goals. You really think without a DM, Kane, Ndombele and Son we should have honestly gone the same route against one of the better teams in Europe this season?
Except it wasn’t for them.....Nothing ridiculous
SeeTotti 's reply
At the highest level, you need full strength, missing 3 key players and taking risks is foolish.
You do realise we lost 1-0 right?! You’re talking about the tactics like it was some sort of success.
Probably. On no basis.
Did you watch the last 20 mins? Why weren’t we picked apart by playing expansive then?
We gave them 4/5 golden chances in the first 60 mins playing regressive football. I couldn’t even reason with anyone thinking that’s an appropriate way to play against a team severely weakened in defence.
To say it was Ndombele that changed the tide is misleading. They scored and stopped pressing like they were doing for the majority of the game. They let us have a bit of the ball and went into their "don't concede and win the game mode".
Ndombele helps immensely no doubt, but we have also seen him go missing when he does get starts in games. Leipzig, at home, are going to press the living hell out of us to get another goal and make us score two or more. Knowing Jose that means more of what we saw today until he unleashes the team in the final 30 minutes or so when there is nothing to lose.
What makes you so confident that we are going to stop playing target man football and start playing a possession based, toe to toe football?
I am curious and not arguing my point. As I said in a prior post, I am naive to the Jose brand of football, but all I have read and watched in his years makes him look like a defensive first coach that looks for quick counters over the top of via quick breaks, which we see us attempting but failing at often.
I’m sorry that’s just tired old rhetoric being trotted out
you’ll drag in some of the less erudite but most on here will see straight through that
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You conceited arse
I made comments about Absinthe previously. Step away from the keyboard.
That description “vital away goal”...with the scoreline finishing 1-0, the fact it was an away goal was irrelevant.
Firstly, it's fucking hilarious that you lads managed to put 16(!!) disagrees on this. I wasn't watching my notifications so I came back to the post and just found it like this. I'm absolutely rolling.
Secondly, I'm taking the cowards way out and deleting it because I don't want the 16 joke neg reps! I'm quoting it and taking a screenshot for posterity -- will edit it into this post when I figure out how to do that on my new phone.
Well said. I'm not going to rehash my deep dive on why xG is a really shitty stat for deciding who "should" have won any individual match because it's long and boring for most people (here for anyone who is interested in that stuff) but my essential conclusion was exactly what you just said: trust your eyes over any statistic, especially xG.
Looking at the xG stats from this game, which I hadn't done before now, just vindicates everything I was saying in the other thread all over again: it was clear to the naked eye that the energy drink team had by far the better chances, yet it's not reflected in the stats at all. And that's why xG models are still little more than statistical toys for almost all purposes.
I'm really bumping the shit out of this now-irrelevant thread, but I liked your post. As I elaborated on in the post above this one, I'm happy to see people coming around to the massive limitations of current xG models.
It's hard to blame people for treating xG as the gospel of the deserving when the media, MOTD etc. are offering these stats prominently without any context, which makes it even nicer for me when fans have the critical thinking faculties to see through the nonsense. MOTD now shows the xG for every game and it's pretty fucking irresponsible: coming from a reputedly authoratitive show on the BBC, you'd be well within your rights to assume that xG must be the numbers spit out by this incredible 10000-tuple weighting algorithm running on a 1024 bit matrix transforming supercomputer -- the football equivalent of Deep Blue. (Of course, if such a thing really existed, it would outperform human managers every time, and I don't even want to imagine that world!)
You hardly have to be an expert in the statistical and algorithmic aspects of xG to be taken in by the flash. I do wonder, though, how many people realise just how useless xG currently is. If a player takes two weak-footed volleys from the same central position on the edge of the area, the xG of the shots will be the same whether they're aiming at an open goal or whether it's like that Harry Kane goal from a few years ago where it went through about three sets of legs and right into the bottom corner, beating the keeper (can't remember who that was against but it was a beauty).
