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For those of you who want a video that recaps the whole season, I've put this together over the course of the season and have finally got around to making it polished enough to upload. The first 10 minutes is a bit of a goal fest and after that a lot more town in 5 footage is used so it gets a lot more dramatic.
I was looking through various teams' XG stats in league 1 over the last 5 years (when the data first became available) and it shows how good this team really is.
From the 120 teams over the last 5 league 1 seasons, we have the highest XG out of anyone, and the lowest XG against. We are the only team to average an XG against that is below 1, and the only team to average an XG above 2 apart from Barnsley 18/19, with our XG still being 0.13 above them.
Which is why I think it is ridiculous for Plymouth and Wednesday fans to write us off just because of our run-in. The stats show that we are miles better than them and the XG difference of us vs our next opponents is much higher than the XG difference between them and their next opponents.
As we've learned from Wednesday's recent form, a team that succeeds off luck and good finishing cannot sustain that success forever, and I have no doubt that Plymouth will drop more points than us over the next few games. They need to get lucky every time in order to stay ahead of us, whereas we just need to get lucky once.
Barnsley have an XG on average 0.78 lower than ours, an XG against that is 0.19 higher than ours and a goal difference that's 12 below us but yes - they're obviously a better team than us.
I wouldn't be surprised if you drop more points than expected in these last few games. The teams at the bottom will be sitting back happy with taking a point and I could see you struggling to break them down with only 7 set-piece goals this season (compared to our 21).
It could easily go down to what happens at Oakwell, but we've changed a lot as a side since our home draw against you and genuinely look like converting good performances into results - our new attacking options look far more clinical than before and I think Luongo in midfield has kept a lot of pressure off the defence.
I don't see Barnsley as a great side, just fairly solid and clinical. But they will have off days because they don't drown out their opposition as we do, so I don't see why we should worry about them.
Guessing it means that we’re scoring a lot of our goals against lesser teams to secure 2 or 3 goal leads but not enough of our goals have been used to win the tighter games that our rivals have been able to win.
So probably means we’re good at playing against open teams with space in behind but can’t break down teams that sit back - as we know.
It is - they probably saw the twtd article on us being interested and decided to stick their neck out and say we’ve bid for him with the possibly of it improving their reputation - they’ve been guessing signings for the last few years.