feltmonkey

I think we looked like a team with several players coming back from injury. Lingard, Martial, and Herrera all looked a bit rusty. We do need to bounce back, though.

Fuck me, what a save!

I'm really not good at fantasy football. My brother has messaged me to point out that I only have one player in my team this week. I haven't captained him.

Am I the only one who saw the draw, with us getting Barca and to rub it in Liverpool getting fucking Porto and thought "FFS" then?

Yes! That's the interesting question - what has changed? @Plissken has added an excellent summary of what indeed has changed to cause the dip in form (I was going to suggest a combination of a dip in individual form, a dip in workrate as a result of their achievements, and the Joe Hart factor) but a lot of people (not yourself particularly) seem to just quote the xG stats and say, "they were lucky before, now they've reverted to where they should be." xG is often used as a way of throwing a bucket of piss over any achievement. If the variance is so high you need to take it over several seasons for it to be accurate, then what's the point of people even mentioning it in reference to individual games? And if it needs that long to level out, is it particularly useful? You could make a formula saying X% of shots overall go in, and then apply that to an individual club over the previous decade, and it would probably hold true. And if it doesn't you could say, well we need a larger sample size, and keep expanding it until it does. As I said, I don't dislike xG per se, I just question the tendency to put greater emphasis on it than any other stat, up to and including the one about which team scored the most goals.

Yeah, it's a good stat, it just gets used a bit oddly, and is often given too much weight. Incidentally, apologies @rjpageuk - my post reads like a direct contradiction of your example of Burnley, but I started writing it this morning on my break (before you had posted) and only finished it on my lunch hours later, so I hadn't seen your post! It's a coincidence that we both brought up the Burnley example. It's one I've seen a few times and it just stuck in my mind.

The problem with xG as far as I can see is that all it really is is a more nuanced form of the shots at goal stat. It takes into account where on the pitch the shot was taken from, and (I think - going from memory here) whether it was a header or not. Nothing else. It doesn't take into account the position of defenders, or whether the chance is a clear tap-in or an overhead kick in a crowded penalty area. So as an example from the Arsenal vs Man Utd game, when Lukaku half went round Leno, who pulled off a fantastic save, and then had a swing at the rebound while off balance and with two defenders on the line, xG would give both those chances the same number as they were from the same spot. As a statistic it has it's uses, certainly, and it is better than just looking at shots on goal, but it's a trap. The self-aggrandising name and the fact that it gives something approaching a scoreline leads to people over-valuing it's importance. It's easy to look at that 1.5 - 2.5 xG scoreline in the Arsenal Man Utd game and see that as somehow the "true" scoreline, when it was obvious from watching the game that Arsenal were the better team on the day and very much deserving of the win. It gets misinterpreted too. When Burnley were doing very well last season playing a very defensive, very organised style, people brought up their xG statistics to try and show that they were somehow lucky, rather than that they as a unit were dogged and habitually got into position to block shots, and didn't let opposition forwards have clear chances very often. They defended deep and in numbers, Tarkowski and Mee are quite old school defenders who throw themselves into the way of shots, and behind them was a very tidy and in-form goalkeeper in Pope. Their xG was used to "prove" that their run was entirely down to luck, but xG simply does not account for good defending, or at least this kind of last-ditch defending. A more interesting use of the stat might have been to look into why they were performing above xG, but it's just dismissed as luck. I am not against xG by any means, but it is not some kind of all-encompassing unifying stat that eclipses all other ways of looking at the game, which is how it's disciples tend to present it. It basically tells us that shots from closer in and more central to the goal are more likely to go in. Duh. I'm sure it's more useful as a coaching tool, and Guardiola can use it to communicate to his players that working the ball into the box results in better chances than shooting on sight. It's just a stat, an oddly fetishised stat. Stats can only ever tell us a part of the picture. In the case of xG being used in individual games it doesn't tell us very much at all.

Arsenal deserved the win, I reckon. They were all over us in the first half, and the way they defended and broke in the second half meant they always looked more likely to score than us. They made a lot of interceptions about 30 yards from their goal and broke dangerously. Some of that was down to our poor passing, and a lot to do with how lethargic we looked, but despite how strange the goals were, you can't begrudge Arsenal the win.

Never a penalty.

Their keeper is having a really good game.

Not a great 15 minutes. Strange goal, really bad mistake from DDG, Arsenal all over us, and our one chance was a bad miss from Lukaku. We need to buck our ideas up.

How come Mustafi isn't playing? Surely it was in the terms and conditions of whatever competition he won in order to spend a year imitating a footballer that he would play in the big games?

Yeah, i can see today being a comedown from Wednesday. Arsenal are a good side, in decent form, and at home. I'd be more confident if Mustafi was playing.

Is anyone going to Warhammer Fest this year?

You'd get bottler refs giving indirect free kicks for everything.