Colossl Victory

My Summary A good performance in both directions marred by a mistake and some poor finishing. While it was influenced by Derby not needing to score for 65 minutes 1.94-0.57 is still a very good xG scoreline and really quite unlucky to get the result we did. Attack I’ve seen a lot of suggestions that last night we were poor going forward, or at the very least no better than we used to be; so let’s take a closer look at this claim. Last night we created 1.94 xG,which for a start suggests we were quite unlucky not to score a second; on balance either Kachunga or Schindler should have scored. According to xG, last season we only produced more chances to score on one occasion, away at Bournemouth (an oddly similar game, conceding two silly goals early on, then getting one back quickly but not being able to finish the job). This would suggest that this attacking display was improved from last season, but this result alone is nowhere near definitive. For a start we got a penalty, ...

Recently I've seen more and more suggestions that it is time to move Mounie on, due to not fitting Seiwart’s system ; in my opinion that would be a mistake. It would leave Town without a viable plan B and take the club backward, to the same problem we had before Grant signed. So I want to look at Town's strikers and their style of play, to show where the similarities and differences lie. Quite often, for at least the last 2 seasons, Huddersfield have been criticised for lacking a plan B up front. During the majority of that time, the only 2 players used as strikers were Mounie and Depoitre, who have extremely similar styles of play, so much so that they seemed to cancel each other out when playing together. There’s clear evidence to show this:  I ran a clustering analysis on the attacking and build up data from 230 strikers in Europe's top 5 leagues to see just how similar they were. The results are below. Although the names aren’t very clear, it is important ...