A Plan B

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 to see that in the list on the left Mounie is highlighted in red, Depoitre green and Grant blue.






Mounie and Depoitre are separated by just 1 player (Dominic Calvert-Lewin), proving that they are extremely similar players.
 To demonstrate this further; the players have to be split into 147 separate groups before their play-styles aren't matched in the same grouping , clearly showing why substituting one for the other won’t make a difference. They were almost literally the same player, whether that was natural or through a very rigid playing style, it is clear that if one of them wasn't effective in a particular game the other one was never going to be.

Grant on the other hand is a considerable amount further away and appears to provide something genuinely different to the other 2. The number of groups required to be in different clusters is only 4. Suggesting that swapping one for the other in a game not going our way could actually help.

Looking directly at the data;Mounie and Grant have similar passing stats, both in terms of number,accuracy and location, as well as defensive stats. The main differences come from Mounie's much higher aerial attempt and success rates and Grant's higher dribbles, crosses and chances created for teammates.

This all suggests that both players should have their moments this season and for those games against hard to break down opposition Huddersfield may just appreciate having a plan B waiting, something which they've lacked for a long time.

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