How long will you use that excuse for? The entire season? Next season, too?
What's the cut-off point?
United and xG (now that Ole is gone will things change?)
- Thread starter Pogue Mahone
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In the latest episode of the United Hour Podcast, Nik and Imran hold a long overdue conversation about United's awful league form with 1 win in 7. They discuss a disappointing draw at Bournemouth, a not so disappointing draw against Liverpool and a crushing defeat at Chelsea - Is time nearly over for Erik Ten Hag?
Then in a special second half of the pod, Nik welcomes Natalie ( https://twitter.com/natalie_17) to discuss the fortunes of Manchester United Women as they booked a place in the FA Cup Final after a historic first ever win vs. Chelsea.
What's the cut-off point?
I think after the international break most of the lads should have their fitness there or thereabouts.
xG is stupid. We deserved to win all games. Ole is the best manager in the league.
Keep faith and the title will be ours!
Keep faith and the title will be ours!
I agree Pogue. Last season our defence shipped 18 fewer goals than the season before, despite playing a huge number of Cup matches on top of it, and also taking into account De Gea's tendency for a clanger.
Its unfair to single out an individual player, but i do feel that a defensive decline has slowly set in since Pogba returned to the team. I just dont know what his position is anymore, but it certainly isn't as part of a solid midfield base. He needs protection behind him.
Id like to see Fred and McTominay come back in for a spell. Our front four are going to score goals anyway. They don't need Pogba's supposed creativity.
I agree, nice to see others think he can do it too
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We somehow gifted Everton a deserved draw. Unbelievable defensive errors.
xG isnt the best indicator here. If the GK punches out to 6 yard box, the xG of the shot is always going to be higher, and that's why xG shouldn't be used as a sole criteria for saying who deserved to win the game
A fantastic example of how xG is absolutely fecking useless.
Why?
Not really. We dominated the game. But then gifted them 4 sitters essentially. It's why the draw is deserved on the balance of chances, which is what xG calculates. We can't claim to deserve more when we gift them the chances and goals we did. That's not luck. It's just shit defending and goal keeping.
Not sure I understand that line of thinking. David De Gea plays for Manchester United, he and therefore United gave Everton a big chance to score which they took. If De Gea and by extent United play better by not making that mistake then we likely win the xG battle comfortably and probably the match.
If any goal/chance shows the limits of xG tonight it's probably McTominay's. Their goalie's slip made the chance of it going in much higher than it normally would be as per xG.
Everton were fecking shite and created feck all. We fecked up and gave them 3 goals including a massive xG chance with the last kick of the game. Fine, you wanna say that that made the two teams’ chances equal, be my guest, but to take that and argue that Everton’s performance deserved a draw (as the tweeter explicitly does) is to take leave of all sense.
The narrative of that game is United imploding 3 times; that’s what everyone will be talking about. If you’re going to take xG and argue that it somehow proves the game was even then I don’t know what to say. It’s a useful analytical tool in certain contexts, and can provide an overview of general trends of how teams are playing. On a game by game basis it’s the preserve of people who don’t understand that the better team doesn’t always win and would rather spaff into an excel table than watch the game itself.
It's not a case of one team deserving a win or not. Stats don't take any bias or write a narrative. It's just a stat showing the total quality of chances. Caley is just saying on balance of chances the totals evened up, despite us dominating the game. As he says. Which is true. We gifted them 4 massive chances and conceded 3 goals and an xG total equal to all the solid chances we created. That's horrendous defending. Its not saying anything wrong. Nobody takes xG on its own. But we didn't win because we gifted them goals. That's it.
’it's a deserved draw’
Literally in the tweet.
He isn’t saying ‘on balance of chances the totals evened up, despite us dominating the game’. If he’d written that, nobody would have an issue. What he’s explicitly saying is that because the xG evened up Everton deserved a draw despite by his own admission stating we controlled the game. It’s a classic case in point of someone being so wedded to their magic stat they think can explain everything that they’re trying to distort reality to fit it.
I get your point, however, in this case, the xG of a team is getting bumped up because of an error. Had Doucoure been 2 steps back and had gotten that chance, the xG would have been significantly lower, but still it would have been a simple tap-in. It's as good as a penalty or rather worse.
Anyways, as big a fan I am of xG, I don't really think it works as effectively on individual games to tell who deserved the win
If one team has more of the ball, has more chances in total, show more attacking endeavour but make some huge feck ups at the back that cost them do they deserve to win? If not then what result do they deserve?
If they defend as poorly as we did, they deserve to draw or even loose. Football is both attack and defense. Just because we did brilliantly when we had the ball, does not allow us to switch off in defense.
We deserved the draw today because of the sheer number of defensive lapses. Our defensive performance deserved a loss, but our attacking performance saved us a point.
If you allow the opportunity to have 3 simple shots in the 10 yard zone, how can you deserve to win? We were lucky one of them was scooped straight at De Gea
No, but who is claiming that? It’s just that the team that is gifted those chances didn’t do anything to have deserved them. They haven’t earned it, or played well to get it, they simply got away with it. Or maybe you prefer gifted it, got lucky, fluked it. Whatever terminology you prefer, use that. They happened to be in the right place at the right time to benefit from a United implosion.
That happens a shit load in football, and the best team often doesn’t win. There’s no rhyme no reason to it sometimes; it’s just what happens when 22 human beings play a football match. If that wasn’t the case, I doubt many of us would be watching.
My specific issue is of using an even xG score to argue that the beneficiary of those mistakes somehow deserved to get them and that the result was the one that should have happened based on both teams performances. As if it makes their performance comparable to the other teams or, somehow, indicates that they played with an attacking verve that went unrewarded until some mistakes came along to balance things out.
It’s a complete mis-understanding of football. Everton can head back to Merseyside cock-a-hoop because they played poorly and were given 3 goals. We’ll head back home knowing we chucked away 3 points. Everyone watching that game knows that both those things are true, so there’s no need to try and argue that at some deep philosophical level it isn’t because the xG balanced out.
Yes because it was a deserved draw? There is attack and defence in football. Were Everton lucky to score from nothing chances? Did we restrict the quality of their chances? Did we miss loads and loads of chances where you can blame bad finishing? No to all. We scored 3 goals from our chances, a pretty normal amount for the ones we made and a had a slice of luck luck Olsens mistake. They scored 3 from us gifting them huge chances. What do we deserve if we can't defend?
We would've been lucky to get away with a win if they missed that chance. We were punished for our bad defending though. You can't claim to deserve a win if you give away those chances, and that's what xG and Caley is saying. It's an extremely different scenario to clinical finishing or shots from range or deflections.
Nobody is claiming this though! It's saying the chances both teams had a draw is fair. Which it is. You can't ignore mistakes. We're still getting praise and Caley even tweeted we played well and controlled the majority... but football is a game of mistakes.
I’m not ignoring the mistakes. I’m saying that ‘a deserved draw’ is the remit of both sides putting in a performance which should see them earn a point. United didn’t deserve to win, but it doesn’t make Everton’s performance worthy of earning a point, either. You seem to think I’m saying we were hard done by or unlucky, but I’m not at all. I’m simply pointing out that Everton were incredibly lucky that we happened to defend so badly that the fact they created nothing didn’t matter. Had Everton been beaten nobody would be saying, ‘oh boy, how unlucky they were, they really deserved a point today‘, they would be slating them for their performance.
As it happened, we decided to implode at the end of the game giving them a chance which balanced out the xG and gave them a point. It was shit on our part and lucky on theirs and that’s the story the xG is telling you: sloppy Manchester United throw away 3 points to lucky Everton. The problem is xG is treated as some sort of proxy for performance (and, to be fair, may well serve that purpose when you extrapolate data across a long period of time) but, in reality, tells you little that your eyes don’t on a game by game basis or, worse, obfuscates what your eyes are telling you.
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Does my head in when people try to use xG to interpret obvious shit, like which team was more dominant. Use your fecking eyes. We were the better team. Clearly. We handed Everton a draw that their performance didn’t deserve.
But the point here is that our attack was dominant and performing while our defence was terrible. A team is comprised of both.
Yes. And the team - which is comprised of both - played better than Everton overall. Whatever the feck xG says.
Everyone getting hung up on the definition of the word deserved and looking at it differently.
Everton's attacking play didn't warrant them scoring 3 goals, they didn't really earn that but then United's defensive lapses also deserved to be punished. Everyone knows a match is 90 minutes long and you can't expect to make defensive errors without being punished. Everyone knows that if you eliminate defensive mistakes you increase your chances of not conceding.
We were the boxer who won more rounds but lost concentration and got knocked down a couple of times, losing a couple of rounds by a big margin and the fight ended in a draw. We showed we were more skilful for the majority of the time and were on course to win but those lapses that we gifted our opponent who did nothing special cost us and we only had ourselves to blame. We have to work on eliminating those lapses for as long as they exist we won't deserve to win.
Everton's attacking play didn't warrant them scoring 3 goals, they didn't really earn that but then United's defensive lapses also deserved to be punished. Everyone knows a match is 90 minutes long and you can't expect to make defensive errors without being punished. Everyone knows that if you eliminate defensive mistakes you increase your chances of not conceding.
We were the boxer who won more rounds but lost concentration and got knocked down a couple of times, losing a couple of rounds by a big margin and the fight ended in a draw. We showed we were more skilful for the majority of the time and were on course to win but those lapses that we gifted our opponent who did nothing special cost us and we only had ourselves to blame. We have to work on eliminating those lapses for as long as they exist we won't deserve to win.
For another bad analogy we were Titus Bramble. Quite a talented defender a lot of the time but he'd also make some really big mistakes too often and it stopped him being as good as he could have been.
If Everton deserved a draw based on our mistakes. What does xG think we deserved based on Rashfords misses?
Funny thing you could also say our defence is made up of Titus Brambles decent defender's all of them but good for mistake or two every other game.
Good one.
Nothing more than we got. We overperformed on our finishing to get the three goals that we did.
People here are talking about how we gifted Everton goals with terrible defending and goalkeeping and how that made all the difference, but come on, Everton should feel the same about the first and third goal we scored.
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Thought it was vaguely interesting, particularly as the stats I look at have us overperforming by more again (+11.17).
A big chunk of that is the 9-0, where we overperformed by 4 goals, which is almost unheard of.
Ah, that explains it. Thanks!
Reveals some serious flaws then that.
xG should always be taken with a pinch of salt. When one guy posts a graph giving us 6.9 and another straight after comes up with 11.17, its pretty clear that different stat-makers have different interpretations on how to measure it.
That is? (Well, apart from taking out the outliers, which of course makes sense in a lot of cases.)
That shouldn't be included really then.
Understat has us at 9.2 above, Fbref has us at 10.8 above.
Last season we were 0.19 behind on understat, 0.58 above on Fbref.
It's very clearly an accurate stat that tends to even out over time. Teams will outperform or underperform their finishing for a certain amount of time but tend to revert to the mean. It's funny for Brighton, in terms of xPts, they 'should' be 5th in the league... but they have woeful finishing and so are 15.6 points below what xG has them at, which is crazy underperformance (all finishing related).
Last season we were 0.19 behind on understat, 0.58 above on Fbref.
It's very clearly an accurate stat that tends to even out over time. Teams will outperform or underperform their finishing for a certain amount of time but tend to revert to the mean. It's funny for Brighton, in terms of xPts, they 'should' be 5th in the league... but they have woeful finishing and so are 15.6 points below what xG has them at, which is crazy underperformance (all finishing related).
Why not? Everything is part of the data set and just shows if a team is clinical over a season or not. Relative to the chances we are making this season, we have been clinical.