The opening day saw a 1-0 defeat for Mark Cooper’s Yeovil Town at the hands of Hartlepool and this season, thanks to promotion and SofaScore, there is a load of stats at supporters’ fingertips.
Our good friend Jonathan Hooper is a bit of wizard and has produced this very tidy graphic.
xG – expected goals – measures the probability that a particular goal-scoring opportunity will result in a goal based on various factors such as the location of the shot, the angle, the distance from the goal, the type of pass that led to the chance, and other situational variables.
xP – expected points
All stats according to SofaScore
But what does it mean?
Possession, possession, possession.
We know we want the ball and against Hartlepool we had 62% of the ball and attempted a whopping 500 passes – 406 of which were successful. Yeovil attempted more than twice the amount of passes of Darren Sarll’s side.
On the images on each side of the graphic you can see the average position of each players, each with a different size circle. The larger the circle, the more involvement. Yeovil’s biggest circles are in defence, with Williams and Wannell seeing more of the ball than any other players on both teams.
It means little if you don’t do anything with it…
For all of the posession, Yeovil’s xG (expected goals) was 0.73 compared to Hartlepool’s 1.22. That means, the quality of chances the visitors created was better than Yeovil’s. It wasn’t until well after Jack Hunter’s 65th minute goal, that Yeovil’s xG began to increase where they created a flurry of chances late on. Harvey Greenslade’s miss in the 97th minute was only worth 0.45 xG and was the best quality chance at goal on the day.
Despite seeing less of the ball, Hartlepool got twice as many shots away – albeit the same amount on target as Yeovil. Those big blue spikes on the momentum graphic from the 50th minute are the visual representation of “it’s been coming” as Hartlepool pushed on and opened the scoring.
Our forward players will need to step up
The size of the circles for Aaron Jarvis, Dylan Morgan and Frank Nouble show the influence they had on the pitch on the day. Jarvis put himself about and roughed up his opposing centre backs but didn’t receive much service, only getting 10 touches of the ball. Likewise, Morgan, substituted in the 57th minute, didn’t get a lot of the ball and only had 16 touches.
You can see from the heatmap below that Frank Nouble found himself dropping deep and on the left side to get on the ball to try and make things happen but his impact further up the pitch and centrally wasn’t as great. He may have also found himself wanting to help out his teammate Morgan, who struggled to make an impact.
