I hope that one fits his partner's colour scheme and doesn't have to be put in the bottom cupboard! (This came out in the Pink'un's interview with wives and partners). Teemu will be married by the time the season starts.
I'd forgotten how important Hanley & Klose were at the start of the season and how small Zimmermann's role was. Although I seem to remember Zimmermann trying to make a tackle with his head at one point, which for me really highlighted the fighting spirit of the team.
I think you might be right. For me it was the tipping point for when my confidence in DF started to increase.
Not being obtuse here, but the last three (3) comments belong on the 2019-2020 thread. This one is so 'last year', darling!
Yeah the “great” was meant to be read as sarcastic. The only good thing about this fixture is that just possibly we could spring a surprise on liverpool with them not quite being up to speed, first match etc. Not a great start, but at least expectations are minimal
please log in to view this image This is interesting, average position and "attacking pass quality" of players from Norwich and Sheffield United making 600+ passes over the season. Just 12 players on the Sheffield map shows how settled their side was. Interesting how central and far forward Hernandez makes his contributions, and how crowded that centre spot is!
Great chart, thanks. It’s really interesting also that our team is so balanced - we clearly didn’t favour one side or the other, whereas Blades were more reliant on the right. Shows that Lewis and Aarons are very well matched. I suspect it makes us more difficult to defend against as we don’t have a clearer threatening side. I’m assuming the blob below Cantwell is Stiepermann. That central part shows that we also attacked through the middle, though I can’t believe as much as last season.
Yes, great chart DH. The Blades had a much more conventional attack and what is not shown is how much movement we had up front. Often a wide player would drop back, pulling his defender out of position so Stiepermann could move into space to make a key pass or shoot himself. That movement and one touch passing will be a force in the PL as well.
I'm not sure quite how well these charts work, but it's an interesting attempt to show what you've tried to describe: please log in to view this image These show the average direction the ball is played in (Left or Right) from the team's own goal (bottom of y axis), towards the opponents goal (top of y). Teams with very balanced attacks will be very close to 0 all the way up the axis, those with a distinct preference will show up one side of the other. So for NCFC, we had a slight prefer to play the ball out to the right, but then play is generally fairly balanced. Perhaps a slight preference to hit players on the by-line on the right side of the pitch, which would make sense as both Max and Buendia attack those areas, whilst Lewis rarely does on the left. In contrast Sheffield United play the ball out almost exclusively to the right. The failure of these graphs though is that if the ball is always going right from the goalkeeper, then it's no surprise that the following passes show a bias to passing left - there's no more pitch to pass wider to the right! So the graph for United is perhaps less helpful, you can't tell if they build more through the right hand side of the pitch, or not. Meanwhile the Ipswich pass map seems to suggest their favourite tactic was to roll the ball out to the RB, who punted it long to the left corner flag... Whilst I'm doing data from SwansAnalytics on twitter, here's a map of every pass played in the Championship last season: please log in to view this image Apparently footballers don't like passing along the white lines!