Arsenal 1-0 Chelsea Player Ratings and Match Reaction

Raya 6 - Didn’t have much to do and made a bit of a pig’s ear out of the only real time he was called upon


Timber 8 - Made Cucurella look like a clown (granted that doesn’t take much)


Saliba 7 - Solid and largely untroubled


Gabriel 7 - Gave Neto nothing


Lewis-Skelly 7 - Solid, showed positional discipline


Partey 7 - Didn’t have much to do defensively, played a couple of good balls forward


Rice 7.5 - Tried to make things happen, good work rate


Odegaard 7 - Probably should have done better when through on goal but laid chances on for others


Martinelli 7 - Still looks raw but he did cause trouble with his pace


Trossard 5 - In his trying too hard phase again, needs to ballooning his shots


Merino 7.5 - Probably didn’t intend to score with his flicked header, but very good control and shot that needed a good save from Sanchez


Subs

Nwaneri 7 - Should have started

Tierney N/A - Game was dead when he came on



This was Ipswich without the stodginess, an XG of 0.75 shows that we really didn’t do all that much going forwards. I don’t think it’s a case of being too conservative (the coach is, but I don’t think the players were) but just still very much lacking confidence in front of goal. Timber probably the best player on the pitch, and frankly I think he’s very much a contender for player of the season for us. Not because he’s been brilliant but he’s been consistently decent (which rather sums up this unspectacular season)

This game rather sums up the season, flickering embers…a season that’s never really got going in order for it to fall apart.

With the exception of a second choice keeper, any money that’s spent other than on creative and attacking areas will be money wasted.

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Originally Posted by HCZ_Reborn

This was Ipswich without the stodginess, an XG of 0.75 shows that we really didn’t do all that much going forwards.

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I have no idea how they calculate that (meaningless in my opinion) stat.
From the highlights it looked like we had a fair number of decent chances or half chances.

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Originally Posted by Letters

I have no idea how they calculate that (meaningless in my opinion) stat.
From the highlights it looked like we had a fair number of decent chances or half chances.

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A lot of football stats are quite misleading, it's like the 'completed passes' thing, if a player has a high rate, it looks good but if all they're doing is passing sideways to someone a few feet away and receiving it back, it achieves nothing

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Originally Posted by Letters

I have no idea how they calculate that (meaningless in my opinion) stat.
From the highlights it looked like we had a fair number of decent chances or half chances.

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XG is determined by looking at chances created, so angle of pass or shot taken, distance from goal etc and then cross referenced against the historical likelihood of that kind of play leading to a goal. It’s only a rough guide but it’s actually far more context dependent than the silly comparison made to pass completed stats.

So to take that game against Chelsea for example, the XG calculation was based on whether it’s thought likely that the type of chances we had would lead to goals. The actual goal we scored wasn’t intended for the back of the net, and actually when you look at the chances we created a lot of the time we took far too long to set ourselves and the shot was blocked.

Of course I’m not saying XG is always a reliable indicator. Our XG for the City game was 1.6 or something like that, this is largely saying that three of the five goals we scored came from shots that actually on average you wouldn’t expect to score from. Partey and Nwaneri shot from outside the box, and as we all know shots from outside the box far more often go high or wide than they go in the net, and Havertz scored from an awkward angle. So this is actually more indicative of the fact that we scored goals that ordinarily would be hard to pull off

Really it’s a case of how you want to read it, losing 1-0 and having an XG of 3 is no better than losing 1-0 and having an XG of 0.3. It’s just the problem you have is different, one you are not taking what would be considered good chances to score, the other you are not creating what would be considered good chances to score

I think XG on the whole is usually a reliable stat, however I am shocked to see that XG we had yesterday was below 1. Also the XG suggests that with our chances we were twice as likely to score than Chelsea yesterday, but I would have put it at 3 times more likely, especially after the first 30 mins of the 1st half.

I do agree Merino's goal definitely wouldn't have moved the XG by much because that was really difficult to pull off. Kudos to him again (whether he meant it or not).

I’d love to see a game where the XG was 4 or 5 and that team didn’t score once, either the keeper has pulled off a couple of worldies or the team is full of Ronnie Rosenthals

PSG’s XG over the two legs with Liverpool was 4.34 (most of that coming from the first leg im guessing)

xG always seems to be a reliable stat over longer timescales e.g. when teams or players are on in unbelievable form and massively out-performing their xG they tend to regress to the mean and drop back at some point, or alternatively if a team isn't performing but their xG is very good, they tend to reocver the results more quickly (or players start scoring etc).

On an individual game level it becomes a bit more finicky, as said abohas been said above.

Obviously then it's whether you "believe" in stats or not, but it's hardly a new concept. And it's only really taking shots vs shots on target one step further.

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Originally Posted by Shaqiri Is Boss

xG always seems to be a reliable stat over longer timescales e.g. when teams or players are on in unbelievable form and massively out-performing their xG they tend to regress to the mean and drop back at some point, or alternatively if a team isn't performing but their xG is very good, they tend to reocver the results more quickly (or players start scoring etc).

On an individual game level it becomes a bit more finicky, as said abohas been said above.

Obviously then it's whether you "believe" in stats or not, but it's hardly a new concept. And it's only really taking shots vs shots on target one step further.

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Yeah I think that’s all probably true

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Originally Posted by Shaqiri Is Boss

Obviously then it's whether you "believe" in stats or not, but it's hardly a new concept. And it's only really taking shots vs shots on target one step further.

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Stats are useful in general, but they're not the be all and end all.
xG seems a bit simplistic if they're only considering shots. Just generally from the highlights we looked a lot more dangerous than Chelsea on Sunday.
There was one ball across the box which would have been a tap in, the Chelsea player just got there first but there are fine lines in football - things like that wouldn't be considered but it was us getting in to a dangerous position. Keep doing that and you'll probably score.

Having seen the goal again, not particularly convinced he meant it.