Esoterica
Well-Known Member
Yes, when a team scores first they are more likely to win. In L1 last season scoring first in a game resulted, on average, in winning 69% of those games. There's also an expected discrepancy between % of games won when scoring first at home and away, although not as wide as you might think: 75.3% of home games were won scoring first vs 62.3% of away games.
You can also see how hard it is to come back and win when you've gone a goal down, which was achieved in just 11.1% of games.
When you compare the conversion rate of number of wins achieved after scoring first then our results are pretty much the average. I also added Luton's data in as the league winners. So you can see, I hope, that on the whole we don't have a big issue with winning once we score first - it could be better, but even if we were to apply Luton's conversion % (80.6% wins when scoring first) to the number of matches we scored first in, then it would only have netted us another 7 points at home and 5 points away. Those 12 points alone would still have only scraped us into the final playoff place.
Below I've attached the full 2018/2019 table that the above 'scored first' data is taken from and I've filtered it by % of matches scored first in:
For us that was 24 of 46 matches and therein lies part 1 of the issue. To challenge for autos we need to score first more often than in 52% of the games because we will score an average of 2.25 points per game when we do!
Now let's look at conceding first which forms part 2 of the issue. Our performance here was very poor. 9 points gained from a possible 60 from a losing position. Compare that with the top 6 and they are gaining many more points from losing positions and in far fewer games too.
My point remains from the previous thread this week though, that we don't score early enough in games, especially the poor teams, so teams spend too long with something to play for in matches. Take a look at the average minute our opening goal was scored in last season - the highest in the league. As a result we have the lowest % of Opening goals scored in the first half of matches:
Add that to this:
Just 14 goals extending a lead and then you really see how woeful that is compared to our rivals last season. So we open the scoring late and then fail to extend the lead more often than not. And again this season 80% of our victories are by a single goal margin. Teams are almost always in the game with us and it has a huge knock on with subs, squad rotation and tactics.
The debate to be had around all this is whether it's caused by Robins' tactics, the naivity/inexperience of our squad or just plain old poor finishing!
Raw stats all taken from League One table, stats, form and results | SoccerSTATS.com
Thread stemming from discussion here: The goalscoring debate - stats on when we score.
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