Weymouth FC – A review in October with over a quarter of the season now gone…
“Are you not entertained???“…A question I am asking the c.2 people that read this blog regularly.
You should be…I should be…for the following reasons!…
– Unbeaten in the league so far with 11 wins and just the 1 draw!
– 7 cup tie wins including cup upsets over three teams in the division above!
– 57 goals scored already this campaign
– We are TOP of the league!
YOUR TEAM EXPECTS…
If you are NOT entertained…and I must admit I have struggled to always get excited this season…I believe we have the problem of expectation levels being incredibly high.
Apparently the term is “anhedonia”… “The reduced ability to experience pleasure, or a diminished interest in engaging in previously pleasurable activities”.
Sounds about right!
The problem is…Rightly or wrongly we are expected to win every game in this league…
…and to be fair we have done almost exactly that so far (the 0-0 draw at Hungerford the only blot on the copybook so far when we were reduced to 10 men).
GETTING OFF MY ARSE!
But maybe the solution to these (probably) irrational doldrums…and lets face it every other club in this division would bite their hand off to be in our current position…is to actually go and watch the team play and win…and that is exactly what I did when I meant to the recent Bristol Manor Farm game.
And it turned out there really is no substitute for actually being there and watching us play…and win…in the flesh. Watching highlights can only do so much to raise the excitement levels but being there really did the trick for me.
Some of our forward play was sublime at times but there was just one issue which has been a theme so far in this campaign which caused concern for a time…we conceded first!
That was the 6th time no less in 11 league games this season (discarding the 0-0 draw at Hungerford). Therefore we have only scored the first goal in 45% of scoring league games in the league!
I ALWAYS TRY TO SCORE FIRST…
But ultimately does it matter if we don’t score first when we are averaging nearly 3 goals a game in return? Well…maybe…
If we look at the chart below we can see there is some correlation between how often we have scored first in the league and our final position in the table… although I agree it’s not a strong signal.
WARNING! Maths bit!…The R squared value shown in yellow means 61% of the trend can be explained by the data points but 39% cannot...
The above means the pattern is not a totally clear statistical signal but we can state some facts from this –
– In every top 5 finish since 2003/04 we scored first in more games than we did not
– Scoring first in c. 45% of games results in a 14th place finish on average
So I am not saying we cannot be promoted by scoring first less often than our opposition but statistically it would be unlikely. I am also not saying we will finish 14th but teams struggling to score first often finish in that region of the table.
However….most Terras teams of the past scoring first around 45% of the time did not score as many as this 26/27 over the 90 mins and this is probably why it is not a concern…we have the time and the firepower to come back and win games.
This can be shown in the chart below – after 15 mins…on average…games have been pretty even – we have only outscored our opponents by 4 goals to 3 in fact by this point – but the difference becomes more and more significant as the games wear on with mins 75-90 being our most productive.
HEADING ON COURSE?
Time to look at something else…
One interesting stat that hasn’t changed significantly since my first blog post this season is the proportion of headed goals – In all league & cup games so far this season 13 have been off the bonce – almost a record high percentage in the 7 seasons I have data for!
Why we are scoring so many with the nut is debatable but some must relate to good work on the training ground as, of the 13 to date, 5 have been from directly from dead ball situations – 4 from corners and 1 free kick.
Other non-headed goals have been scored directly or indirectly from set pieces so other all our dead ball and ariel game seems to be on point so far this season…
THEM OVER THE HILL AND BOBBY’S BOYS…
Whatever we are doing it is clearly working but how good a league start it has been for us and the others in the top 3?
Well according to nonleagueranking.com we are all over-performing…but to varying degrees. Based on their ELO style ranking system we are all massively outperforming expectations as we can see in the table below.
The expected points values are based on the % chance the site gives for each game. For example – the prediction for Weymouth v Bristol Manor Farm was “65% D15% L20%.
WARNING! Maths bit again!
65% x 3 points = 1.95 points. 15% x 1 point = 0.15 points. Add them together and our “expected” points from that game was 2.1.
I know you can’t get 2.1 points in a game but after a few games it can tell a story…
Therefore the top 3 teams are exceeding expectations and there is two possible reasons for that –
1. The model is underestimating the strength of the teams – This is quite possible as it is only based on games played – It cannot account for personnel changes over the summer etc.
2. This is due to “natural variation” and actual points will converge towards “actual” points over time.
For point 2 there is a mechanism through which this can happen as the rating for any team over-performing will increase slightly after every game – a team on a winning run will also increase their % chance of winning their next game and vice versa.
The model basically suggests that Weymouth & Dorchester (the two strongest teams in the division according to the model) should average roughly 2 points per game over a season – c.80 points – and as promotion favourites that seems reasonable.
But both are doing better than that and Swindon Supermarine are not far behind. In fact if all carry on as they are the final tally would be…
1 – Weymouth P42 Pts 119
2 – Dorchester P42 Pts 100
3 – Swindon S. P42 Pts 95
I think collectively that would smash a few records!!!
Of course there may be other horses that will join this race but even Hungerford in 4th on 26pts after 13 games are just too far back to analyse at this time.
WHAT NEXT?
I do not believe three teams will end up on 95 points and more but it will be interesting to see who gets closest and I am not making any predictions just yet! (Yes I remember how it panned out using % chance stat last season!)…..
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