Surely with expected goals, if you are constantly one-nil down after 5 minutes, you are only going to be chasing the game and creating more chances and therefore should have more expected goals.

That Charlton away win was awesome. Even Tyrone Barnet managed to score.

STTA- really interesting article that. Fine margins and we seemed to have been constantly on the wrong side of them. It matches the sense I've had that while we've been rubbish, we've been no more rubbish than other teams. Let's hope we get a win tomorrow. Wally said four points from two at MtM so let's sneak one like we did in the 2-1 A couple seasons ago.

Good morning all. Interesting xG discussion, and for me the key issue is whether our strikers have been rubbish throughout their careers, or just since they came to us. Historically, all of our forwards have a career strike rate of around 1 in 4, which is pretty poor. So it looks like NA recruited poor strikers and probably due to a lack of confidence they have got worse.

It just shows that NA's fault in relying on appaih and when he had the chance to sign a 4th striker all he could muster was Jervis

Hash - exactly! lump on the win at Charlton tmw ;)

Didn't someone tell us this was a really good squad tho?

The flaw with xG is it doesn’t assign a value to the player shooting. It assumes Harry Kane and my mate Harry from the pub have an equal probability of scoring. It says ‘Pigott, Kwesi Appiah and Jake Jervis should have scored 14 league goals between them but have only hit the net six times.’ Yeah, probably, but then they are a bit shit.

Of course the manager should take no responsibility at all for the persistent failure of his squad/s to score goals.

Although I stopped reading that article when it said Neil.

So basically it wasn't NAs fault then. Can hardly blame the manager for players missing piss easy chances. You can of course credit the manager for the build up to the chances.

STAn, We are staying up!

Do you remember me saying a little while back I was told our stats suggested we should be top 6 [Link]

Middle Aged Don - I am 6 ft 2 and when I saw him at the Junior Don's party, he looked no smaller than me.

Having it. Now that’s what I call football.

Yeah I know it’s football but tonight I’m watching the other football so it still counts. . And me chargers are giving Kansas a game. 3 mins to go.

As said before good keepers at this level are as valuable as outfielders (wouldn’t believe Long was on 10k but heard a reasonable suggestion of 6 or 7). You have to take a punt or constantly go for loans. None of that list of permies would do the job needed at L1 for us.

Shea was a money thing as much as anything else, too good and too expensive to be bench warmer. Also a very good footballer and generally model pro just about 3-4 inches too short.

Bert - You around?

How many keepers did we run through on Ardley/Bayes regime? It's shit reading for a position you need consistency....

Don't get the Celtic keeper on loan

yes - I think its deeper than though. My guess is that NA felt that neither Shea or McDonnell is a number 1. Lets face it, he replaced Shea with Roos and Clarke. He clearly didn't rate him as a first choice. So he thought McDonnell is a cheaper number 2 option. The problem was that King didn't work!

Mark, was chatting to Lurker about this earlier. In essence we need to stop fucking about with cheap shit options, sign a keeper to build a defence from/with and stop seeing it as a position to save pennies on.

I did see that yes. Poor Bradford, things were bad enough for them before having to resort to putting old butterfingers in goal

MAD: Shea a great pro and gets my respect for his efforts and attitude but dodgy on crosses for sure. Still better than McDonnell. Its all going to be about money. McDonnell would be cheaper as a number 2 than shea probably and therefore you could spend it elsewhere.