There’s a Twitter user called @DymondFormation who makes amazing graphs for every Football League team after each fixture and publishes them for free on his Twitter feed.
They’re graphic representations of each player’s passes over the course of 90 minutes, with each yellow arrow representing a successful pass and the red ones one that failed. The direction and the length of the arrows show where the pass started and finished. They provide a quick and easy way to analyse the passing game of any particular player.
The graphics for Town’s 2-1 defeat to Preston last Saturday illustrate some interesting points, which I’m going to dig into below…
Kicking long doesn’t relieve pressure on the defence
Hamer having a 65% pass completion rate isn’t a particularly enlightening statistic because it doesn’t tell you much about the kind of passes he was playing. If you look at the graph above it becomes quickly obvious that nearly all of Hamer’s short passes found their man but the vast majority of his long kicks didn’t, with only two out of the 12 kicks into Preston’s half finding a Town player.
This graphic makes it easy to see why it’s better for Town to play the ball out from the back, in my opinion at least. It means we get to keep possession and can build up attacks from deep rather than trying to force play forward prematurely and have the ball come straight back at us.
If Town had a Steve Mounié or Andy Booth type of striker to aim for upfield then we would probably see more yellow lines for Hamer’s long kicks but Frazier Campbell isn’t the kind of player that wants big balls lumped up for him to try and win in the air.
It’s also not part of how Town are looking to play under Corberán, and those big hoofs down field are usually a sign that the opposition’s press has forced us to go long due to a lack of other options.
Were’ becoming more and more reliant on Toffolo
You don’t need to look at graphs to see that Town are becoming very reliant on Harry Toffolo but here’s one anyway. The yellow blobs on the heatmap above show the areas of the field where we passed the most. Unsurprisingly, Toffolo’s leftback position is glowing the brightest as he’s often the person that is expected to bring the ball out of defence.
The focus down the left is, somewhat counterintuitively, also creating opportunities down the right for Pipa. As play gets sucked over to Town’s left side it opens up space for the speedy Spaniard to exploit. You can read more about this in point 3 of Steven Chicken’s excellent 5 conclusions on the Preston defeat article.
Hogg’s more ambitious and forward-thinking passing
Town have played with three central defenders at least some of the time in each of their last three games, which has led to Jonathan Hogg having somewhat of an identity crisis. When there’s an additional central defender he no longer needs to drop back quite so much and has to find something else to do. Occasionally he’s reverted to type and ended up standing next to Schindler, who is doing the job that was previously Hogg’s responsibility.
At other times Hogg has been joining the midfield battle more and has been more positive with his passing. The position of the passes and the direction of them shown above reveal that he’s still fond of a sideways pass but on the whole he was getting forward more and stretching the play. The length of his passes also show him being more ambitious too, as Hogg’s typical passing radius isn’t more than ten yards and is predominantly in his own half.
Bacuna’s wastefulness
Bacuna’s pass map does not make pretty reading. Just 52.8% pass success tells the story of a player that had a bad day at the office. The fact that his passes only found their man about half of the time is a real worry. That statistic is distorted by him taking set pieces and corners but I would like him to find Town players in those situations more often than not too.
More frustrating than the data about Bacuna is his body language when he loses the ball. Every other player scurries into action after making a mistake and seeks to immediately put it right. Bacuna just strolls around as though it doesn’t make any difference to him whether what he’s trying comes off or not.
Koroma has more passes in the final 19 mintues than Mbenza did in the first 71
Josh Koroma was only on the field a fraction of the time Mbenza was but he still managed to have more attempted and successful passes while on the pitch. Despite Mbenza having a much improved attitude this season he is still sporadic in his form and struggles to impose himself upon games.
I don’t think Koroma was dropped from the team last weekend as much as he was rested so he could be used in the games we’ve got coming this week. But the graphic above shows that he’s more able to influence games and get involved than his attacking counterpart.
Eiting rarely plays a meaningless pass
Carel Eiting only played for just over half an hour against Preston but his pass map is quite interesting to look at. Only a handful of the passes he made were simple, short passes. Most of them covered a lot of ground and typically looked to switch the play from right to left.
This graph matches up with what I’ve seen from watching games too. Eiting has a great understanding of where the rest of the team are on the pitch and has the ability to ping balls into the path of players a good distance away from him. This passing ability was missed when he wasn’t on the pitch last weekend as it speeds up our attacks and helps us to find cracks in the oppositions defence.
Excellent observations of the game.
But how does he get the data??
Don’t look up, there are more arrows than a Robin Hood film, my Town friend Steve Pogson has replied so will give him a ring and a couple of hours to explain, cant see the the Sherwood for the trees, will go with the greatest Sherriff of Nottingham ie- Brian Clough, he once told a young Sun reporter, “footballs easy young man”
“when we attack, we all attack,and when we defend we all defend”, plus he was the first to spend £1m on a centre forward, (Town take note) and lets hope Fraizer Campbell can carry on his remarkable record vs Birmingham.
with apologies to Dymond Formation, UTT,
Yes David, Brian Clough was doing this kind of stuff years ago, defending and attacking as a unit. And how we need a Trevor Francis here now and at what cost today. Bacuna would need to do his defensive part of the game properly, by not giving the ball away and tracking back when needed.