Brighton 1-2 Crystal Palace - Monday 22nd February, 2021

[Dan+]

I think Brighton essentially show a massive flaw in it. I can't believe they're 'that' unlucky. It's not bad luck if it's been happening for 18 months.

[Danny]

23 hours ago, Inverted said:

For elite teams I think it’s useful for seeing who isn’t taking their chances and teams which are on a hot streak.

For teams like Brighton, which have a decent coach and a lot of nice creative players, but no serious forwards, it just becomes farcical. 

Part of football is finding players who are good in front of goal, and training the team so that it is able to put those players into goal scoring positions. Expected goals is useful if you assume that is what every team is doing - but Brighton clearly aren’t doing that. 

They cram as many creators as possible into the team, get them to combine nicely around the box, and then assume that some shit will stick to the wall. 

Brighton operate and play in a similar way to us, it's notable that they signed Maupay off of us. I always thought they haven't used Maupay to his best, always seems to be playing in some sort of front 2 or a 3 that doesn't focus on him that much. We play similarly in that we look to create a good xG in every game, but we have Ivan Toney. Brighton could do with a better forward than Maupay, but also, could look to play to his strengths more imo

[Honey Honey]

22 hours ago, Dan said:

I think Brighton essentially show a massive flaw in it. I can't believe they're 'that' unlucky. It's not bad luck if it's been happening for 18 months.

That also means what Palace do isn't good luck. Funnily enough Newcastle used to do what Palace do, then our defence went to shit and keeper couldn't keep the chances out and we just started losing, forcing us to try and come back to the real world.

[Dan+]

1 minute ago, Steve Bruce Almighty said:

That also means what Palace do isn't good luck. Funnily enough Newcastle used to do what Palace do, then our defence went to shit and keeper couldn't keep the chances out and we just started losing, forcing us to try and come back to the real world.

Another way of looking at this as well I suppose - Brighton had xG of about 2.00 but 25 shots. That means each shot they had, on average, was 0.08, which implies an 8% chance they score. It's not unfathomable to think that if you take 25 shots at that rate you only get one goal.

Both teams are clearly doing something that the model itself doesn't factor in well enough - because neither outcome was that surprising and if they play again next season with the same managers, you could see a similar outcome.

Then again football can never be an exact science. I don't mind xG personally, I can see the logic, but for me it's just similar to shot counts and whatnot, it's a bit of a guide rather than anything definitive. If people start ever bragging about being good at xG then that's when we have serious problems.