Dean Ashton

[Capt. Pants 4,194]

The celebrations had nothing to do with their equaliser. We still managed to play decent football at 2-1 and it should have been all over but for Rhodes's failure to convert a point blank header. The constant messing around with the back 4 didn't help; Aarons switched to left mid, Lewis off, Godfrey switched to LB, Aarons back at RB, a cold Klose on. We lost our shape and our cool such was the excitement.

[......and Smith must score. 1,331]

9 hours ago, lake district canary said:

I must admit that watching the game I was surprised at the incredible looking celebrations where everyone went over to the sidelines and players/subs/trainers etc jumping all over each other after the second goal.  It was dramatic and it was fantastiuc to get those two goals, but it was only 2-1 and I can only think that the euphoria was there because we had turned the game round so dramatically - but it was only 2-1....

 

I really don't understand how you are a football fan LDC. On the occasions when you do go to a game don't you ever go just a bit mental when we score unexpectedly and salvage a game when all seemed lost ?

Sport is an emotional business both for spectators and players. It's those highs that compensate the lows.

Forget the bigger picture and try living for the moment. You might get to like it.

Edited April 12, 2019 by ......and Smith must score.

[lake district canary 4,531]

54 minutes ago, ......and Smith must score. said:

I really don't understand how you are a football fan LDC. On the occasions when you do go to a game don't you ever go just a bit mental when we score unexpectedly and salvage a game when all seemed lost ?

Sport is an emotional business both for spectators and players. It's those highs that compensate the lows.

Forget the bigger picture and try living for the moment. You might get to like it.

I do go mental and I went fairly mental when we scored those two goals, but the way some of the players behaved on the touchline, it was as if we had won the world cup. It was plainly an incredibly charged atmosphere at the ground which is why it happened - but the bigger prize is getting ever closer and we cannot afford to lose focus even for a second.

It's well known we sometimes lose focus after scoring and allow the opposition back into a game and in this game we did not make the most of getting 2 - 1 up when perhaps we should have.  You could say all sorts of things about it - losing focus, bad luck, tiredness, individual errors, etc etc but they are a young team still learning and for whatever reason they could have handled their one goal lead better. 

[splendidrush 698]

Has anyone considered that, maybe Reading had a part to play in this? There are, after all, two Teams on the pitch, and to make any conclusion without taking them into account is sheer arrogance. 

54 minutes ago, lake district canary said:

 

It's well known we sometimes lose focus after scoring and allow the opposition back into a game and in this game we did not make the most of getting 2 - 1 up when perhaps we should have.  

I think you might be 'old school ' ldc, maybe we should go back to the 50s where someone would score a 30 yarder,  all the players would shake hands and march back to the halfway line, while the fans throw their hats in the air. 

[Hank shoots Skyler 2,094]

1 hour ago, lake district canary said:

I do go mental and I went fairly mental when we scored those two goals, but the way some of the players behaved on the touchline, it was as if we had won the world cup. It was plainly an incredibly charged atmosphere at the ground which is why it happened - but the bigger prize is getting ever closer and we cannot afford to lose focus even for a second.

It's well known we sometimes lose focus after scoring and allow the opposition back into a game and in this game we did not make the most of getting 2 - 1 up when perhaps we should have.  You could say all sorts of things about it - losing focus, bad luck, tiredness, individual errors, etc etc but they are a young team still learning and for whatever reason they could have handled their one goal lead better. 

Celebrating as if we’d won the World Cup? Really?

 

[All the Germans 1,075]

1 hour ago, lake district canary said:

I do go mental and I went fairly mental when we scored those two goals, but the way some of the players behaved on the touchline, it was as if we had won the world cup. It was plainly an incredibly charged atmosphere at the ground which is why it happened - but the bigger prize is getting ever closer and we cannot afford to lose focus even for a second.

It's well known we sometimes lose focus after scoring and allow the opposition back into a game and in this game we did not make the most of getting 2 - 1 up when perhaps we should have.  You could say all sorts of things about it - losing focus, bad luck, tiredness, individual errors, etc etc but they are a young team still learning and for whatever reason they could have handled their one goal lead better. 

I think you get a harsh rep and normally have a valid point. I don't always agree, but I can usually see your point. In this instance, I don't even understand your point and I'm not entirely sure you do.

We lose focus after scoring, like every other team that has existed, ever? It's well known that all teams are most vulnerable when they score. This is not a City phenomenon.

I agree they could have handled their one goal lead better, because they ultimately lost it but I believe that has zero to do with the celebrations when the goal went in.

When you score a goal there is always a joyous celebration, when you score a goal that appears to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat and puts one foot into the Premiership I think that can go a step further. I didn't see any poor play, lack of concentration or celebrations in the following 10 minutes that makes any suggestion - what-so-ever - that the (deserved) exuberant celebrations were in any way to blame for us losing the lead. Sometimes the other team scores...

Edited April 12, 2019 by All the Germans

[Hank shoots Skyler 2,094]

5 hours ago, westcoastcanary said:

Sorry Crabby but you are wrong. Anybody who actually understood stats would know perfectly well that they were totally consistent with the game ending as it did, or any other result equally. 

What element of the stats makes it so obvious to you that the game finished 2-1? I am seeing the complete opposite. 

Even the XGs point to a comfortable home win, something you used to highlight our apparently false league position earlier on in the season... 

Why so negative?

 

 

 

[Hoola Han Solo 448]

Of course everybody, including the players etc, celebrated wildly. We’d just turned a game around in four minutes that would have virtually sealed our promotion. It’s human emotion and a massive release of adrenaline.  

[westcoastcanary 173]

8 hours ago, Hank shoots Skyler said:

What element of the stats makes it so obvious to you that the game finished 2-1? I am seeing the complete opposite. 

Even the XGs point to a comfortable home win, something you used to highlight our apparently false league position earlier on in the season... 

Why so negative?

Hank this is the second time in quick succession you have replied to a post of mine and managed to completely miss the point! What I said was that anybody who understands stats knows that, whatever the ex post facto stats tell you about the performance of the two teams in a game, the result of that game cannot be deduced from the stats. It's nothing to do with being positive or negative; it's a simple point of logic about what conclusions do or don't follow from a given set of premises.The stats for the game are what they are: could the game have finished as a Reading win? Yes, obviously. Could the game have finished as a Norwich win? Yes, obviously. Could the game have finished as a draw? Yes, obviously. Ergo, obviously, all three ways the game could have finished are consistent with the stats being what they were.

Re. your second paragraph, at no time have I said that our league position is false. My points have consistently been about how we have performed to get to that position. What I -- and many others including Bethnal -- kept pointing to, was the discrepancy between our GF and our cumulative xG. What that meant was that, game after game, we were relying on clinical finishing of not very good chances to harvest our points. If you've followed my posts recently, I have several times pointed out that this has now been reversed: we are now consistently engineering better quality chances, and the discrepancy between our GF and xG has significantly narrowed. In other words, we have recently become less reliant on exceptional finishing, which is a good job because most of that early exceptional finishing was provided by Teemu, who is currently not finding it as easy to get the ball in the net. Less fortunately, the player who has contributed most to keeping our GF ticking along is Emi.

The Reading game provided a textbook example of these various points. The Pukki of the first half of the season would very likely have scored at least one goal on Wednesday. Even without Buendia, we created a succession of good quality chances but on this occasion our finishing was not just not exceptional, it was below average for the chances created. As a result we relied on our CBs converting low grade chances for our goals. 

 

 

Edited April 13, 2019 by westcoastcanary
Typo

[Hank shoots Skyler 2,094]

1 hour ago, westcoastcanary said:

Hank this is the second time in quick succession you have replied to a post of mine and managed to completely miss the point! What I said was that anybody who understands stats knows that, whatever the ex post facto stats tell you about the performance of the two teams in a game, the result of that game cannot be deduced from the stats. It's nothing to do with being positive or negative; it's a simple point of logic about what conclusions do or don't follow from a given set of premises.The stats for the game are what they are: could the game have finished as a Reading win? Yes, obviously. Could the game have finished as a Norwich win? Yes, obviously. Could the game have finished as a draw? Yes, obviously. Ergo, obviously, all three ways the game could have finished are consistent with the stats being what they were.

Re. your second paragraph, at no time have I said that our league position is false. My points have consistently been about how we have performed to get to that position. What I -- and many others including Bethnal -- kept pointing to, was the discrepancy between our GF and our cumulative xG. What that meant was that, game after game, we were relying on clinical finishing of not very good chances to harvest our points. If you've followed my posts recently, I have several times pointed out that this has now been reversed: we are now consistently engineering better quality chances, and the discrepancy between our GF and xG has significantly narrowed. In other words, we have recently become less reliant on exceptional finishing, which is a good job because most of that early exceptional finishing was provided by Teemu, who is currently not finding it as easy to get the ball in the net. Less fortunately, the player who has contributed most to keeping our GF ticking along is Emi.

The Reading game provided a textbook example of these various points. The Pukki of the first half of the season would very likely have scored at least one goal on Wednesday. Even without Buendia, we created a succession of good quality chances but on this occasion our finishing was not just not exceptional, it was below average for the chances created. As a result we relied on our CBs converting low grade chances for our goals. 

 

 

Hmmm, I don’t think I have missed the point. I agree that you can’t look at the stats and know for sure that it was a home win. But surely around 80% of the time it would be a home win- and when you also factor in the nature of the chances on both sides I would push this out to 90-95% of the time. On another day Pukki would’ve bagged a hatrick. We had at least 4 exceptional chances that didn’t go in (inc. Rhodes’ header) and that’s not even mentioning Trybull hitting the post! 

So what’s your point? Yes, you can look at those stats and say that it COULD have been a home win, away win or draw, but can’t you do this for every game? Why are you trying to throw stats up in the air after appearing so heavily reliant on them earlier in the season? Surely you agree there is still a more likely outcome - similar to your XG stats (which is something I really like). 

You have to play your percentages and given the above there is little I can criticise the team for on Wednesday’s game, two sucker punches out of a measly three chances we reduced them to across the entire game. If we were playing poker we would’ve had them all in and crushed with 1 card to come, unfortunately for us they hit their 1 in 20 card on the river. You described this as ‘woeful defending’ in your other post, I have to disagree, we were massively unfortunate that Reading managed to hit their fleeting moments perfectly.

Just to remind you of your own words;

‘’Sorry Crabby but you are wrong. Anybody who actually understood stats would know perfectly well that they were totally consistent with the game ending as it did, or any other result equally.’’

Ignoring the extremely patronising caveats of ‘you are wrong’ and ‘anybody who actually understood stats’, I will ask what about the stats is ‘totally consistent’ with the game ending as it did? You are not simply suggesting that any outcome is possible (which is a completely fair conclusion to make), you are claiming that any outcome is equally likely. Surely your own statty mind is short circuiting at this notion? When you factor in the patronising opening sentences it’s all starting to sound a bit twatty (no offence).

I just don’t understand where your watered down viewpoint has come from. Has your partner had an affair with stats? Did you lend stats money and they not pay you back? What happened westcoast!?

Also RE our league position, you never suggested false exactly, however you did indicate pretty confidently that you felt we would finish 4th.. Although, I respect that because our XG to GF ratio has improved your opinion on this must’ve also changed - which is fair enough. I take that back.

[......and Smith must score. 1,331]

11 hours ago, lake district canary said:

It's well known we sometimes lose focus after scoring and allow the opposition back into a game and in this game we did not make the most of getting 2 - 1 up when perhaps we should have.  You could say all sorts of things about it - losing focus, bad luck, tiredness, individual errors, etc etc but they are a young team still learning and for whatever reason they could have handled their one goal lead better. 

It's well known that all teams in any sport lose focus for a time if they get ahead unexpectedly. I doubt there's a team anywhere who haven't ' lost focus ' at a crucial moment and been pegged back. It's called human emotion and sport would be pointless without it.

Obvious stating the b*eeding that we could have handled our one goal lead better as we didn't win. Occasional days like Wednesday are more than offset when the reverse happens. They survived the incredible Millwall game at Carrow Rd but I think Forest might agree with you that they could have handled their three goal lead better 😀

[Crabbycanary3 994]

HSS, my point was that if I had supplied westcoast, or anyone for that matter, the stats I had quoted and asked for them to guess the score of the game, no amount of their statistical analysis would have come up with 2-2. Oh yes, it is certainly possible, of course it is, even teams who do not have a shot on target win games, but westcoast wouldn't have risked any of his hard earned to bet on it, that's a fact.

I let the patronising comments go, as if I had told him that I used to work in statistics and in the field I worked in, people's lives actually depended on it, I fear it would have passed him by.

Edited April 13, 2019 by Crabbycanary3

[Thirsty Lizard 3,154]

So Dean Ashton - after Man City's injury time "winner" was ruled out by VAR" do you know what "celebrating too early" looks like now?

Edited April 17, 2019 by Thirsty Lizard

[CanaryChris 146]

I blame our 3-4 loss to derby on the celebrations for the equalizer against Forest the match before. What were they thinking? Didn't they know those celebrations would come back to bite them...