Day 90

I called another backroom advice meeting today. It felt like a while since the last one. It was filled with the usual—individual training suggestions, squad status changes, and player recommendations. Jason Fowler's suggested central midfielders Dale Fulton and Michael Richardson looked pretty good, though. I'll be very interested to see what my scouts make of them.

I also pulled out another of the cool analysis tools available to me. I compared our stats and plays in last week's match against Luton Town (which we won convincingly) and yesterday's match against Alfreton Town (which we drew despite being the better team).

Looking at the shots didn't tell me anything, but comparing the spread of passes started to show some differences. Our passing against Alfreton (on the left, below) was very bogged down in the centre of the park. We played only a handful of balls into the box and barely used the full width. Against Luton (on the right, below), by contrast, we played a lot of passes from wide positions, seldom got bogged down in the centre of the park, put a lot of balls into the penalty area, and used more angled passes (yesterday's match featured few of these, and lots of straight forward or sideways passes).

This tells me that our movement against Alfreton was poor, but I'm not sure why. We had the same personnel in attack and midfield for much of the game, so I must conclude that it's down to our opposition (and possibly also the poor weather). One of the most interesting statistics, I thought, was Barnes-Homer's passing. In yesterday's match he completed 17 out of an attempted 20 passes. Last week, he completed six out of nine attempted passes. Why the huge discrepancy between matches? He was subbed off in the 73rd minute last week, but that doesn't account for it. No, the reason is that he had his back to the goal against Alfreton, and he's not a traditional hold-up player. We needed to get more through balls to him, so he could run at the defence.

Watching the game, I felt that Alfreton were keeping us from playing football with men behind the ball and conservative positioning. Looking at the stats, I can see I was right.

Yet we created the same number of scoring chances in both games (eleven in total), which means that—while we struggled to attack effectively—we really did waste and squander opportunities to score against Alfreton.

The movement diagrams really paint the picture I've been describing (again, against Alfreton on the left and against Luton on the right). I counted just nine runs (including one offside call) against Alfreton, compared to 24 (including four offside calls) against Luton. Koroma, who made a third of those runs last week, was clearly marked out of the game yesterday. And our lack of dynamics going forward made it too easy for our opponents to keep us pegged in. Next time we play a defensive team that tries to keep the ball in central areas, I must push my players to use the width and move the ball around—creating space for them to run into.