Royhendo, I'm curious - after watching pre-season, how far along do you think we are in the project? Would you characterise some of the passing of the ball yesterday when we repeatedly penetrated Valeranga's defense as good circulation football? I noticed yesterday there was a lot more emphasis on build-up and methodical play, vs. few opportunities to counter-attack because the Norwegians defended deep in their own half.
i still think it's fragmented, but the intent's there isn't it? when keane settles it'll be interesting to see the impact it has, because moves that have thus far broken down are more likely to flow on. the end game for us is for the moves to flow on and on and on until the opportunity presents itself clear as day - we're going to still be forcing things a little this year i'd guess.
that's one potential hurdle that may stand in our way - will rafa 'over engineer' the patterns of play? i think personally that his work with valencia showed that's not the case, and that with time it'll come on its own.
Last year away to Newcastle I felt Babel's goal typified the route we want to take. I remember thinking "That's Liverpool football!". it feels like sacrilege on some level to say this, but i want to see the kind of play that led to diaby's goal in the Anfield leg of last year's CL quarter final - pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-space-goal. if we get close to that when we're faced with a packed defence, we'll have fewer nightmare games like Wigan home, Marseille home, and so forth.
The other thing is the fact we now have better finishers at our disposal. If you look at the stats on our conversion ratio, it was our big achilles heel last year. We created chances galore in most games, but in spite of adding Torres, we still fared miserably when compared with our rivals.
Look at the Actim Premier League stats from here:
http://www.skysports.com/story/0,19528,11096_2705370,00.html If you divide goals scored by the number of attempts on goal we had (to figure out the percentage 'conversion ratio') we hit 12.52%. So for every 100 chances we create, on average, we score 12.52 goals.
So in the Premier League, we had 535 attempts on goal (note that this is second only to Man United who had 547 attempts, and well ahead of Arsenal who had 473, and Chelsea who had 454). So we created a lot of chances - a tremendous number of chances.
If we converted something like the percentage of chances our rivals did, the stats would be frightening.
To put this in perspective, Man United scored most goals with 80, followed by Arsenal with 74, and then Villa with 71. We scored 67 - one more than Spurs, and two more than Chelsea.
So how do we rate in our conversion of chances? Well, Villa were first with 17.57%. Arsenal were second with 15.64%. Man United came fifth with 14.63%. Meanwhile, we were 10th with 12.52%.
If we upped our conversion ratio even to the average percentage of those above us, we'd hit roughly Man United's level at 14.65%. That would equate to 78 goals.
If we upped our conversion ratio to Arsenal's level (15.64%), we'd up that to 83 goals.
And if we topped the league in converting our chances by matching Villa's 17.57%, we'd score 94 goals.
So clearly it's going to pay if we improve the quality of service, the creation of space and opportunities in the box, and how clinical we are in and around the box.
We need to improve on our performance from last year.
