shurlock

You'd think they would work that out pretty quickly, not take him to Austria and feature in a couple of games - all while Les Reed was trumpeting how refreshed and sharp he looked in training.

Wasnt Gardos recovering from a knee or thigh injury or something when he joined us last year?

If we can't deal with that front line, then our defense will need a lot of work and a new CB can't come quick enough.

No chance. The FA is an extended arm of the civil service. Conservative to the bone. No doubt, they're waiting for an earnestly unremarkable u-21 manager not to f**k up, if they continue to 'go English'.

Planning to go by intercity train which doesn't go through Amsterdam as far as I understand. Am trying to save money and have a Bergkamp/BA Baracas aversion to flying and the hassle of airports. So need to find somewhere around Arnhem, though the most obvious low-hanging fruits are gone. As I say will definitely have one ticket to make available; so will keep you in mind. Will know more by the weekend/early next week. Cheers.

Am guaranteed tickets -and was planning to go; but not booked anything yet because the trigger-happy and likely ticketless have booked up all the hotel rooms etc If I don't go, there'll be two tickets if anyone wants; if I do make it, I'll have one ticket in the Saints end as my mate can't go. Don't PM me just yet.

It was only one game, so not going to draw too much from it; but was interested to see Reed dropping deep to pick the ball up from the CBs to initiate attacks and dictate the tempo. From what I've seen of Clasie, assumed that's his job as he's a much better passer. Guess, if there was anytime to experiment, it was yesterday.

Agree about Steklenberg - hadn't realised that he's played only one competitive game in 18 months. Perhaps he'll hit the ground running; but would like to have seen more of him.

Not to be outm**ged, I built a very quick and dirty model, using data from last season's league to explore the relationship between total points, keeping clean sheets and shooting blanks. It actually fitted the data pretty well (adjusted r2 =0.841), met the standards of statistical significance and passed various robustness checks. To cut a long story short: it finds that every game a side failed to score, it was equivalent to dropping 2.8 points (p-value It’s worth pointing out there’s much less spread associated with keeping clean sheets. It seems that many teams managed it on a regular basis whereas the failure to score is far more widely distributed (see variance, standard deviation and kurtosis measures). Given the gap between the big boys and the rest of the league as well as economics of premiership status, perhaps playing not to lose and parking the bus are the norm, again suggesting that avoiding blanks is a bigger differentiator. We failed to score 12 times last season (middle of the pack with the likes of Everton). Not surprisingly, all the teams that finished above us had better records. Chelsea and City shot blanks only 3 times –a league high or low depending on your perspective- followed by Arsenal (5 times). There’s quite a drop off after that, though interestingly the next pack, featuring the usual suspects, also includes Swansea (8 times) and Stoke (9 times) and Wham (11 times). Stoke is easy to explain as defensively it was a shambles (only Palace and QPR kept fewer clean sheets). The story is similar or Wham, not least as they conspired to leak goals towards the end of games. One case which is difficult to explain through the model is Swansea. Clearly they knew how to do a job (as they showed at SMS and the Emirates). One possible explanation is that while Swansea managed to score in more games than us, they rarely scored many. I started to look at this, by examining the probability of winning a game or, at least, securing a point when scoring different amounts of goals, and there’s quite sharp jump when team scores two goals. Perhaps we achieved that more often than Swansea which would fit our often Jekyll and Hyde attack. Finally, there’s the sense in which its easier to improve on average performance than trying to squeeze marginal gains out of superior performance. Anyway, a few thoughts. It’s a very crude, preliminary analysis, though dare I say its more rigorous than the ****e that gets passed off on the sports journalist and amateur analytics sites.

Was it confirmed why Ramirez missed the last game (and this one)?

Nice to see you skirt how we only managed four away clean sheets all season (two against relegated sides and the other against ten men); yetmaintaining that form would have given us three clean sheets in far fewer games. Its only Stoke or Sunderland doesn't cut it, I'm afraid. Having seen the games, we were pretty comfortable against many of these sides (Stoke, Spurs, Everton and Sunderland followed the pattern of so much of the season). You're simply and erroneously reasoning backwards from results. Perhaps performances had less to do with injuries than an end of season lack of intensity. Who knows. As for Alderweireld, he also missed games before January. Indeed, another poster observed that we won more ppg without him than with him, though I accept such comparisons are fraught when it's impossible to control for other sources of variation (Alderweireld playing in midfield is one source). My point regarding Schneiderlin stands. If we're modeling the problem, as you purported in your first post, it involves convenient abstractions and it is fair to assume that a like-for-like replacement necessary to maintain the same level of clean sheets, would cost a similar amount. Otherwise, the exercise is no different from pulling rabbits out of the hat. As a principle, I don't think we should necessarily splurge money on strikers as a principle. Rather its about examining matters on a case-by-case basis and responding accordingly. The fact is that the defense was shooting the lights out (which may or may not have been sustainable); but in the second half of the season, the goals virtually dried up (easily less than a goal a game if you exclude Villa, near the bottom of the table). Only Mane really shone. Pelle was out-of-sorts; Elia and Djuricic lived up to their billing as makeweights; and Tadic was crocked. Its an approach driven by evidence, not some, deductive, grand 'economic' theory to explain everything which in the wrong hands is like a toddler with a machete. How long do you think market inefficiencies would last if they definitively and irrefutably existed?

Fox did a decent job for us and was instrumental in getting us promoted. IMO, there are four reasons why he attracts so much scorn: 1. It is easy to forget he was one, if not our most expensive signing after administration (obviously before we reached the premiership). That became a burden and de facto standard by which to judge him. 2. He replaced take-no-prisoners, fan favourite Dan Harding - that said, its interesting that Harding proceeded to keep Fox out at Forest. 3. Even when he wasn't caught up the pitch -for which there may be good reasons- he had a tendency to stand off attackers and overcompensate for his lack of pace. These things are clear to even the most naked, uneducated eye. 4. By extension, many still hold him culpable for the opening goal against Reading that had large bearing on them winning the Championship.

Sounds like you're running out of steam. Stats from November are irrelevant for this purpose. Specifically, do have you stats of shots faced pre- and post-Forster's injury. Cant find them anywhere; nor do I remember seeing anything on here. A more detailed breakdown would certainly shine light on the question (assuming such stats are actually meaningful to begin with).

If only, if only. There are no guarantees that we would have kept clean sheets - there's a reason why clean sheets are worth disproportionately, as you point out, its because they are very difficult to achieve and efforts to explain them probably have a large residual which is a fancy way of saying that they are pretty random (by extension, you are likely to be over-interpreting what a clean sheet means). Not sure what maintaining the level we had all season means either - your fanciful scenario is premised on keeping away clean sheets. Never mind that up until the games you mention -by which time the vast majority of the season had passed- we had only managed four away clean sheets (not surprisingly two were against relegated sides and the other against ten men). For all intents and purposes, we would have had to match that record in vastly fewer games. That's not maintaining a level, that's exceeding it. By a long stretch. We actually demonstrated we could be tight without the likes of Alderweireld, though Morgan's absence was a bigger loss. That said, we also missed a decent stand-in for Forster (something you fail to mention). If anything, our defense coped pretty well in those games (Leicester apart); but at key times, we conceded soft goals where either Davis or Gazzanigga should have done more. And finally there are trade-offs: instead of splashing £27m on a Schneiderlin replacement, perhaps that money could have been spent on a more ruthless striker or a quality playmaker (indeed, it would have been the much cheaper option). Over the course of the season, its just as easy, if not easier to tally up games where it would have made the main difference.

Unlikely; more a case of overkill.

True, though it depends how far those results differed or departed from Spurs or Liverpool's other results. Just looking at the Sunderland game: if you take our goal-scoring form from last season and make some standard statistical assumptions about distributions, then we'd score 8 goals roughly once in every 7825 games. If that's not an outlier, then I'm MLG Anyway, on more important matters, I wouldn't mind another striker, someone to take the load of Pelle. There are still question marks whether Jrod can play down the middle, though I thought he led the line pretty well at times in his first season (Wham away). Mane and Long have combined well (e.g. Chelsea away), though it does seem RK likes a target man. Long is surprisingly good in the air but the rest of his hold up play/close control lets him down. I wouldn't say no to Austin, even if I'm not his biggest fan. Remember Austin and Jrod have history together from their Burnley days. I still think we need a genuine playmaker who can pick a pass in and around the box as well as know where the goal is. Mane is probably our most creative player; but if you look at him, Jrod, Juanmi and Long, they all rely on pace to a greater or less extent. That's why Elia is slightly surprising. Yes he's out-and-out-hug-the-touchline winger which the others aren't; but he still relies on pace - never mind, that he's so risk-averse for an attacking player. That only leaves Tadic who struggled when he played behind Pelle. I have high hopes for him -now he's injury-free- though there are no guarantees. The alternative is Ramirez -and, alas, that's not saying much.

That's an insult to real statisticians. He's basically a pedant with factoids, training for the pub quiz that nobody wants to play. Worse he's not even objective - he's as agenda-driven as the best on here.

Because they are outliers. If your argument is robust, removing them shouldnt make a difference. It does. It makes a massive difference - under these circumstances, it's not unknown to exclude the observations from the dataset. More importantly, goals only matter to the extent that they win teams points. But the value of those 14 goals in terms of additional points was negligible. Despite this, you persist. You really aren't the brightest, are you?

I guess you're the type that prefers Maccy Ds over filet mignon.

Therein is the difference. Too many divs can't see that the contractual status of the players was vastly different. If a player is under contract, that fact should be respected -hence the ethical dimension. Never mind that 'tapping up' by a big club player may make little difference to a player's decision to leave (arguably it does make a difference, albeit not a massive one). That's a purely instrumental way of looking at the issue. Indeed, it's an ever greater reason for a player to keep his mouth shut.

Not sure it's that complicated. If you're going in the home end, the same rules travel everywhere. Show some respect and don't be a dîck and take liberties.

Cheers

Will you be able to book your ST seat?