On 16th of December last year following a 5-0 defeat at the hands of Liverpool, Daniel Levy decided enough was enough and sacked manager Andre Villas-Boas after just 18 months in charge following a paltry return of just 27 points from Tottenham’s opening 16 league games. He was swiftly replaced one week later to everyone’s surprise by rookie Tim Sherwood who hadn’t even completed his badges upon taking charge.
In his first 10 games in charge, Sherwood amassed 23 points, with his average of 2.3 points per game easily better than AVB’s 1.7 per game. He was roundly praised for bringing players previously frozen out by AVB suxh as Emmanuel Adebayor, back into the squad and getting them to contribute significantly in this run. So from reading that short synopsis, one would assume Daniel Levy made the correct choice in despensing with the services of his former Portugese manager? Well I think not.
Villas Boas was attempting to construct a squad and a style of play. If you believe what you hear they some of the summer signings were not the idea of the Head Coach and if this is the case then he has to be exhonorated from blame regarding their failure to settle quickly or be suited to his style of play. Under the Portugese, Tottenham were attempting to play a high defensive line which would allow all their midfielders and attacking players to push higher up the pitch and press the opposition. The main objective being to win the ball back off the opposition as close to the opposing box as possible so that a goal scoring opportunity will be easily created.
This style has been perfected by Barcelona and now Bayern Munich in recent times but it takes time to perfect and for players to know their positions in the shape and when to press and when to close the space. In the first half of the season Tottenham were caught out on numerous occasions where the high line would be found out with an easy ball over the top from the opposition full-back and Villas Boas came in for stinging criticism about how easily his defensive system was breached. I would argue however that as the wingers learned that they were required to close down the full backs and cut off the long ball quicker then this threat would have ceased over the course of the year, looking back at the goals Tottenham conceded under AVB this season, barring the obvious demolitions by Man City and Liverpool, they were generally tight at the back and didn’t concede too many goals from set pieces which boded well for the future.
The other area where Villas Boas was criticized was Tottenham’s lack of goals. Tottenham lost a lot of 1-0 games where they had dominated and could not convert their chances but I would put a lot of this down to luck as a few charts I have will show.
The Shot Chart excludes penalties and shows average shots per game. Shots taken by Tottenham under AVB’s reign are shown on the left side, with their shots conceded appearing on the right side of the image. All teams attack the goal on the right.
The table above each chart shows the average number of shots per game across four different zones, where the chances of a shot being scored reduces as we move through the zones. The proportion of shots in each zone are shown, followed by the average number of goals per game in total and separately for each zone.
AVB’s Tottenham averaged more than 17 shots per game, but scored less than 0.7 goals per game (penalties and own goals are excluded). On the other side of the ball, his team gave up almost 11 shots but managed to concede 1.2 goals per game.
Despite having slightly more Prime zone shots than they conceded, the North London side managed to concede almost 1 goal per game from this zone yet managed to score less than 0.4 goals per game themselves. Tottenham converted just 7% of their Prime zone shots during their first 16 games but somehow conceded a goal in 1 out of every 5 shots that the opposition took from this same zone. 42% of shots Tottenham conceded during this time were from the Prime zone, compared to 30% of their own shots.
However, even allowing for the fact that the average shot Tottenham conceded was more dangerous than other teams we can see from the above graphic that AVB was most unfortunate to somehow end up with an average goal difference (excluding penalties and own goals) of -0.50 per game.
SHERWOOD’S TOTTENHAM
Defensively, Spurs have conceded 1 more shot per game than they were before Christmas and worryingly for them that additional shot is coming from the Prime zone. In fact, since Sherwood took over, half of all shots they have allowed have been struck from the Prime zone. Despite the notion that the AVB set up allowed good quality shots against them, it appears that the Sherwood’s gung ho 4-4-2 is even more susceptible to permitting very dangerous opposition shots.
It’s worth specifically noting the concession of an average of 1.3 shots per game from within the 6 yard box is a particularly bad stat. Over the 10 games, this equates to 13 shots conceded from inside the 6 yard box and only Fulham and Cardiff have conceded more shots from this very important area in the period since Sherwood took over. By way of comparison, Everton have conceded 3, Liverpool 6 and Man City 4 over the same period, so the amount of such chances conceded by Tottenham are not consistent with a team chasing that important 4th league position.
PDO
There is one metric that has perfectly captures the ebbs and flows mentioned above in relation to Tottenham’s season; PDO.
PDO doesn’t actually stand for anything, but has been described as the following by James Grayson (the guy who first applied it to football):
“PDO is the sum of a team’s shooting percentage (goals/shots on target) and it’s save percentage (saves/shots on target against). It treats each shot as having an equal chance of being scored – regardless of location, the shooter, or the identity or position of the ‘keeper and any defenders. Despite this obvious shortcoming it regresses heavily towards the mean – meaning that it has a large luck component. In fact, over the course of a Premiership season, the distance a team’s PDO is from 1000 is ~60% luck”
As stated in James’ own definition, the weakness of PDO is that it treats all shots as equal. Fortunately in this instance, the profile of the shots taken and allowed is roughly similar in the two managerial spells so PDO will give us a good representation of what has been happening.
The figures we are looking at are in the final colum 860 under AVB and 1256 under Sherwood.
The league average team will record a PDO of 1000 and teams will tend to regress back towards that value. The AVB number of 860 in comparison to Sherwood’s 1256 neatly illustrates the difference in luck experienced by the two managers. We can see that the component that has seen the biggest shift in outcomes has been Tottenham’s Shooting percentage, ie Goals / Shots on Target.
Under AVB, Tottenham scored from less than 17% of their shots on target, however since Lucky Tim has been at the helm they have managed to convert more than 51% of their on target shots. It may be the case that Sherwood has tremendous coaching capabilities but I’d certainly be betting that his Tottenham team won’t finish the season with more than half of their on target shots being scored. In fact, I’d wager that the Regression Monster is due to pay another visit to White Hart Lane.
This amazing stat can prove that Sherwood is experiencing a massive reversal in Tottenham’s shooting percentage and he is riding the crest of a wave as a result. With that being said stats are just that – stats and it can’t be judged the impact Tim Sherwood is having inside the dressing room but it does beg the question. Can Tim Sherwood’s old style English tactics be successful in the long term?
Let us know your opinions in the comments or on twitter @Sports_Hangout.
Credit goes to StatsBomb for the graphics.
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