Foxy figures: You’re still thinking about the bad news, aren’t you?
Our second Foxy Figures looks at Leicester’s defeat to Arsenal and reviews the season so far. Warning: xPositivity is in short supply.
In the aftermath of Saturday’s defeat at the Emirates, there’s been a lot of talk about how the second half comeback was a positive sign for Steve Cooper. A signal that the tide might be about to turn, how it showed how this team was different to the side that got relegated two years ago.
Not to call anyone out, but we are talking about, for example, Rob Tanner in the Athletic.
This sort of attitude has been recreated elsewhere. The idea that Leicester showed some fight and were a little unlucky. That it shows how we are better than results suggest.
To put it bluntly, this is wrong. It’s deluded, wishful thinking, and a good example of why you sometimes have to look past the final result to see the full picture.
The reality is that Arsenal vs Leicester was astonishingly one-sided. A deflected header and an unbelievable finish out of nowhere shouldn’t convince you otherwise. Leicester’s overall performances so far this season have been terrible, and we are fortunate to have any points at all.
The thrashing that never was
One way to read Expected Goals (xG) is as a kind of ‘luck’ rating. If you significantly outperform your xG number, you’ve been lucky (or your strikers had a great day, or their ‘keeper had a terrible day: you get the point). In one-off games, these vagaries of fortune can lead to some pretty weird results.
Over time, the luck balances out and you usually regress to the mean – a few hot streaks meet a few cold ones and the xG numbers over the course of a season tell you how good a team is overall.
What you often notice when you look at the xG for individual games is that big wins are a bit of a perfect storm, where one team has scored a lot of relatively low quality chances. When Liverpool beat Bournemouth 9-0, for example, they had an xG of around 4. In the World Cup semi-final, Germany had an xG of 3.1.
