Gus's most damning statistic

[Acker79]

 

[looney]

All games start from a drawing position!!

Not second legs if the first wasnt a draw.

 

[Binney on acid]

Did we have more 0:0 draws than any other team in the 4 divisions?

 

[Thunder Bolt]

Did we have more 0:0 draws than any other team in the 4 divisions?

6. We had a few 1-1s, several 2-2s and a 3-3.

 

[pottert]

If all of this disappeared under the mat & gus was our manager next season I would not be disappointed.

I don't think that is going to happen.

Including the playoffs we lost 10 out of 48 games.
We drew 19 including the playoffs I think.
I can think of at least 5 games where we conceded injury time goals to turn wins into draws that is 8 points.
Yet we were only 4 points away from automatic promotion.

IT'S NOT ALL BAD

 

[Tubby-McFat-Fuc]

Official stats don't apply to friendlies or testimonials.
The failure to come from behind to win in 91 league games is entirely down to the manager and his tactics. Its not bad luck or pure coincidence, there is a reason for it. He has one way of playing and doesn't want to change. He is narrow minded and inflexible. Our ' possession football ' suits us when we are ahead. We can protect what we have. The other team has to do the worrying. The manager's cautious nature fits comfortably with this, he likes it and his confidence transmits to the players.
When a team goes behind it sometimes calls for throwing caution to the wind to get back into the game. Gus won't do this. It disrupts the game-plan. He believes implicitly in our style of play and firmly believes that all will come good if we just keep doing all the right things he has told the players to do.
Well football doesn't always work like that. Sometimes you have to screw up the game-plan and invent something different. Its called thinking on your feet. Not one of Gus' strengths and clearly his assistant ( who spends ages scribbling notes during games...what the hell is he doing?....writing love notes to Gus! ) hasn't got any original thoughts in his locker either.
If Gus stayed for all of next season we still wouldn't win a game from behind. He would still play the same way and it would still yield the same results.
He has a blueprint and intends sticking to it. It is great at times but hugely frustrating at other times. The better the manager and the better the players he encounters along the way, the more he will flounder.
Wasn't it rotten of Holloway to bring on Bolassie and free up Zaha to roam all over the place. Gus hadn't allowed for that!
Some BHA fans refer to the glorious wins over Barnsley, Sheff Wed, Huddersfield and Blackpool and say its some of the best football seen for 30 years. Some of it was very good but you have to remember the games where you left the ground pulling your hair out in frustration. The teams who worked us out and we couldn't break them down. The times you wanted Gus to make changes and he wouldn't. He and Tanno expecting their game-plan to always deliver. The players that haven't ' trained on ' under Gus, notably the enigmatic Will Buckley, occasional match-winner, regular no.1 Mr Frustration. Playing exactly the same way now as when he joined.
It is a damning statistic and outsiders are always flabbergasted when I mention it. It reflects rather unfairly on the players. It implies that they lack character. That their heads drop when they fall behind and they can't raise their game. It implies that they are ' flat-track ' bullies. Great when the going is good ( i.e ahead ) not so good when they trail.
No, its not the players. Its the manager and his system. Simple as that.

Post of the season. Spot on

And I fear had Gus stayed, not only would that stat not have changed, but more and more clubs would have learnt the way to counter his style, and we would have ended up higher mid table.

We ended up 9 points better than last season.

In black and white that suggests a big big step forward..... and would have been if he had the same squad available to him and had merely improved that.

But for the money he spent and the players he had available, I can't see how anyone can argue that is a big improvement.

No offensive to big Peter, but Kuszczak was worth more than 9 points on his own when you compare his performances this season with the keepers the year before.

Not to mention the improvements all over the squad, I would argue a 9 point improvement with those additional players was not a forward step. Far from it.

That is why I am so delighted Poyet has gone. He was tactically limited, when his system worked it was some of the best football you could hope to see, when it didn't it was so frustrating and boring, and if he had the will/ability to switch tactics, not only would we be a premiership club now, but he'd probably already be have been named the new Everton manager, but he cant and he didn't, and that is why I am amazed that so many think he will just walk into a Premiership job.

 

[El Presidente]

Spot on. Which is why, despite a successful season overall, people have questioned his approach throughout the year. Many teams simply work us out.

Clearly not many, we had the fewest defeats in the division and finished fourth.

I note you and the OP ignore that we have not lost a league game once we have gone ahead for 70+ games too. Is that down to Poyet's sterile tactics too?

 

[Scunner]

I think it's important to understand the proposition in my thread title. Gus's good stats, of which there are many, don't outweigh this.

The reason is, as we have just experienced, a key aspect of a top manager is the ability to change games. Otherwise one doesn't need a manager, just a coaching staff of high quality. Someone needs to name decisions, stasis is not one.

No doubt that Gus is good, and has been brilliant for us, but will this inflexibility be exposed in the Premier league?

 

[Thunder Bolt]

Clearly not many, we had the fewest defeats in the division and finished fourth.

I note you and the OP ignore that we have not lost a league game once we have gone ahead for 70+ games too. Is that down to Poyet's sterile tactics too?

People see what they want to see.

 

[Seagull over Canaryland]

I think the OP makes a fair point. Our stats look excellent - except for games when we went behind. If we had turned around only a couple of those games and taken 3 points then we would probably be in contention for the automatic promotion places.

I think the biggest indicator of this were the play-offs against Palace when it counted most, yet over two legs we could not score, even after Palace went one up at the Amex. There is a fine dividing line of course and if Speroni hadn't tipped Barnes brilliant effort at The Amex onto the bar we would not have this thread. Looking back I am really disappointed that our players couldn't up their game and above all the manager didn't seem to have a plan B. He didn't even look that animated by his standards so do wonder if this is a flaw in his attributes. I hope he learns from this.

 

[Thunder Bolt]

I think the OP makes a fair point. Our stats look excellent - except for games when we went behind. If we had turned around only a couple of those games and taken 3 points then we would probably be in contention for the automatic promotion places.

If we hadn't had two keepers making cock ups we would have gone up automatically too. Beasley the gk coach out.

 

[Seagull over Canaryland]

If we hadn't had two keepers making cock ups we would have gone up automatically too. Beasley the gk coach out.

I agree but realistically we are likely to see the odd cock up from keepers in the course of such a long season. Whereas the inability to come from behind over such a protracted period is more of a team and managerial failing, so more fundamental. The fact that we failed to address this suggests a weakness in the capabilities of the manager and coaching staff and maybe to a lesser extent the team?

 

[Seagull73]

Clearly not many, we had the fewest defeats in the division and finished fourth.

I note you and the OP ignore that we have not lost a league game once we have gone ahead for 70+ games too. Is that down to Poyet's sterile tactics too?

Beat me to it. As Thunderbolt said, people will see what they want to see.

 

[Scunner]

Clearly not many, we had the fewest defeats in the division and finished fourth.

I note you and the OP ignore that we have not lost a league game once we have gone ahead for 70+ games too. Is that down to Poyet's sterile tactics too?

Yes, it is...and it depends what you want. Statistically attack minded teams fare better than defensive ones according to book excerpts published in the Times this week, by about 5 percentage points. The question is, when it really matters, which would you want your team to be?

 

[Seagull over Canaryland]

Beat me to it. As Thunderbolt said, people will see what they want to see.

In the final analysis we finished 4th which constitutes very meaningful progress and had an excellent record in most areas except for a) our inability to come from behind and b) drawing too many games that might have won. Wolves away comes to mind as 2 points dropped, just for the sake of a couple of minutes discipline. That may well have cost us an automatic promotion place. We failed to address this within the season. I'm sure there will be many around the Club who are really feeling this as they reflect on last season. Having got so very close to that elusive goal and the more I think about this issue I feel it was a really serious flaw.

Many of our rivals threw away precious points in what was a bizarrely open Championship. Surely it cannot be as open for us to make a late run into the play offs like we just did.

I can't wait for next season to start so we can put that hoodoo behind us.

 

[Notters]

No one is saying Gus's tactics are bad it's the fact we don't have a backup if things go wrong.. Very rarely have we gone behind and thrown on attacking players to change the game and when we do its too late.. I love the football we play but sometimes it seems Gus thinks playing football "the right way" is more important than getting the win.

I'm so SICK and TIRED of hearing this utter tripe. We played all sorts of different tactics throughout the season, with some very attacking lineups and some quite defensive ones. Some games we played with 2 strikers and 2 wingers, some with one and one. This "no plan b" stuff is just something that some Gus hater came up with which all the others clung onto. I'm no fan of Gus right now but his tactics were often excellent with some very shrewd tactical substitutions.

 

[Seagull73]

I'm so SICK and TIRED of hearing this utter tripe. We played all sorts of different tactics throughout the season, with some very attacking lineups and some quite defensive ones. Some games we played with 2 strikers and 2 wingers, some with one and one. This "no plan b" stuff is just something that some Gus hater came up with which all the others clung onto. I'm no fan of Gus right now but his tactics were often excellent with some very shrewd tactical substitutions.

Well said.

 

[Hornblower]

Beat me to it. As Thunderbolt said, people will see what they want to see.

Agree totally. We had our best season in many, many years. We played some of the best football I have seen in my 50 odd year of watching the albion and all that under a crap manager. Nice to see that NSC has not lost its sense of disproportion.

 

[father_and_son]

Agree with the OP. Gus needed a plan B and it appeared that he seldom, if ever had one.

THIS THIS and THIS again.

I LOVE this style of football, but its too predictable and easy to grab a cheap point for the opponents if they play right. If you don't have the capability to switch quickly to an alternative strategy (and back again), then you won't lose many games, but you won't win many either!

 

[brightonrock]

If only this had been discussed before. FWIW the 91 games stat is a falsity - how many have we actually gone behind in that time? For example, if we'd NEVER gone behind in 2 seasons, Doncaster would still be the last time we'd won from behind. It's irrelevant for all the games we score first.