Stoke City Vs Tottenham: Match Thread

Sweetsman said:

Matzdorf, your analysis is based in half a season's data and you are comparing a guy who was there for a season and a half. There are also confounding factors to take into account, plus biases that include having been hounded from day one by the likes of that fat turd, Martin Samuel, and his glove puppet, Neil Ashton.

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TheChosenOne said:

Shame the cup exit stats don't hold up very good.

1/10

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Gaz_Gammon said:

Dave was asked to provide these stats by another poster. The jury is still out as to if AVB was here for a season and a half.....

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chrissivad said:

Ade, Chadli and Kaboul heading home

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davidmatzdorf said:

This is a misleading and badly chosen piece of analysis.

When AVB left, 5 points off 4th represented 10.4% of the points available in the 16 league matches up to that point.

Now, after 36 matches, 7 points represents 6.5% of the points available in the 36 league matches up to this point.

It is in the nature of the table to open up, i.e., for points gaps to widen as the season goes on, because there are still 20 clubs, but there have been more points available for them to win and lose. My statistic is a meaningful one; yours is not.

What reinforces this is that we have obtained more points per match under Sherwood (1.95/match) than we did under Villas Boas (1.67/match). That has kept us relatively closer to the top 4.

Don't misunderstand my point: I think we should move on from Sherwood next season if there is a more experienced manager with a suitable track record and style of football available. But insisting that Sherwood has been unsuccessful in the league, compared to AVB, is factually incorrect, by a substantial margin.

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Sweetsman said:

Matzdorf, your analysis is based in half a season's data and you are comparing a guy who was there for a season and a half.

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Sweetsman said:

The search party is still looking for your wit...

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davidmatzdorf said:

Sherwood's cup results have been disappointing and we won a succession of 10 cup matches under AVB. However, this has to be tempered by the circumstances: early in the season, under AVB, we were playing a very low standard of cup opposition; Sherwood's accession coincided precisely with our move to playing more serious cup opposition.

I'm not convinced that we would have done any better against the teams that knocked us out of the various cups, with AVB still in place. We probably would have defended more tightly; but where were the goals going to come from?

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davidmatzdorf said:

I was asked a question and I answered it, from my spreadsheet. The results of the analysis are what they are and they are accurate. Last season we had a different squad.

Have a good read through the excellent long post by EJWTartanSpur for a good setting-out of my own views. Sherwood has done the one thing he could do, which was to bring three good players into the team who belonged there (Adebayor, Bentaleb and Kane). Then he has let all of them play, which has included permitting attackers to enter the penalty box, which was more than they were doing in the first 16 league games of this season.

What he hasn't done is to show any special abilities to take a top-6 squad and get it into the top 4. He hasn't the experience to work magic on players' psyches, in Redknapp's mode. He hasn't the experience to set out a team to get a result against squads with a superior or equal quality of players to our own. All he has accomplished, which is a not-at-all-bad 1.95 points per match, is down to letting a good squad play to the players' basic individual abilities, but for the team to lack coherence and shape. In this, he has also been undermined by numerous key injuries.

The result is that we have reliably beaten inferior teams and reliably been beaten by superior teams. At least we have scored goals, which is more than we did earlier this season.

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Gaz_Gammon said:

And after your brilliant (but seriously flawed) cunning plan to keep Lloris at Spurs by loaning him out, Levy will be looking for a keeper. Well up until Lloris loses in next seasons CL at some other club......

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davidmatzdorf said:

I was asked a question and I answered it, from my spreadsheet. The results of the analysis are what they are and they are accurate. Last season we had a different squad.

Have a good read through the excellent long post by EJWTartanSpur for a good setting-out of my own views. Sherwood has done the one thing he could do, which was to bring three good players into the team who belonged there (Adebayor, Bentaleb and Kane). Then he has let all of them play, which has included permitting attackers to enter the penalty box, which was more than they were doing in the first 16 league games of this season.

What he hasn't done is to show any special abilities to take a top-6 squad and get it into the top 4. He hasn't the experience to work magic on players' psyches, in Redknapp's mode. He hasn't the experience to set out a team to get a result against squads with a superior or equal quality of players to our own. All he has accomplished, which is a not-at-all-bad 1.95 points per match, is down to letting a good squad play to the players' basic individual abilities, but for the team to lack coherence and shape. In this, he has also been undermined by numerous key injuries.

The result is that we have reliably beaten inferior teams and reliably been beaten by superior teams. At least we have scored goals, which is more than we did earlier this season.

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Sweetsman said:

The search party is still looking for your wit...

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davidmatzdorf said:

Yes, we have won a number of games solely because we have better players who can make things happen (as we did last season, when we also had Bale), but the analogous problem with AVB's approach was that it actually stifled those better players and their 'flashes of class'.

In most of our early-season games, we would watch this mind-numbing hesitancy for about 65 of the 90 minutes: we'd have the football, but all of our 'better players' were too inhibited by rigid tactical rules to express themselves and actually try to score a goal.

What on earth would make you think that the last part of this sentence follows sensibly from the first part? Carefully constructed and analysed statistics can illuminate things that may not otherwise be obvious to people who view football matches with preconceived ideas. Of course they 'don't tell the whole story', but that's a straw-man argument, because no one ever claims that they do. People here who see the value in stats sometimes appear to rely solely upon them, but that's just because they have to repeat themselves constantly, as a result of idiots people who make daft statements like 'you can shove [stats] where the sun don't shine'.

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Sweetsman said:

You see, the point that keeps failing to lodge in what passes for your brain is that I said we could consider it if he wanted to leave for CL football. He has after all hinted at this in a recent interview in a newspaper read by Johnny Foreigner. I would like to know what you would do if he does start making noises about leaving.

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dondo said:

Let it go dude AVB is gone stop obsessing about him

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TheGreenLily said:

Clearly a shit manager, who completely has no idea what he is doing.

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CrazyHeart said:

Hey I didn't bring him up!

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