Premier League 2017/18

[FestiveJack]

Honestly at this point I just mute the commentators and let True Geordie and whoever he's got on #TheKickOff commentate. Much more entertaining and with the presence of 'pundits' who actually understand stuff like XG etc more insightful 90% of the time too.

[Colly]

I don't want to hear anyone ever talk about XG. 

[FestiveJack]

XG is a good metric, just depends on how it's used. As pundits and the like get familiar with it - this is really the first season its even been measured, so there'll obviously be issues there - analysis and how its use will improve.

[MDK]

7 minutes ago, Colly said:

I don't want to hear anyone ever talk about XG. 

Grandad is getting grumpy again...

[FestiveJack]

My one issue with XG is that the name is misleading. It should be Quality of Chance or something similar.

[Adam]

So far Expected Goals has seemed pointless to me. Is it not a subjective determination? Plus, every single time I've seen it pop up on MOTD, the number has been between 0 and about 1.5 no matter what the overall score actually was. Even if it was 4-2 or something. The lone exception was Arsenal on Saturday against United when it was like 5.2 or something.

[Gazz]

All quantitative statistics are subjective. You can take a data set and if you apply enough analyses to it, it will eventually give you the results you want.

For example, I saw a study that used three seasons of data from the Bundesliga that found that the strongest indicator of points gained was the goalkeeper's pass completion percentage. Which is brilliant if you're Manuel Neuer, you have ten of the top fifteen players in the league in front of you and you can play with no pressure as a sweeper a third of the way up the pitch, playing short passes out to Jerome Boateng, not so useful if you're the keeper of the bottom team in the league that spends 75% of matches defending.

[Colly]

I'm an analyst by trade, all I deal in is stats and methodology. The last thing football needs is to go American and assign stats to everything, and the first time I see a manager refer to XG is the point I give up on the whole thing. Remember when Danny Simpson was statistically the best right back in the country at one point while at Newcastle? Fuck that shit and examine sport with a qualitative eye. 

That being said, had I not had to go to London today I was considering going to a seminar with this abstract today. .. 

"The statistical modelling of sports has become a topic of increasing interest in recent times, as more data is collected on the sports we love, coupled with a heightened interest in the outcome of these sports, that is, the continuous rise of online betting. We consider the task of determining a football player's ability for a given event type, for example, scoring a goal. We propose an interpretable Bayesian inference approach that centres on variational inference methods. We implement a Poisson model to capture occurrences of event types, from which we infer player abilities. We then use these inferred player abilities to extend the Bayesian hierarchical model of Baio and Blangiardo (2010), which captures a team's scoring rate. We apply the resulting scheme to the English Premier League, capturing player abilities over the 2013/2014 season, before using output from the hierarchical model to predict whether a certain number of goals will be scored in a future match or not (along with attempting to predict the winning margin for a team)."

[stokeriño]

Behind after six minutes. FFS.

[Colly]

West Ham deserve the win just for that unpunished foul throw. 

[MDK]

1 minute ago, Have a Colly Jolly Xmas said:

West Ham deserve the win just for that unpunished foul throw. 

That was shocking. I don't even expect that down the park.

[stokeriño]

Well I doubt we're going to get even one goal, let alone two, so that solves that I guess.

[MDK]

1 minute ago, stokeriño said:

Well I doubt we're going to get even one goal, let alone two, so that solves that I guess.

Its nice of Chelsea to give to the needy at this time of year. Truly a family club.

[Adam]

David Moyes is BACK lads!

[MDK]

Another amazing throw in there from Chelsea. 

[Adam]

I see foul throws every week in the league. It's clearly not taught anymore, and it should be. It can be costly, as it was with Willian there. Everyone's decided that taking a proper throw-in isn't worth wasting time on now, and I heard once that officials are even told not to bother looking out for it particularly as there's other things they can look at. When I was a kid playing in a team we did drills learning how to take a proper throw-in, but it seems such basics as that have been cast aside now.

[Colly]

It has to be pretty bad to be punished in the Premier League though, and those were horrendous. 

[Kaney]

What happened with the throw in? I can't find any clips.

[Gorka]

I can't believe Swans actually managed a win AND a clean sheet.

[MDK]

Newcastle just Newcastle'd themselves