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Stat of the Week: The Glen Hoddle Clinical Finishing Index

By J B Harwood

A few weeks ago one of the Sky Sports favourite pundits was waxing lyrical about Arsenal. How pleasing on the eye they are, the quality of their play, everyone’s second favourite team… the usual diatribe. You could feel a “but” coming on and yes, it duly arrived. “But they are not clinical enough in front of goal… lots of opportunities but the end product is just not quite there”.

Now I must admit I’ve never been a great fan of Mr Hoddle. Ex Tott, not very entertaining in his commentary, anti Arsenal most weeks, but… he once was the England coach, he played under Wenger at Monaco – maybe he had something here. Had big Glen been pouring over the statistics, examining comparative numbers of the top 4, developing inciteful analysis of reasons for the Gunners third position in the league?

Well… No. Sorry Glen my first impressions were right.

Clinical finishing is actually quite easy to measure. Take the number of goals scored and divide it by the number of shots at goal (important to look at the number of shots, and NOT shots on target). Over the course of an extended number of games you can get a good feel not only for how accurate the team is but also its leading marksmen.

What do the numbers for this season’s Premier league tell us.

………………..Shots                Goals               %

Arsenal           398                  73                    18.3

Man Utd          433                  72                    16.6

Chelsea           523                  75                    14.3

Tott H              402                  55                    13.7

What about Champions League (maybe Glen was confused over what he was watching?)

…………………..Shots                Goals               %

Arsenal              104                  18                    17.3

Barcelona         101                  12                    11.9

Man Utd            110                  17                    15.5

Real Mad          122                  16                    13.1

Not bad for a team without a Centre forward for most of the season.

So who is responsible for this clinical finishing. Again looking at the EPL for this season.

………………….Shots                Goals               %

Fabregas           62                    15                    24.2

Van Persie        34                    7                      20.6

Arshavin            53                    9                      17.0

Bendtner            34                    4                      11.8

Eduardo            30                    3                      10.0

Walcott              18                    2                      11.1

Note, that before he was grievously assaulted in 07/08 Eduardo was hitting his stride with 4 in 17 shots (23.5%). But there is one other player that should be mentioned here.

If you watch carefully next time you are at the Emirates, after the first team has finished warming up there is one player who is the last to leave the pitch. He’ll go over to where the goal keepers are warming up and let fly with one or two shots from distance.

Whilst I’ve been watching they’ve been pretty accurate, often top corner (but then again this is practice and he doesn’t have some hairy defender breathing down his neck). This player is seldom mentioned in dispatches, and I doubt that Glen Hoddle can even spell his name let alone mention him, but this season he’s scored 4 goals from 14 shots (28.6%) and 2 of those goals were match winning goals.

His name is Denilson and he’s only just turned 22 years of age. Now we are beginning to see why Wenger described him as “very efficient” and a bit of a cross between “Gilberto and Rosicky”. Of course in addition to the 2 match winning goals Denilson belted the last minute effort against Hull that Boaz Myhill couldn’t handle and which Bendtner put away.

I’m sure Denilson was not bought for his shooting and the smaller the numbers the less statistically significant they are. But as a defensive midfielder that passes, intercepts and wins the ball more than any other in the EPL to be scoring important goals is worth highlighting for a player that is often unfairly criticised by Arsenal fans.

By way of final comparison if you look at his numbers last year (when he wasn’t injured for 2.5 months) he scored 3 from 29 (10.3%) which is very respectable for someone in his first year in the EPL and who invariably shoots from outside the box. And these are numbers which are still better than another long range specialist Frank Lampard (7 from 82 shots, 8.5%, excluding penalties this year).

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