Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News. Supporting the Lord Wenger in all he does » Why we need to be very careful in quoting Arsenal statistics
By Walter Broeckx of Arsenal Worldwide
Is every 6-0 the same? It is a question we could ask ourselves on the day, well after a few days in fact, when we won 6-0 and Chelsea also won their first home game with 6-0. A popular score in London for the moment.
The pundits are wild about Chelsea doing this twice against a newly promoted team(WBA), like we did with Blackpool and against a team (Wigan) that just had been beaten by that same Blackpool.
I do think that when we come in may we will see those 3 teams very close to the bottom 3 of the league. I do hope for Blackpool they find a way to avoid relegation as they seem to be a team that is trying to play football and don’t use the ‘kick you to pieces tactics’ as we have seen way to many times being used against our players.
So maybe it’s time to look at some match statistics and I will take both the home games from us and from Chelsea as it can make a difference if you play at home or you play away.
We had a total of 30 shots against Blackpool and Blackpool managed to get 5 in total. Chelsea had a total 19 shots against WBA who had 11 shots in that game.
We had 8 corners against the 2 from Blackpool and Chelsea had 3 corners and WBA had 2. We made 10 fouls in total and Blackpool only made 5 fouls so we were almost a dirty team at times. Chelsea made 12 fouls against WBA who made 10 themselves.
The passing success was almost the same as we had 87,9 and Chelsea had 88,4. It would be interesting to see how many passes actually had been made but I couldn’t find this information anywhere.
We made the same number of tackles as Chelsea did (15), but they are a far better tackling team than we are as their tackling success was largely better than our 66,7 against their 73,3.
One somewhat amazing statistic is that we only had 54,5 % of possession and Chelsea had 60,1 %. And if you compare this with the territorial advantage you see a completely different picture. We played in their half for 63,5% of the time and Chelsea played only for 50,3 in their half. This means that we spend a lot of time in the Blackpool half even when we didn’t have the ball and that Chelsea had the ball a lot but where playing in their own half.
The main conclusion you can draw from this is that we attacked Blackpool the whole game having the ball or not. But then I still had the feeling that we had more off the ball than this 54,5 %.
Because after having seen these statistics and I have found them on Sky Sports, I really started wondering if my thoughts of the game and my general feeling of the game was that bad.
And so I looked around and I found statistics on the BBC and they said we had 65% of possession. Now I will not moan about one channel having a difference of 1, 2 or even 3 or 4 % in possession compared to another, but having a difference of 10% is very much.
Who is right and who is wrong? I had the feeling that we certainly had much more of the ball and that 65% should be the right number for this game.
Maybe one of the conclusions about making conclusions about possession is that it all depends on the way they measure these things and there is a difference between them, but I just don’t know which. But who is wrong and who is right? And if for the rest the statistics are almost the same why then suddenly this big difference between two ‘reliable’ channels.
Off course a shot is a shot and this is something that we all could measure if we would take the time for it. But possession is something different to measure and I really have no intention to do this to get a third number. So maybe we could agree with 60% possession in the Blackpool game.
But we can say that we created a lot more than Chelsea did and as we almost got 30% more shots than they did. But you can also say that Chelsea are a more cynical team when it comes to finishing their chances. One thing is for sure we can enjoy the game more as we always try to bring the ball up field and bring it to the opponents penalty area and try to play our game over there. We play attacking football and Chelsea play somewhat more counter attacking play. But I think most of us didn’t need all those numbers to come up with this conclusions.
But the main conclusion could be: be careful with statistics on possession.
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