New England - Postmatch

[dummyrun]

Either the team suddenly got real unlucky when it changed coaches, or Dome fucked them up.

It's hard to isolate Dome IMO as the sole cause of our inability to keep outperforming xG.

It's true that there are a couple teams that regularly outperform xG, but they tend to have Lionel Messi on them.

Vieira left 15 games into the season. Here's ASA's GD-xGD split for seven seasons' worth of teams before and after the 15 game mark:

And here's the same chart for even gamestates:

Being unlucky sucks. But if you don't like your luck, don't worry, it'll change.

 

[mgarbowski]

A bunch of other things changed in that time. Injuries, internation duty, the alignment of the stars and Kanye's shoe size. It's hard to isolate Dome IMO as the sole cause of our inability to keep outperforming xG.

Being unlucky sucks. But if you don't like your luck, don't worry, it'll change.

Tell me that you think the team's offensive flow in the final third looks good right now, and that you truly believe the poor results are just luck.

Tell me you think that hiring a washed up never-was Dome-buddy as our Herrera midfield replacement was a good idea.

Since Dome took over the team PPG is 1.54 through 13 games.
Since the Vieira to Arsenal rumors started the PPG is 1.48 through 21 games. Tell me you really and truly believe that is a 21-game streak of bad luck.
Or, tell me you think this is in fact properly a more-or-less 1.5 PPG team and the strong start to the season was the true aberration.

Otherwise I'm satisfied that PV fucked us hard by distracting the team for 2 months, lying repeatedly before cutting loose, then CFG hired some handy in-house lifelong assistant coach who may or may not have a plan for 2019 but basically had no clue how to resurrect 2018 and he in turn hired a useless old friend because why the fuck not.

And by the way, Vieira is fucking dead to me. He handled the whole thing as poorly as possible and the results are in. He is Frank Lampard, Ferran Soriano no-good-disloyal-fuck-you-dead to me. His non-existent hair could catch on fire and I wouldn't spit on him to put it out.

 

[Midas Mulligan]

if we play like this for the rest of the regular season we will be quite alright.

Bet.

 

[mgarbowski]

Every year, there is something special about the game that makes you give up on the season.

 

[Midas Mulligan]

Tell me that you think the team's offensive flow in the final third looks good right now, and that you truly believe the poor results are just luck.

Tell me you think that hiring a washed up never-was Dome-buddy as our Herrera midfield replacement was a good idea.

Since Dome took over the team PPG is 1.54 through 13 games.
Since the Vieira to Arsenal rumors started the PPG is 1.48 through 21 games. Tell me you really and truly believe that is a 21-game streak of bad luck.
Or, tell me you think this is in fact properly a more-or-less 1.5 PPG team and the strong start to the season was the true aberration.

Otherwise I'm satisfied that PV fucked us hard by distracting the team for 2 months, lying repeatedly before cutting loose, then CFG hired some handy in-house lifelong assistant coach who may or may not have a plan for 2019 but basically had no clue how to resurrect 2018 and he in turn hired a useless old friend because why the fuck not.

And by the way, Vieira is fucking dead to me. He handled the whole thing as poorly as possible and the results are in. He is Frank Lampard, Ferran Soriano no-good-disloyal-fuck-you-dead to me. His non-existent hair could catch on fire and I wouldn't spit on him to put it out.

Frankly, when people shove a ridiculous take on a stat in my face like dummyrun is here, I question their ability to understand the prerequisites of objective analysis.

I don’t mean to be rude. I just prefer coming off as rude to coming off as one who fails to consider that our club doesn’t look at all as likely to score. Like ever.

 

[dummyrun]

• Tell me that you think the team's offensive flow in the final third looks good right now and that you truly believe the poor results are just luck.

Tonight, definitely.

• Tell me you think that hiring a washed up never-was Dome-buddy as our Herrera midfield replacement was a good idea.

Jury's out.

• tell me you think this is in fact properly a more-or-less 1.5 PPG team

I'll take the over.

• and the strong start to the season was the true aberration.

It was.

I've been working on an article comparing Dome and Vieira's coaching, I'll try to flesh out the results piece to answer some of this stuff more fully.

 

[Midas Mulligan]

Every year, there is something special about the game that makes you give up on the season.

If this is for me, I agree we always find a new way to make me realize we are indeed actually shit.

And I always go back to the fact that we are shit at positions that we all (excepting some) identify and don’t fix.

It’s the damnedest thing. You mean we can all watch a match, see where we suck, see how our coach sucks, and recommend remedial measures that when ignored don’t make us better?

We are indeed all crazy to hold such beliefs.

 

[dummyrun]

Frankly, when people shove a ridiculous take on a stat in my face like dummyrun is here, I question their ability to understand the prerequisites of objective analysis.

I don’t mean to be rude. I just prefer coming off as rude to coming off as one who fails to consider that our club doesn’t look at all as likely to score. Like ever.

What "take" are you even objecting to here? The question was whether team GD-xGD is some kind of repeatable skill. It's not. All I did was post the charts that show that it's not.

 

[Midas Mulligan]

• Tell me that you think the team's offensive flow in the final third looks good right now and that you truly believe the poor results are just luck.

Tonight, definitely.

• Tell me you think that hiring a washed up never-was Dome-buddy as our Herrera midfield replacement was a good idea.

Jury's out.

• tell me you think this is in fact properly a more-or-less 1.5 PPG team

I'll take the over.

• and the strong start to the season was the true aberration.

It was.

I've been working on an article comparing Dome and Vieira's coaching, I'll try to flesh out the results piece to answer some of this stuff more fully.

No way. We had one off chances from bad hops and poor defense.

Well duh.

Why? We can’t beat (not going to say it because crass)

Prove it.

 

[Midas Mulligan]

What "take" are you even objecting to here? The question was whether team GD-xGD is some kind of repeatable skill. It's not. All I did was post the charts that show that it's not.

All I did was tell you that what I see means that your metrics are broken. We haven’t created nearly the same level of clean chances. The end.

 

[dummyrun]

All I did was tell you that what I see means that your metrics are broken. We haven’t created nearly the same level of clean chances. The end.

That ... is not what's on those charts. Sleep well, friend.

 

[Midas Mulligan]

That ... is not what's on those charts.

Exactly. But it is what matters, despite you argue.

Enjoy your haughtiness, friend.

 

[Jock]

I don't see how Dome is to blame for our reticence in the final third. Unless we catch him on the BTS saying "whatever you do, don't take advantage of open looks in the 18".

How many times in one game can you find yourself yelling "shoot, for fuck sake!"

Facepalm football at times.

 

[mgarbowski]

• tell me you think this is in fact properly a more-or-less 1.5 PPG team

I'll take the over.

• and the strong start to the season was the true aberration.

It was.

But which one more so than the other? The first 7 games were an aberration to be sure. We were never going to go undefeated all season. But 7-game blips are common. Clusters happen. Go ahead and explain it if you want but I already know.
But 21 games of underperformance are more likely to have a cause.

Put another way: you don’t have to explain a good 7 game streak by an excellent team. And such a streak doesn’t make me think the team is beyond excellent and possibly an all-time great team. It’s just something that happens.
But 21 games of mediocrity by a supposedly excellent team is either (1) evidence the team is not in fact that good, or (2) has a cause, or (3) one ginormous cluster. Can 62% of your data set be a cluster?

As for the jury being out on Eloi? We hired him for 9 games. One third of them are in the books. He was thrown out of the first, suspended for the second, and he led to the losing goal in the third. That’s a hell of a hole to dig out of with 6 games left.

 

[ZYanksRule]

That was maddening. 28 shots is great, but it just feels like there's something missing. The movement off the ball is lacking, guys almost seem confused.

Maybe that has to do with the fact that it seems we're playing a different formation and system every night. We used to be a 4-3-3 every night, and everyone knew their role. Now we're all over the map. We had the personnel to go 4-3-3 today, but instead we got weird. I had the same criticism of Vieira when he used to try a 3-4-3 every once in a while; it always seemed like the players were confused when he did that, like they didn't know what to do.

That's where I feel like we are now: The team seems confused. Torrent is a good coach, I'm sure of it. But he's trying to prove how smart he is by changing formation every night. It's not working. Someone above said something I 100% agree with -- we no longer have an identity. That's a problem to me. Torrent needs to find an identity, and needs to let the players be good at it the way Vieira did. Dome is overthinking.

I felt like Torrent's first 5 games or so, he was just trying to figure out what he had. Now lately he's been tinkering, and tinkering far too much. As I said: Stop overthinking.

 

[Annagram]

What happened to the individual talent on the team? SJ, Ring, Maxi -- our three most consistent players -- are completely out of sync in the last 2 months.

Don’t know about SJ and Maxi, but Ring is injured, and forced to play through injuries because there’s no replacement. That’s what happened with his talent.

 

[ZYanksRule]

Don’t know about SJ and Maxi, but Ring is injured, and forced to play through injuries because there’s no replacement. That’s what happened with his talent.

Really hoping these two weeks off do him some good.

 

[ferrarinycfc]

NYCFC has gone backward since Viera left.

Going to be tough getting anything out if this season now I think.

 

[dummyrun]

But 21 games of mediocrity by a supposedly excellent team is either (1) evidence the team is not in fact that good, or (2) has a cause, or (3) one ginormous cluster. Can 62% of your data set be a cluster?

Imagine you roll a die 30 times, and at the end you've rolled each face exactly five times. But then you notice that your first 10 rolls were all fives and sixes. You decide to exclude that short streak because it's clearly not representative of the distribution of the die's faces. Now you're left with 20 rolls, 67% of your dataset, that are all numbers one through four. Did cutting out the unrepresentative streak improve your overall picture of the die's distribution and what its average roll will be? Are the 20 later rolls the die's true form?

Obviously soccer's more complex than a die, but that's kind of how our season's gone. In March and April we didn't play that well but got lucky. In May and June we played better, if a little inconsistently, and got mostly fair results. July was the best soccer we've played all season and our results were if anything not quite as good as they should have been.

Since then it's been a mixed bag: we played very well at home against Vancouver and New England, decently in weird red card games against Toronto and RBNY, and badly on the road to Philadelphia and Columbus. The actual performances have been more or less what you'd expect given opponent strength and H/A. But we got unlucky results in the games where we played well, okay results in the ones where we played okay, and deserved results in the ones where we played badly. I could run the numbers for expected points, but you get the idea: we were never going to take that many points from a tough run of games, but not winning the easy ones where we outplayed our opponents made our overall results look worse than they should.

Here's my takeaway: I think we're a very good team whose 1.71 PPG is now almost exactly in line with our expected point production over the course of the season. I think we'll finish third on the table and have a good shot in the playoffs. And I think we're going to be even better next year.

 

[Shwafta]

How many times in one game can you find yourself yelling "shoot, for fuck sake!"

Facepalm football at times.

I used to watch TMac where he'd get the ball and hesitate for a second or two, just enough for the defense to catch him, and it frustrated me because most of our team would just first-time the ball or do something else.. But last night the entire team did that.