Two good things stand out from the stats and shotmaps from the Arsenal game.

The first is that we registered higher xG than the Gunners, with a number of shots from really good positions in front of goals. Meanwhile, Arsenal’s efforts — except for their opener — are from less favourable angles.

The second thing is the number of touches we had in the opposition box. At 26 it was more than Arsenal’s 21, and came from what was quite a direct display. (Directness is the proportion of forward pass distance to overall pass distance).

You can tell those touches in the box are the result of quite direct play because they heavily outnumber the number of deep completions (passes in the final 20m), so there was clearly not a lot of fannying about before arriving in the danger area.

Other things to note:

Another good pressing performance, where we went toe-to-toe with a costly, quality-laden, athletic side to almost match them on PPDA (opposition Passes Per Defensive Action).

We seem to be playing up the right a lot more than the left these days (see passmap and heatmap below)

 

Arsenal this season have been a bit of a flop, considering the quality in the team, and find themselves in 10th place with 28 points (4 behind Sheffield United) as they go into the game.

Their big issue? They’ve shipped more shots against (329) than they’ve taken themselves (253) over the season.

Now they have a new manager — Mikel Arteta — but it’s hard to see a bounce yet in those numbers, although they are unbeaten since he took the reins (2-0 vs Man Utd at home, 1-1 vs Palace away).

Blades beat West Ham last time out after two away losses at the best teams in the league. Arsenal are full of quality but will not run rampant in the same way as Man City and Liverpool did.

A game low on quality, but one that United deserved to win.

I’ve put the whole team stats in here for the sake of keeping a record, but maybe of more interest is the performance of Oli McBurnie, who seemed a different player once he dropped off from trying to play target man. See blog post here for that.

Oli McBurnie was way more involved in the Blades’ final third action after the tactical switch that came with the introduction of Lys Mousset on Friday against West Ham.

The substitution on 60 minutes saw David McGoldrick go off and from that point Mousset became the most advanced forward while McBurnie dropped into a slightly deeper role.

If we count the number of actions McBurnie was involved in before the substitution and after, the difference is noticeable.

Prior to Mousset’s introduction, McBurnie had been involved in 26 actions during the game. That includes offensive and defensive actions and over 60 minutes that averages to 0.43 per minute.

The transformation following the Mousset substitution is quite staggering, with 24 involvements racked up in 23 minutes, at which point McBurnie went off (replaced by Sharp on 84′). That’s more than double the previous hour’s worth, at 1.04 per minute.

Prior to 60 minutes the former Swansea forward had been playing point man to McGoldrick’s deeper lying link role.

The shift to a deeper position suited McBurnie, with lots of duels won and some good interplay, particularly with Mousset, and was more in keeping with his role last season at Swansea.

 

At just past halfway in the season (after the Liverpool game) the Blades sit 8^th in the table and have had a pretty successful start to their first PL season in more than a decade.

As it’s found its feet, the team has developed its playing style. It has found it can’t play the same way as in the Championship and has evolved a slightly more conservative style, becoming more direct and taking less touches high up the pitch.

That said, the desire to play high and make chances when possible is still there and is a major factor in keeping opponents away from our goal and goes a long way to explaining the very low shots-against count for this Sheffield United team.

Key also to success so far this season is the midfield. With Fleck and Lundstram as the more attacking elements, and Norwood taking up a more deep-lying role, the engine room of the team has achieved good balance.

If we look closely at those three players we can see where they complement each other, and by focussing in on a couple of those metrics we can also see how parts of their on-pitch performances might be changing as the season progresses.

Left, right and deep-lying

First, let’s look at the big picture.

The obvious division of roles concerns footedness – Fleck on the left, Lundstram on the right – and how high or low the player plays, which puts Oliver Norwood in a deeper role and with a less-defined axis to work on.

Also, as Norwood often covers for whichever CB bombs forward on the overlap, he can find himself on the left or right for extended periods.

Here are the heatmaps that show that. These show these players’ touches in all matches this season, with corner-taking removed so there’s no bias for these for Fleck and Norwood.

Between Fleck and Lundstram we can see that the latter has played a slightly freer role, perhaps less bounded by strong and weak foot bias.

Attacking and defensive strengths

Digging deeper we can look at a few metrics that reflect attacking and defensive activity and see how the players complement each other but may also provide strengths and weaknesses up the left and right axes of the pitch.

In the three radar charts of midfielder performance the right side of the chart indicates attacking metrics and the left defensive. (The ranges are approximate ranges for PL midfielders.)

On the face of it, the three charts look pretty similar.

As we’d expect, Norwood’s bulges out to the left more, ranking higher on all defensive counts, with about double the number of tackles as Fleck and nearly double the amount of ball recoveries as Lundstram, for example.

 

Looking more closely at Fleck and Lundstram, what’s clear is that the latter is more of an all-rounder. Lundstram puts in more tackles, makes more interceptions and commits about the same number of fouls per 90 minutes. He’s also more box-to-box than Fleck.

Fleck makes more ball recoveries than Lundstram per 90, however. That’s when a player gains the ball from situations where no team has possession or has it played to them by an opponent.

The interesting bit of their respective attacking profiles is that Fleck is the one more likely to have taken players on this season. Lundstram is less of a ball carrier, and more likely to send a pass off after one or two touches.

On the flip-side though, Lundstram is more likely to get involved in passing in the last 20m of the pitch (deep completions) than Fleck. There seems to be a passing hot-spot high on the right in nearly every game this season and Lundstram has usually been part of it. He’s also often the one to receive throw-ins in that part of the pitch.

The time factor

The trouble with the charts so far though is that they are season averages. In fact, players can have a run of games where they do, for example, take players on repeatedly, then a few where they don’t.

So, while we can see which players tend to do more of one thing than another, we need to look at rolling averages (or even per-game figures) to get a more realistic picture.

So, for example, while John Fleck comes out as the take-on meister of our midfield trio, looking at the data in time series shows he came back from injury to his record number of take-ons this season against Southampton on 17 September, but hasn’t quite achieved that since and his average has dropped away.

Meanwhile, however, Fleck’s average number of ball recoveries has been increasing during the season. That could be down to his individual performance or could be down to changes in team tactics. Maybe the evolution towards occasional bouts of energetic pressing has seen our no.4 pounce on loose balls more often?

What’s clear from looking at all these stats and charts is that while they can give lots of insight, they can also mask a lot of things. So while we’ve seen here some key features of how our midfield three tend to play, we’ve also seen that averages can mask a lot.

What we do know, though, as Blades fans is that these three have been a revelation in stepping up to a higher level and being the engine room of a fine first half of a season back in the PL.

Addendum: Defensive actions maps

Here are where the three midfielders have carried out recorded defensive actions so far this season. These pretty much accord with the players’ pass heatmaps, with Norwood the deepest. The other two have a bias towards each flank with Lundstram being a bit busier than Fleck, up and down the pitch as well as across it.

One look at the shot count, pass count, xG timeline or xG shotmap shows Sheffield United to have dominated this game. Ben Foster made some magnificent saves to deny the Blades.

Having said that, it didn’t feel like that watching the game live. Charting Blades passes per 10 minute period shows a lot of activity early in each half, and that seems to be faily usual for Sheffield United.

The passmap, however, also shows that a lot of passes were in our half and beyond Watford’s front line. They came to play deep and block up the central areas in front of goal with the hope of getting an opportunity on the break via Deulofeu, which they did.

Brighton (0) vs Sheffield Utd (1) review, 21-12-19

This was a game of two halves in a tactical sense.

In the first half Brighton expected to play Potter-ball. IE, passing their way up the pitch, with Gross and Trossard as key creators and Maupay a focus for them in our danger area.

That didn’t happen, though.

The Blades took the game to the Seagulls, pressing high when the opportunity arose, and creating chances. Out of possession we often let their CBs have the ball.

Mid block . . . 
The result was an overload in our favour in front of that, from their final 1/3 towards our goal. Often three Brighton CB were trying to pass the ball to seven of their players while 10 of ours marked them or blocked passing lanes.

In effect we clogged up the middle of the pitch and Brighton sent the ball long to bypass the midfield numerous times, to little effect.

You can see that here in the first half passmap for Brighton.

Half time substitutions are not common but Potter made two, taking off Trossard and Gross and replacing them with big frontman Murray and little pacy frontman Connolly.

It felt to this writer like Potter was saying, “We can’t get the ball up the pitch by playing football so we’re going to have to launch it.”

. . . Low block
But, the Blades, a goal to the good, sat back and absorbed it and let Brighton pass it around outside our final third and dealt with anything that came in.

You can see that in the passmap below. And also where Brighton’s subs played (the squares; the top and right ones are Murray and Connolly)

The chart below shows a timeline of passes bucketed into 10 minute periods and clearly shows when we let them have the ball more.

The PPDA (opponent passes per defensive action) chart also shows how we pressed in limited periods, mostly around the start of the halves. McBurnie’s goal came during a period (23 min) in which Blades’ pressure was low, and was in fact assisted by Henderson’s ball from inside his 6yd box.

PPDA needs to be seen as simply showing what happened. Whether a team pressed a lot and allowed fewer passes to the opposition is only a good thing if that’s what they want during part of a game. There are going to be periods for some teams where they want the other side to have the ball, however, and it’s probably fair to say that’s the case for Sheffield United for chunks of the 90 minutes on Saturday.

Brighton vs Blades preview, 3pm 21 Dec 2019

Expected assists and assists for BHA and Blades players. Pascal Gross stands out. xA explained below.

Brighton sit 13^th in the PL with 20 points while United are 7^th and have 25. Brighton are much improved on last season and have a more attacking character under Potter, with a league position that appears ‘honest’ (beating teams they should, losing to ones they’re more likely to).

The Blades and Brighton have scored the same number of goals (21) but Brighton have let more in (25, Blades 16). Last eight form is 1.38 points per game (United 1.63).

In terms of expected goals/against (xG/xGA), Brighton over-perform their xG while xGA is roughly where it should be. United are the other way on this, getting about the number of goals xG says they should while out-performing xGA.

Of the two teams’ individual players, Blades’ summer target Neil Maupay stands out in terms of xG, as seen here.

The number of shots taken by Brighton is 218 while they have allowed 229, with Sheffield United chalking up 174 and 191 on these counts.

Formation-wise Brighton appear to be very tactically flexible and have employed a wide range of shapes from a 5-4-1, through 4-1-2-1-2, to 3-4-1-2 so far this season. But for the most part 3-4-3 and 4-4-2 have been their preferred basic shape.

All this may point to Graham Potter setting up to suit the opponent at hand and with United almost invariably playing three at the back, BHA could set up similarly.

In terms of style Brighton are happy to play through the thirds or go long, with Pascal Gross a key link in midfield and topping the expected assists (*xA) chart (see top of page).

In terms of directness**, as averaged over all games so far, the two teams are near opposite ends of the scale, with Brighton’s desire to play from the back and build perhaps registering more than a tendency to go long.

Sheffield United’s high ranking in terms of directness probably masks their tendency to play quite high for periods during games.

It should be an entertaining game. For periods Sheffield United will try to take the game to Brighton and the Seagulls will be happy to start from low down the pitch. Both approaches have risks, of course, so it’s a question of who manages those and takes the opportunities that come.

(* xA or expected assists sees players assigned the xG value of shots that results from their pass)

(** Directness is calculated by the proportion of pass distance that is towards the opponent’s goal divided by total pass distance. Average line is the average of all players’ touches in a game.)

United won the xG battle (1.13 to 0.89) but that doesn’t tell the whole story. Both teams had about the same amount of shots (7 and 8) but Villa didn’t have one on target and looked fairly toothless for a lot of the game.

Blades’ goals came on 50′ and 73′, with Grealish’s missed penalty at 77′ (not on xG timeline).

This was also a rare occurrence in that the Blades had more possession than the opposition. Below are possession numbers by 10-minute period for the game.

Once again, and bucking last season’s trend, a lot of the offensive action came down the right. You can see who was involved when the ball got to that area in the average position map below — Basham, Baldock, Lundstram and McGoldrick — with Fleck benefitting twice from balls from that area of the pitch as he came in from the left/centre.

Sheffield United vs Aston Villa, 14 Dec 2019

(Blades 8th WDDDLW; Villa 17th LLWDLL)

This clash looks set to include some contrast in fortunes so far, and in styles. Villa have been a little more free-scoring than United, with 23 goals for (SUFC = 19).

Meanwhile though, Villa have given up the most shots in the division — 305, against Sheffield United’s 183.

Those numbers are reflected in the expected goals (xG) and expected goals against (xGA) stats, as seen here. That spanking off Leicester last week didn’t help Villa’s xGA line.

We may also see some clash in styles, with Villa tending to sit deeper and look for opportunities to counter while the Blades push on, at least until there is a lead to protect.

That’s most apparent in this chart, which shows how ‘sticky’ teams are up top by measuring their average line against numbers of passes in the last 20m (deep completions).

That Villa tend to build rapidly and not hang around in the opponent’s final third is also shown by the fact their touches in the box outweigh their deep completions (as a per-game average). For Sheffield United those numbers are the other way round, although the recent trend has been for that to reverse with more direct play evident.