2020-21 has been a difficult season to follow. It started late, because of [gestures wildly at 2020] and is finishing at a normal time because we need to get last year’s continental international tournament done and dusted before the World Cup next year. In such a context, it’s been all too easy to miss stuff going on. We can all recall the big storylines and the glamour info but what subtler pieces of information that seemed important were actually misleading? Here are four of them.
The Six Days of Brighton being Pure Brighton that cured Brighton
Everyone knows the Brighton ethos. They’re good. They’re progressive. They create good chances. They’re tight at the back. They lose matches. As February drew to a close, things were lurching from the sub-prime to the ridiculous, as Graham Potter’s men suffered haunting defeats in the space of six days to Crystal Palace and West Brom. Those ancient overlords of banks of four, Roy Hodgson and Sam Allardyce, had bested Potter’s short goal kick aesthetic and put the Seagulls into a proper fear-of-relegation scenario, but they absolutely shouldn’t have. In raw expected goals terms, the two unluckiest defeats of the Premier League season were those two Brighton losses in late February. Their xG was +2.15 higher than Palace’s in the first of them (lost 2-1) and +2.28 higher than WBA’s the following weekend. The latter game was the one where Brighton had a goal disallowed due to some rogue multi-whistling from Lee Mason, as well as missing two penalties. Pure Brighton and Hove Albion. Doomed by their own ethos. And yet that was the lowest point. Recovery was near and by the end of the season Potter was standing tall as Hodgson and Allardyce departed their clubs, the latter relegated from the top-flight for the first time in his career.
Harry Kane The King of Creation?
We are living through the very dramatic conclusion to Harry Kane’s domestic season, a storyline that will probably obscure the beginning of Kane’s campaign, when he became the most creative player in the division. Or did he? Some of the narrative about Kane moving to, say, Manchester City, this summer is built on the incredible assist numbers he generated in the first half of the season. By the turn of the year, Kane had 10 assists, three more than any other Premier League player and as many as Arsenal (assists are not a team metric but in this sort of instance, they can be). But the truth of the matter was that Kane’s 10 assists had come from an xA figure of 1.54. At the same point, West Ham’s soon-to-depart Sébastien Haller had the same xA figure and a grand total of zero assists. Now some of this can be explained by the fact that Kane, as a central striker, makes relatively few passes, and that he was also the beneficiary of some incredibly above average finishing from Son Heung-Min (eight of Kane’s 10 assists had been for the Korean), but even so, it didn’t look sustainable and so it has proven. Kane had already shattered his seasonal best for assists by New Year’s Day but has added just three more between January and now. He’s an elite striker and should be viewed as such. The additional creativity was just a mad autumn, we’ve all had them.
Almiron’s Lucky Day
This is no time to dwell on Southampton’s traditional 9-0 defeat of the season but instead investigate an entertaining yet relatively overlooked defeat for the club up at Newcastle in February. Very much the start of Newcastle’s late-season revival, given Joe Willock scored on his debut, the other two United goals in the 3-2 win came from Miguel Almirón, who did so from a total xG within the game of just 0.09. No player in the last five Premier League seasons has mustered two goals in a single game from a lower xG. Almiron’s first was a cross-shot helped into the Southampton net by perma-unfortunate Jan Bednarek, while the second was an effort from distance, capitalising on loose distribution from Saints keeper Alex McCarthy. So, just a few days after falling 9-0 at Old Trafford, Southampton felt 0.09-ill against Almiron.
Virgil’s Secret
Perhaps the ultimate misleading bit of 2020-21 information concerns Virgil van Dijk. The Liverpool defender’s injury in his club’s game at Everton in October shaped the rest of the campaign for the club, especially as he was joined on the long-term absence list by Joe Gomez, Joel Matip and seemingly every other central defender in a 36 mile radius of Anfield. It’s clear that the club’s defence of their Premier League title would have been better with the Dutchman in their ranks… and yet the Reds were still title favourites after beating Crystal Palace 7-0 just before Christmas, more than two months after van Dijk’s knee injury. Meanwhile van Dijk has a goals conceded per game rate of 2.2 in the Premier League this season, no defender to have made five or more appearances in the competition this season has higher. Obviously that figure is strongly impacted by the 7-2 reversal at Aston Villa, a match in which Adrian deputised in goal not entirely perfectly, but even so, the idea that simply slotting van Dijk into Liverpool’s defence all season would have solved every issue they’ve suffered, doesn’t really stand up. Maybe Ruben Dias would have been the defender of the season in all of the timelines, not just the one we’re actually experiencing.
