Team Focus: Cardiff's Need to Solve Goalscoring Woes

Ole Gunnar Solskjaer was rueful after his Cardiff City side’s 2-0 defeat at home to West Ham United on Saturday, a result that leaves them in the relegation zone, just a point above Sunderland and Crystal Palace. It’s so tight at the bottom – six points separating the bottom 11 sides - that there’s no reason for panic, but Solskjaer’s point seemed deeper than that.

“We had about double the possession of them, we had twice the shots,” he said. “So sometimes football is that way, that you don't get what you deserve.” Actually Cardiff had 63% possession to West Ham’s 37% and 19 shots to 10, but the general point stands. In each of the two metrics generally used to give a rough idea of who has dominated a game, Cardiff came out comfortably on top.

The insistence on the importance of the shots tally is itself telling of how Solskjaer looks at the game. In Norway in the nineties, when Egil Olsen was in his pomp, he would regularly talk about chances, justifying disappointing draws by pointing out his side had had more shots than the opposition, or dampening enthusiasm after a win by pointing out the shot count had been almost equal. His use of that statistic was so common that it became ingrained in the Norwegian football consciousness and it’s hardly surprising that Solskjaer, having played for the national side under Olsen, should have absorbed the theory.

Charles Reep, the pioneer of match analysis in English football, was similarly convinced that focusing only on goals was an error: that in one match, or even a run of a handful of matches, a team might be lucky or unlucky, that chances offered a fan better snapshot of whether a team had been in control or not, from which long-term predictions could be made to which goals scored and conceded would eventually adhere.

Reep’s analysis showed that it took on average nine chances to score a goal, a figure that Olsen claims still holds true today. This season in the Premier League there have been 5630 shots and 559 goals – so 10.07 shots per goal. Whether you use that figure or Reep’s rule of thumb, Olsenian logic would suggest Cardiff ‘should’ have won 2-1 on Saturday.

But of course it’s not as simple as that. Manchester City have scored 59 goals this season with just 366 shots – a goal every 6.2 shots. Now perhaps that is partly down to luck, but surely even Reep would agree that it’s also because City have some exceptionally good forwards, who are extremely efficient at taking chances, and also exceptionally good creators who generate chances more likely to be converted that what we might call a ‘typical’ chance.

Olsen himself went through a spell of trying to categorise chances into three grades of likeliness of scoring before deciding that for his sides it made little difference. When Tottenham were struggling to score earlier in the season, despite averaging more shots per game than any other side in the league, he suggested the reason was they were attempting too many speculative long shots. Spurs now are third in the shots per game rankings, and have scored 26 goals with 350 shots – 13.46 shots per goal.

So where does that leave Cardiff? Their tally of 15 goals scored is the second lowest in the division, and they also have the second-lowest shots per game rate (10.9). Those goals have come in 228 shots – it takes them 15.2 shots per goal. That suggests that Cardiff’s inefficiency in front of goal on Saturday was not a one-off but an on-going problem. The question then is whether the best way to rectify it is with better finishers or by designing a system that produces better chances.

Can Cardiff beat the drop? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below