Rayvin

Too wasteful with some of these passes.

Wood and Longstaff as coached and developed by Howe though, in his systems. We don't have superstar depth yet, fair enough, but that can't be news to you just off the back of this teamsheet man

The bench has options for left back though so Howe hasn't been forced into selecting Burn here, he's chosen it. We should take some comfort from that IMO.

Manquillo on the bench. Not trusted over Burn I suppose.

Cheers for the missing context

If it's not already an incredibly impressive marketing stunt, they should fucking hire whoever is behind toonpolls

WTF. Some account called ToonPolls is behind it and... has somehow persuaded several large international companies to tweet his name?? Why

I will always appreciate that phrase

Fucking hell man The word 'cringe' is currently an internet slang term for 'uncool' or 'lame' and in this case fully captures, across all meanings, Pearson's persona. At this rate it'll not be long before someone 'yeets' him into the sea.

Reading that has literally cheered my whole day up Renton, just seeing you bounce back to some positivity after all that shit. It didn't kill you, so it will make you stronger. Good luck with all of it.

I assume there's an intermediate step where it travels from Lyon to Newcastle, why is that not the one to focus on? Or is that one off the radar?

I think this should be a question on the next leadership debate.

Nice to see YouGov asking the important questions there. That's caused a storm in the twitter comments mind you, people really trying to justify that it has two holes. One person even noting that it's two holes connected together Surely at that point you could also say it's a million holes connected together?

Thank you for clarifying this because I read this tweet and assumed I must have been phrasing it incorrectly my whole life, and had intended to change to this version

It really does feel as if Johnson is operating entirely on the basis of pure spite at this point. Wouldn't surprise me at all if he's sat around in number 10 on the playstation all day.

I appreciate that sentiment

While I fully respect the what you're saying here in many senses, I do wish to note that in my sad existence, obsessing over data and excel sheets is actually pretty fun. So yeah, I don't need to do it, none of us need to do it, but some of us just find it kinda enjoyable I occasionally run up excel for hobbies tbh...

Yeah I can see that argument, I think I was viewing xG more as a kind of running tally of goals they scored versus goals they should have scored, all built into a single data point. Thus a lower value would be reflective of inefficiency. As I said, I've not looked at this properly ever so that's my fault, confusion is on me. I think with my logic it was the idea that 0 would be total inefficiency and 1 would be total efficiency, and the specific number placed itself somewhere between those two values. Based on what you've outlined, I now understand - and then yes, your logic holds around interpreting it. Either way, still a useful metric.

So do I have it the wrong way round then? My understanding of xG is that it tracks goals you would expect to see from the position and circumstance that a player is in. So if someone has a low XG with high goals, to me that would suggest that this player has many opportunities in which you would expect them to score, and is only able to convert a limited number of them. That's clearly the opposite of what you're saying, so I'm wondering what I'm misunderstanding in my premise about what xG is?

I wasn't going to comment on this whole topic because I'm squarely on the fence and want to avoid being a "fanny" That said though, as a data man at heart, i feel that xG does have merit even applied across the full spectrum of players. Yes forwards might have a higher xG than players in other positions absolutely, but they're also far more likely to actually be in an xG position to start with, since that is their job. So the value potentially becomes in analysing the player as an individual irrespective of their team. If the best striker in the world is in a shit team, he may have very few chances to score. On paper, this may mean that he appears to be a poor player. "Only 10 goals per season? We need a 20 goal man ffs". xG can demonstrate a nuance that we otherwise wouldn't be able to see, which is that if the player had a high xG held alongside a low overall return on goals, we might conclude that in a better team he would score far more. This potentially reveals "diamonds in the rough" as it were. If the player has a low xG but a high return on goals, maybe his teammates are doing most of the work for him and giving him plenty of chances to look good. I think the latter formulation of this might be more obvious to casual viewing than the former. Anyway that's my two cents. I want to point out that I actually know nothing about it, I've just vaguely assumed that this must be the premise. Watch it turn out that I'm wrong

@The Fish Who do you think we should aim for? I'm lost in the sea of names now and tbh it's starting to get a bit tedious.

Head says we lose this. Still don't think we're quite there yet, or at least I'm not used to the idea that we might be. Heart says we win 2-0.

Fucking hell.

https://www.theguardian.com/football/who-scored-blog/2022/aug/10/newcastle-europe-joelinton-bruno-guimaraes-midfield-eddie-howe A couple of days ago I was reading one of those articles about Manchester that comes up every now and again - how shit they are, what the flavour of their crisis is now. And I was annoyed by it. After all these years, we still have to talk about that empty shell of a club on its perpetual downward journey. When, I thought, will they write about my club just for the hell of it? And here we are. Not even written by Louise Taylor. Comments open too, so you can see the sheer, unadulterated fume by the mentally feeble. We're starting to get somewhere.