Graphic: European football conversion rates

The following chart displays the efficiency of European football forwards my mapping their conversion rate (goals per shot) against the number of shots per game.

The higher on the Y-axis the forward, the more efficient the player in front of goal; the farther to the right on the X-axis, the more shots they generate.  Only players with four goals or more this season were considered (ie. forwards

Read More

Huntelaar a great fit at Liverpool

Reds fans must be salivating.  Liverpool have today been linked with Klaas-Jan Huntelaar, the 29-year old Dutch goalpoacher extraordinaire of Schalke
04.  Should the transfer come to fruition
– which is eminently possible, but a long way off – it would remedy perhaps
Liverpool’s greatest failing so far this term, converting on-ball dominance into
goals.



So far this year, Liverpool rank sixth

Read More

Juan Mata leads (another) Chelsea revolution

It's hard to be mad at anything that
scampers. Likewise disdainful, jealous or irritated. As a word, scamper
is used generally when something flits about in a light-footed
manner, implying that the observer receives some kind of pleasing
entertainment just from the sight.




No-one scampers with malice – it
can't be done. Any attempts veer quickly towards scurrying, or it's
less desirable

Read More

Pim Verbeek finally shows he has balls by criticising mess he left

Former Socceroos coach Pim Verbeek has
been quoted in Qatari media as saying Australian
football faces a bleak period as the brightest stars in
Australian football history are slowly extinguished.



Well, you'd know, Pim.



His Aussie tenure was marked
by Viking-style honesty. Did you ever meet someone so honest
that every conversation you had with them ended up revolving around
your faults?

Read More

Shelvey, Suso and Sterling: Liverpool's future

Liverpool's three years of struggle has
been not only documented but celebrated. In fact, their primacy over
much of English football's history means that the rebuilding efforts
of 2012-13 are providing not only column inches, but also the
can't-look-away-car-wreck Hard
Knocks clone, Being: Liverpool.



The stilted attempt at a fly's-view
series has attempted several times to conjur interest

Read More

Time for UEFA to act strongly on Serbia

After a hard-fought win against Collingwood in 1993, Australian footballer Nicky Winmar turned to the crowd at Victoria park, raised
his jersey and pointed at his chest.




Winmar is an indigenous Australian. He
had spent the entire 120 minutes of the match being racially abused
by the pro-Collingwood crowd. The moment was captured on film by a
photographer from the Age newspaper and went

Read More

Minnows deserve their puncher's chance

Proboxing-fans.com's lexicon
of pugilistic nomenclature defines a “Puncher's Chance” as
“[a fighter] who doesn't have a very good chance of beating the
other fighter, who is probably more skilled, but could still pull off
the win by landing a great punch and knocking his man out”.




Basically, a puncher's chance is what
it says on the tin. It was the concept that defined all six Rocky
movies

Read More