One of the cooler sites I have stumbled upon was sent to me by a good Swedish friend (HT: Daniel). He, like me, is an Arsenal fan and must get a good bit of his coverage of that team from outside of the US. Unlike me, he has been a fan for longer than a year and having lived in Europe is much more in tune with the UK press that covers their domestic league. The Guardian has a really cool "Create your Chalkboard" feature where you can get the summary statistics and where each event occurred on the pitch from any game in the last four Premier League seasons. It's quite a neat web application (and allows embedding like any good web app should), one I plan on using regularly for any Premier League analysis.
As any good Arsenal fan knows, watching our Gunners can sometimes be maddening as they play such a beautiful game that they often seem content to pass to each other rather than score. The chalkboard function allows comparisons between two matches or attributes. The embedded chalkboard below compares the 2008-2009 and 2009-2010 Arsenal/Tottenham matches at White Hart Lane. One can see that the match from last season had a lot fewer passes and at least a draw for the Gunners. This season's match had far more passing, and Arsenal's first loss to Tottenham in more than 10 years of league play. If one plots the Arsenal vs. Tottenham passing in this year's match, they find that Arsenal passed 555 times in the 2010 match to Tottenham's 241.
I hope to explore this trait of Arsenal's in a future blog post, but I need the 2009-2010 season to mercifully finish for the banged up Gunners before I can do so. Some questions that come to mind are:
- On average, does Arsenal pass more than other teams?
- Are Arsenal more likely to make more passes than their competition at home, away, or both?
- Are Arsenal more or less efficient than the competition at doing what wins matches - convert passes to assists and scoring goals?
by Guardian Chalkboards
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