Liverpool have not been as successful lately as they might have been, and Mo Salah has seen fingers pointed his way after not passing at crucial moments. Are both inextricably linked?
And a lot of the supporter-led aggravation over missed chances appears to fall at the feet of Salah. So can it be justified?
Prior to delving into the numbers, some caveats are rewarding: any annoyance is obviously a stunted amount–that the group isn’t fighting for goals or form, it is only an inevitability that individuals will search for perfection or at least areas that may be improved.
Also, we will only look at Premier League data for today, given that is the vast majority of football the majority of the staff have played over the past two months and how the nature of European soccer changes quite radically game to match.
We have won all six (obviously ), scoring 12 goals on the way, but it possibly should have been a few over that, and contributing to this idea is that Salah himself has’only’ two goals in those six games, by a total of 22 shots.
A nine percent conversion rate across those fixtures is rather abysmal but is also far below Salah’s strike-rate for the entire season–see the tables below for the way he compares to the rest of Europe’s 10 most ordinary shot-monsters.
Against Wolves on Thursday, Salah had six attempts, which were weighted thus Concerning scoring probability:
17 mins: 14 percent
18 mins: 2 percent
45+1 mins: 8 percent
46 mins: 7 percent
50 mins: 5 percent
69 mins: 8 percent
Average: 7.3percent
Not a huge average and even the complete xG for Salah’s attempts were only 0.44. For instance, Raul Jimenez’s headed equaliser was 0.28 alone, while Diogo Jota’s late miss stood a better likelihood of being a target than most of Salah’s shots united, at 0.48.
Across the six-game spell, we are considering, Salah’s 22 shots weigh in with an ordinary xG value of 0.13, a single high of 0.47 (his close-range overlook against United) and a low of 0.02 (second shot at Wolves).
Both goals Salah scored in such 22 shots (against Man United and Sheffield United) had exactly the identical xG worth of 39 percent.
Salah normally scores off reasonably significant probability opportunities, with nothing under 12 percent and only two of his 11 goals coming from attempts with an xG below 0.20.
Thus, his latest average of 0.13 could be viewed as way below the required shot quality scope for Salah to be constantly attempting to score from and has certainly led as a knock-on effect to his lower-than-usual conversion speed.
A whopping 17 of his 22 shots across the past six games, 77 percent of them have experienced an xG of less than 0.12, therefore it is sensible to see why people’s frustrations might happen: the shots he is taking on aren’t, typically, the quality or type of shot he scores out of.
