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Gareth "Interesting" Southgate


Richard

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Great. Came to read and relish the Southgate gone posts and ended up with an unfeasible dull argument about XG. 

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25 minutes ago, Stevo985 said:

They log thousands and thousands of shots that have been taken from that position before and work out how many of them went in. That give you your probability.

Who is taking the shot is irrelevant

The type of shot is presumably also irrelevant too?  I'm guessing it's simply "header" vs "shot".

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1 minute ago, sidcow said:

Great. Came to read and relish the Southgate gone posts and ended up with an unfeasible dull argument about XG. 

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I think the argument shows that because xG has been so low, he was heavily reliant on individual moments of greatness from top players to turn something very unlikely into a goal.

That is a poor strategy, and top teams don't reply on such a tactic.

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1 minute ago, bobzy said:

The type of shot is presumably also irrelevant too?  I'm guessing it's simply "header" vs "shot".

Yeah I think models distinguish between headers and shots but that's the extent.

But I'm not 100%. Different models might go into more detail

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Just now, Mic09 said:

I think the argument shows that because xG has been so low, he was heavily reliant on individual moments of greatness from top players to turn something very unlikely into a goal.

That is a poor strategy, and top teams don't reply on such a tactic.

Yep.

The argument is basically a more precise way to say "If you only create a couple of chances and they're all screamers from outside the box you're unlikely to keep winning games"

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2 minutes ago, Mic09 said:

I think the argument shows that because xG has been so low, he was heavily reliant on individual moments of greatness from top players to turn something very unlikely into a goal.

That is a poor strategy, and top teams don't reply on such a tactic.

I think you've missed my point. What are the chances? 

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So glad he's gone. He should have been sacked after losing in the final to Italy.

That was arguably our best ever chance of winning a trophy, at home against an ageing Italian team and he blew it with his dreadful tactics.

He should be a politician with the bollocks he spouts out.

Now do us all a favour and bugger of to Manure at some time

 

 

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4 minutes ago, Stevo985 said:

 

Low probability things happen. It doesn't mean they'll keep happening

There's also no reason to think England will create identical chances (they didn't, and that never happens anyway), so there is no reason to predict England *won't* score, and in fact England only failed to score in one of the matches this tournament. 

The whole point is this is not a situation of random low-probability events like millions of people buying random lottery tickets. These are not repetitions of the same act, they're unique events in their own context. It's not 'people' winning the lottery because a) lottery tickets are all the same in terms of chance, and the whole point of xG is that shots are not the same, and b ) this is the same group of people achieving something with odds of 1 in 20 or worse on 4 out of 6 attempts. It would make sense to chalk this up to 'well low probability events will happen eventually' if England were having dozens of shots on goal per game but that was not the case.

So we're left with, either England were insanely lucky - I can't be bothered doing the maths, but MrBlack claims the odds are 177,285 to 1 - or the model is just not very good. 

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59 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

That tweet just shows how weak xG is as a measure of anything. The claim that 'relying on screamers' is 'unsustainable' is rather belied by the fact that something he thinks has a less than 1 in 20 chance of happening happened in 4 out of 6 matches. The claim is basically 'well it worked in reality, but it shouldn't have worked according to my model'. 

That's an odd take.  It's just statistical probability based on however many pieces of data are being used.

The odds of winning the Euromillions are something like 1 in 139,000,000 - however, people have won it.  It doesn't mean you should use the Euromillions as a means of reliable income.

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Just now, bobzy said:

That's an odd take.  It's just statistical probability based on however many pieces of data are being used.

The odds of winning the Euromillions are something like 1 in 139,000,000 - however, people have won it.  It doesn't mean you should use the Euromillions as a means of reliable income.

See above. It's not even remotely similar to buying lottery tickets. 

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36 minutes ago, MrBlack said:

Also, regarding you questioning the betting maths... if we take your figure of a 1 in 20 thing happening 4 times of of 6....

That has a 1 in 177,285 chance of happening.

If we assume Southgate need it to happen a 5th time to get us to extra time and a win on pens, it takes it up to a 1 in 3,368,421 chance of happening.

Funnily enough, that didn't happen.

Now I know those figures were plucked out the air, and I know that xG has its issues.

But it's a fact Southgate played low percentage football that kept things tight at the back but gave us little chance of scoring but for world class strikes from our world class forwards.

If you were a bookmaker, and someone had approached you in the 89th minute wanting to bet on England scoring an equaliser,  would you have offered them odds of 3,368,421 to one?

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2 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

There's also no reason to think England will create identical chances (they didn't, and that never happens anyway), so there is no reason to predict England *won't* score, and in fact England only failed to score in one of the matches this tournament. 

The whole point is this is not a situation of random low-probability events like millions of people buying random lottery tickets. These are not repetitions of the same act, they're unique events in their own context. It's not 'people' winning the lottery because a) lottery tickets are all the same in terms of chance, and the whole point of xG is that shots are not the same, and b ) this is the same group of people achieving something with odds of 1 in 20 or worse on 4 out of 6 attempts. It would make sense to chalk this up to 'well low probability events will happen eventually' if England were having dozens of shots on goal per game but that was not the case.

So we're left with, either England were insanely lucky - I can't be bothered doing the maths, but MrBlack claims the odds are 177,285 to 1 - or the model is just not very good. 

I really think you've gone off on a really weird direction with this.

Literally all it means is you're unlikely to keep winning games if you're not creating chances and the ones you're scoring from are low percentage.

Which proved to be the case

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8 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

See above. It's not even remotely similar to buying lottery tickets. 

No, that was more at the "sustainable" part.  You can look at anything actually happening and go "well, that proves it's sustainable", but the reality is that the more uncommon an event is, the less reliable it is and, therefore, more unsustainable.

The odds into a percentage of probability aspect doesn't work as MrBlack is saying because every single goal has a degree of "can be missed" to it so I can't see how a "1 xG" event is ever available and therefore you can't extrapolate odds from that.  But you cannot rely on all your goals coming from low-chance attempts because, statistically, those shots will not continually go in.

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Don't know what people are are talking about but all that matters is he has gone. What's gone on before doesn't matter now.  Now the FA have to make the biggest decision in the history of Englsh football. Get it right it could be a dynasty with all the talent in English football. No picking safe options because they tick all the boxes Southgate ticked 

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15 minutes ago, Stevo985 said:

I really think you've gone off on a really weird direction with this.

Literally all it means is you're unlikely to keep winning games if you're not creating chances and the ones you're scoring from are low percentage.

Which proved to be the case

Reverting to the mean.

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9 minutes ago, bobzy said:

No, that was more at the "sustainable" part.  You can look at anything actually happening and go "well, that proves it's sustainable", but the reality is that the more uncommon an event is, the less reliable it is and, therefore, more unsustainable.

The odds into a percentage of probability aspect doesn't work as MrBlack is saying because every single goal has a degree of "can be missed" to it so I can't see how a "1 xG" event is ever available and therefore you can't extrapolate odds from that.  But you cannot rely on all your goals coming from low-chance attempts because, statistically, those shots will not continually go in.

Luckily we didn't! The other two efforts on goal came that spring to mind were Foden from close range from a cross and the header in injury time. I bet the xG on those was way higher, but we didn't score so we're not discussing those. We probably should be, because I doubt that Southgate was sending the team out with a reminder to take shots from distance and unlikely angles, so the goals England scored can't be considered 'an approach' as such, they're just the chances that led to goals. 

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46 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

Well I can say it was sustainable, because it literally was sustained throughout the entire tournament. Luckily for me I'm not saying and haven't said that it was 'a good approach' or 'the likely outcome', just that it's a problem for the model if things it says are extremely unlikely keep happening over and over again, and that even if you do chalk this up to a truly extraordinary level of luck it makes no sense to claim it's 'unsustainable' *after the tournament is over* when it has been sustained!

I agree with your second paragraph, though that's probably far from the only problem with it.

You can get away with it to an extent in a 7 game tournament.

We'll see how it stacks up in a league season when he takes over at Old Trafford in November.

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1 minute ago, HanoiVillan said:

Luckily we didn't! The other two efforts on goal came that spring to mind were Foden from close range from a cross and the header in injury time. I bet the xG on those was way higher, but we didn't score so we're not discussing those. We probably should be, because I doubt that Southgate was sending the team out with a reminder to take shots from distance and unlikely angles, so the goals England scored can't be considered 'an approach' as such, they're just the chances that led to goals. 

No, that's fair.  You should take the whole into account:

"England did not shoot in great volume, and when they did those shots were not of great quality. Low volume, low quality is just about the worst of all possible worlds.
Southgate’s team produced just 0.88 expected goals per 90 minutes across their seven games, ranking them 19th of 24 teams. Their xG per 90 minutes was lower than Romania, Ukraine, Georgia and Slovakia. When penalties are discounted, England fall to 20th."

(Link:  https://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/2024/07/15/stats-show-england-did-not-have-good-euro-2024/)

 

Sounds good.

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