Hey, welcome to part 5 of the rapidly expanding look at the 2011/12 EPL season.
After the jump we'll be looking at shots against in a home and then an away context and if they are linked to performance in the EPL
2011/12 EPL Table By Shots Against Per game (home)
By Chart
By Graphic
Now, we can see a little better uniformity here with shots against than we did with shots for. We see City-a very strong outfit both offensively and defensively-, Arsenal, a stingy Liverpool side-in terms of shots against-and Spurs rounding out that top 4. A suprise by this measure is Man Utd, who are 10th with a 12.84 score which is below the mean. This is the mighty Man Utd, at Old Trafford, a below average team in terms of shots given up (although quite how indicative a measure shots are is up for debate). Still it's quite shocking to see them there in the middle of the pack.
Now, we have seen Stoke near the bottom of all the measures we have looked at thus far, yet, this is where they claw back the ground and show us why they finished with 47 points, they are hard to play against, hard to generate offense against both home and away.
Wolves terrible by this measure, 5 shots per game the wrong side of the mean. Sunderland again show up near the bottom with nigh 4 shots per game conceded the wrong side of the average.
2011/12 EPL Table By Shots Against Per game (away)
By Chart
By Graphic
There are a fair few teams the good side of the mean here in the shots against per game category. They are the teams we might expect too, the teams that don't give it away on the road. Arsenal are the suprise at the top of the chart, again we are wary of putting too much on just shot data. Arsenal had the 3rd best EPL away record and we can think of that as we look at Arsenal conceding only 12 shots per game away from home. It's still a mighty good number when put against the classic image of Arsenal as an attacking side in recent seasons.
Everton, always hard to play against are third here. Liverpool are near the top too. United fall to 5th despite having the best away record. Yet more small pieces of evidence that points to Utd riding unsustainable away PDO/save %/scoring% numbers (more to come on this). Newcastle, yet again, look mid table. Sunderland are bottom 3 again by this measure.
QPR conceded too many shots, that led to too many goals and a embarrassingly narrow escape from relegation for Mark Hughes.
Only Man Utd , Stoke and Wolves got anywhere near to conceding as few a number of shots on the road as they did at home. It is a hard thing to level the shot count up on the road.
Shot differential home/away will be the next post up.
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