Tottenham 3-1 City: A look at the shot battle

It was a strange pattern of events yesterday in terms of the shot battle between the two sides. After an early Tottenham effort, City fairly dominated not only the remainder of the half but up to around the 70th minute when they were blitzed by three goals on three consecutive shots in the game (which shuddertothink assures me is a first during 2012/13 at least):

We can also see this late burst perhaps better illustrated in the moving shot average, which charts a teams average shots per minute over the course of the game. This shows that City enjoyed the better of the shot battle pretty much from the midpoint of the first half right through until a quarter of an hour remaining:

Despite some of he narrative being that City collapsed in the second half in the face of a Tottenham onslaught brought about the tactical nous of Andre Villas-Boas. The reality instead could be that a goal down, and which we have seen happen in the majority of games where we have looked at TSR, Tottenham were always likely, being a goal down, to have a spell of pressure as they sought a way back into the game. Not often though does the result in the type of end result that saw Tottenham completely turn around the game.

Perhaps, when Roberto Mancini protested that City had merely been unlucky to end up on the wrong end of a defeat he wasn't too far wide of the mark?

The breakdown of the type of shots does however highlight an area where City have struggled throughout the season, and one that has likely had a significant bearing on the title ending up at Old Trafford: converting chances:

It is evident that in 2012/13 City have failed to convert chances or shots into goals at the rate they did in 2011/12. The reality is also that City and United are not too different in terms of quality within the squad (and I would still back to have the better squad 'on their day' but United have clearly been more proficient at converting chances this season.

Once again on Sunday we saw City equal their opponents in terms of getting shots away but there on target count was lower, a problem that has haunted them throughout the season and will surely be an area addressed this summer.