To win a game of football you have to score at least 1 goal.
End of.
QED. Scoring a goal is far more important than letting one in. If you never conceed, but never score either you will end up with 46 0-0 draws......46 points. Most likely get relegated.
It really is that simple. Attack is more important than defence. Score more goals than the opposition & you win. Whether that is 1-0 or 7-6.
Ah yes, the good old WM formation.
What was life like back then Golfie? (Apart from everything being in black and white)
To get promoted all that needs to happen is for every other team to get docked 138 points each. You then don't need much of a defence, or an attack, and the ball can be a scrunched up piece of paper.
There is some schoolperson thinking on this thread.
Not all goals are equal.
The opening goal in any match is enormous. It could prove to be the only goal. Conversely, the fifth in a 5-0 win is entirely unnecessary and could, in the worst case, actually use up a goal that might be better employed in the subsequent match. After all, a striker is only going to get a defined number of goals in a season (as History shows us), so you don't want them being wasted away frivolously turning 4-0 into 5-0.
The same goes, of course, for consolation goals. Tucking one home after 88 mins to reduce the arrears from 0-4 to 1-4 is pointless. Hold on for ten playing minutes and make it the opening goal in the next game.
No, no. 1-0 is the perfect score. Nothing wasted. Functional. Minimalist.
In a strange fictional world where each team had a fixed ration of goals and they spent them as they saw fit throughout the season, you would be absolutely correct.
Back in the real world, there is no fixed limit on scoring and no direct causality between one goal and the next. You can hold on for ten minutes all you like, but it will have no more effect on your next game than it will help you fly through the air.
Oh, so much fun to have here:
No fixed limit on scoring? So, a player (any player) can score an infinite number of goals?
No direct causality between one goal and the next? You don't think that a team four goals up will generally play with more confidence and therefore be more likely to score a fifth?
Your table of research is also interesting. I especially like the last three rows where I discovered that, if a team scores but doesn't concede, they will earn three points per game, but that this drops to zero if they concede but don't score. The curious 'don't score, don't concede' option will net an average of one point per game though ... so it's not all bad news. Dull to watch though.
What can happen if you don't score enough goals as a team, is that it puts more pressure on the defence as they know an error potentially has a higher price.
There is some schoolperson thinking on this thread.
Not all goals are equal.
The opening goal in any match is enormous. It could prove to be the only goal. Conversely, the fifth in a 5-0 win is entirely unnecessary and could, in the worst case, actually use up a goal that might be better employed in the subsequent match. After all, a striker is only going to get a defined number of goals in a season (as History shows us), so you don't want them being wasted away frivolously turning 4-0 into 5-0.
The same goes, of course, for consolation goals. Tucking one home after 88 mins to reduce the arrears from 0-4 to 1-4 is pointless. Hold on for ten playing minutes and make it the opening goal in the next game.
No, no. 1-0 is the perfect score. Nothing wasted. Functional. Minimalist.
In a strange fictional world where each team had a fixed ration of goals and they spent them as they saw fit throughout the season, you would be absolutely correct.
Back in the real world, there is no fixed limit on scoring and no direct causality between one goal and the next. You can hold on for ten minutes all you like, but it will have no more effect on your next game than it will help you fly through the air.
Oh, so much fun to have here:
No fixed limit on scoring? So, a player (any player) can score an infinite number of goals?
No direct causality between one goal and the next? You don't think that a team four goals up will generally play with more confidence and therefore be more likely to score a fifth?
Your table of research is also interesting. I especially like the last three rows where I discovered that, if a team scores but doesn't concede, they will earn three points per game, but that this drops to zero if they concede but don't score. The curious 'don't score, don't concede' option will net an average of one point per game though ... so it's not all bad news. Dull to watch though.
No, of course a player can't score an infinite amount of goals. A game is of a fixed duration and it takes a certain amount of time to score a goal, ergo there will be a point beyond which a team can't score any more. But this limit is both unknown and unfixed since different circumstances would change the amount of time it became possible to score in. More importantly the laws of probability mean that we never get anywhere near that level of scoring. There is a man called Jimmy Melrose who could score a goal in 9 seconds from kick off. There is no reason in theory why he could not replicate this over and over again. If he did so he'd bag 600 goals in a match. Of course he never did and sadly Charlton's record goal tally stands at a rather more modest eight. A lot more than the four or five you were talking about but still nowhere near the point where scoring another goal is impossible.
Lots of things happen in matches. Your point about confidence is a good one, but things happen that push things in the opposite direction as well. What about teams that play catenaccio style? If one of them scores, they'll be less likely to attack pushing the trend in the other direction. But neither of these give us direct causality between one goal and the next. There may be indirect influence caused by confidence, tactics or some other confounding variable but no single goal is ever directly attributable to another, they are separate events*.
You're right, three of the bottom for lines tell us nothing about football that a five year old wouldn't know. I deliberately left them in though to signify the validity of my data.
Good fun
*I'm going to prove myself wrong with that last statement. I can remember a team once deliberately scoring an own goal to even up a goal they scored in unfair circumstances (I think something about an injury but I can't remember the details). That one was definitely caused by the previous one, but that's why it was such a talking point.
There is some schoolperson thinking on this thread.
Not all goals are equal.
The opening goal in any match is enormous. It could prove to be the only goal. Conversely, the fifth in a 5-0 win is entirely unnecessary and could, in the worst case, actually use up a goal that might be better employed in the subsequent match. After all, a striker is only going to get a defined number of goals in a season (as History shows us), so you don't want them being wasted away frivolously turning 4-0 into 5-0.
The same goes, of course, for consolation goals. Tucking one home after 88 mins to reduce the arrears from 0-4 to 1-4 is pointless. Hold on for ten playing minutes and make it the opening goal in the next game.
No, no. 1-0 is the perfect score. Nothing wasted. Functional. Minimalist.
That's, word for word, what George Graham told LB when he managed him at Leeds!
Well, actually, this is what George Graham taught LB and perhaps offers a bit of an insight as to why the likes of Williams and Oztumer have struggled to get a regular starting spot:
However it was what happened next Bowyer says made him into the player, and now manager, he eventually became.
He said: “In George Graham, the club brought in someone who instilled something new in me. Who made me a better player.
“How? He dropped me. I’d been playing well: scoring goals, making goals, but I didn’t really track back. Until I did that, George said I wasn’t going to play.
“I wasn’t convinced. He won’t drop me. I’m flying, but he did. I remember one game, we were 3-2 down to Derby [County] after the first half and he brought me off the bench at half-time. We ended up winning 4-3, and I scored the winner.
“I played really well when I came on, too. Changed the game. Surely, I’ve got to start next week.
“But no. I was back on the bench. That lasted for about six weeks. In George’s mind, until I started doing the other side of the game, I was worth sacrificing for the good of the team. Yeah, I might do something good going forward, but I could let them down going the other way,
“I learned that you can’t carry anyone. It wasn’t about punishing me. He was thinking about the team.”
That would explain why he told Taylor to improve his work rate after playing two games for Cafc. He did and the rest is history. Also the reason why despite his magic feet Fosu went from main man for Robinson to reserve player under Bowyer. Fosu talent was always going to see him back in the Championship and I'm pleased he got his move to Brentford after impressing for Oxford under Robinson who always believed in him.
Lee played the lightweight but hard working Vennings over Morgan when we had so many injuries last season at the valley.
Managers have different opinions but maybe we need to stop buying players who can only play for 60 minutes if we are going to copy the blue print of George Graham.
The table above shows Charlton's league games for the last three full seasons: 2017-18, 2018-19 and 2019-20. It shows (at least for us over those three seasons) not conceding was the best foundation for totalling a lot of points, whereas not scoring was the surest way of ensuring a poor points haul. I guess the biggest thing we can learn from this though was bleeding obvious anyway: both are important.
That’s a good bit of research, @stig. I’m thinking that by being defensive we might usually concede 0 or 1 goal. What are our points per game when conceding 0 or 1?
Comments
What was life like back then Golfie? (Apart from everything being in black and white)
You then don't need much of a defence, or an attack, and the ball can be a scrunched up piece of paper.
No fixed limit on scoring? So, a player (any player) can score an infinite number of goals?
No direct causality between one goal and the next? You don't think that a team four goals up will generally play with more confidence and therefore be more likely to score a fifth?
Your table of research is also interesting. I especially like the last three rows where I discovered that, if a team scores but doesn't concede, they will earn three points per game, but that this drops to zero if they concede but don't score. The curious 'don't score, don't concede' option will net an average of one point per game though ... so it's not all bad news. Dull to watch though.
Lots of things happen in matches. Your point about confidence is a good one, but things happen that push things in the opposite direction as well. What about teams that play catenaccio style? If one of them scores, they'll be less likely to attack pushing the trend in the other direction. But neither of these give us direct causality between one goal and the next. There may be indirect influence caused by confidence, tactics or some other confounding variable but no single goal is ever directly attributable to another, they are separate events*.
You're right, three of the bottom for lines tell us nothing about football that a five year old wouldn't know. I deliberately left them in though to signify the validity of my data.
Good fun
*I'm going to prove myself wrong with that last statement. I can remember a team once deliberately scoring an own goal to even up a goal they scored in unfair circumstances (I think something about an injury but I can't remember the details). That one was definitely caused by the previous one, but that's why it was such a talking point.
That would explain why he told Taylor to improve his work rate after playing two games for Cafc. He did and the rest is history.
Also the reason why despite his magic feet Fosu went from main man for Robinson to reserve player under Bowyer. Fosu talent was always going to see him back in the Championship and I'm pleased he got his move to Brentford after impressing for Oxford under Robinson who always believed in him.
Lee played the lightweight but hard working Vennings over Morgan when we had so many injuries last season at the valley.
Managers have different opinions but maybe we need to stop buying players who can only play for 60 minutes if we are going to copy the blue print of George Graham.