Be Clinical

Ok, so xG isn’t the be-all and end-all, but we had better xG in the Cambridge, Gillingham and Doncaster games. The actual balance of chances suggests we should be nine points better off than we are now. Gillingham’s xG was a paltry 0.89, meaning they had fewer clear cut opportunities than any team going back to Shrewsbury in October. That will bring me to another point in a moment, but it does show that even though we played badly there, we are still getting into the right places to score goals; we’re just not doing it. John Marquis has been guilty of this in recent weeks; he should have scored against Bolton twice and on Saturday in the first half, whilst Chris Maguire and Morgan Whittaker have also missed good opportunities in the last ten days or so. You can even go back to Cambridge, where we were the better team and were only kept at bay by great goalkeeping from their number one.

If we actually took our chances, not even all of them, just an additional one or two, we’d be in a much better place. Gillingham is annoying because they were there for the taking, and if Marquis puts that one away before half time, they’d have had to advance a little more and actually threaten us, leaving spaces for us to attack at the back. They didn’t though, they just kept it tight and waited for the now-customary gift-wrapped chance to score. We have to make sure if the opposition are scoring against us, we’re doing the same when a chance arrives, which right now, we’re not.

We were bad against Gillingham, but look at the attacking momentum; they claim to have been playing well, yet the balance of play suggests it was two bad teams competing against each other, which it was.