What was wrong with Lacazette?

We had Kolo Toure at CB, he was actually our best player on the night.

What really stings about the whole thing though is Sakho was banned for the final for that failed drugs test and it turns out WADA messed up and he'd taken nothing illegal. Liverpool must have grounds for legal action.

Minor leg muscle injury. His absence ended up being big as Fekir wasted a couple golden opportunities. Lyon are capable of scoring 3 at home if Lacazette is back, but I don't see how they don't concede at least 1-2, so all may be lost.

Yeah. Anyone?

I dunno he mostly got a few balls shot dead center / right at him*
As soon as someone praised his performance I had flashbacks of Ochoa 2014 who also got lots of praise that I didn't agree with.


*By Ziyech a.o. - who, except for finishing, did everything superbly though so I forgive him. He even got 3 assists I think?

Anyone know why this game was played on a Wednesday?

Wow! Dominating performance.

Yeah tomorrow is national remembrance day (mainly for WW2 victims), which features a pretty big memorial event in Amsterdam including 2 minutes of silence at 8PM so the city of Amsterdam requested the game to be played a day earlier instead. UEFA agreed.

Oh, finally UEFA do the right thing.

Well that and we played an actual good team from a good league who'd won the EL the previous 2 seasons

Yeah I was extremely surprised myself

Thanks. Bit underwhelming though

So is the interpretation of xG that Ajax ran good because they outscored xG? Because watching he game it felt like they could have legitimately had 10 goals

There's your problem right there

It's pretty silly to declare that a team ran good or bad with a one game sample of xG data, except in truly exceptional cases (where it would also be obvious to the eye test). I'd imagine scoring four goals from 2.7 xG is easily within a normal range of outcomes. Actually something that I think would be interesting to post along with the raw xG of a team in a given match would be how often teams with that xG score 0,1,2,3 or 4 goals.

Plus, of course, finishing a difficult chance is as much skill as making a difficult pass to create an easy chance. It's just that the data clearly suggests that the latter is more of a repeatable skill and a more sustainable way of creating offense.

Thing is, when you say they could've had 10 goals you're doing the same thing that xG is attempting, which is assessing the chances created by the team... and we know that people in general way overrate the likelihood of any given chance being taken. In small samples it's always possible that xG misses something of course, like a potential tap-in that the strikers just misses getting to and isn't counted as a shot. But on the vast majority of chances, I'd say that xG gives you a better idea of how likely it was to result in a goal than someone on TV yelling "HE HAS TO SCORE"

Two reasons. One xG is not very accurate in terms of probability. It massively underrates some gilt edged chances based on what happened in terms of the shot rather than what could have happened based on the chance. Like xG afaik wouldn't even have a chance missed for a player swinging and missing the ball when it was an open goal (correct me if I'm wrong here). Second humans aren't great at estimating this either, we see a one on one missed and think he should score that, but maybe only Messi would have 80% there, other players more like 50% etc.

nice summary of RBs post

No Zlatan no party. Tonight we Celta

gllgl today ManU!

Been a huge move on Utd from yesterday, 2.8 to 2.3 currently.

Yeah, I saw a bunch of people backing Celta yesterday so atm they should be great value

Mourinho confirmed that Jones/Smalling/Pogba all fit prob something to do with it.

Lol at this cup keeper business btw, just play the guy that gives you more chance of winning.

Alvarez, Mallo, Cabral, Roncaglia, Jonny, Wass, Radoja, Hernandez, Aspas, Sisto, Guidetti

Laying utd all day here.