What great night! Entertaining match, fantastic goals, great management from Jay, hard to ask for more! The biggest storyline (in my mind) coming in to the match was around Sam Howard, so I’ll attempt to evaluate how Sam did, as well as, explore at least one person’s feeling that we turned the ball over at midfield a lot, and talk about Shak Adams, a sure fire bet to make team of the year.
1) Sam Howard filled in admirably.
Let’s start with the non-data driven approach to the question how did “Gianna’s boyfriend” do? There is no doubt that Sam made the most dramatic save in the history of the club in the 77′. If you haven’t rewatched it, do it now, I’ll wait. The save answered my pre-game question, will Sam answer the call the one time he needs to with a resounding yes. The UO GK standard “two saves or less” in a game aside, it did seem like Sam had more to do than Rashid normally does and that it was a little more dramatic. That isn’t very objective so let’s dive in here and figure it out starting with season stats for the two players.
Thanks to the “Brick Wall” defense, our goalkeepers have not seen a lot of action making this a very small sample size. That said, in about 1/3 as much time on the pitch, Sam has more interceptions, catches, and punches than Rashid. With an interception, catch, and punch against Tucson, Sam was showing us things Rashid has done very rarely or never.
One thing I wanted to see the quality of Sam’s distribution on the night. I used Rashid’s game at home against North Texas as a benchmark since the games were similar in being home games where our opponents dominated possession but we won.
The numbers here very similar across all categories. Let’s look at the pass charts.
I’d argue that Sam’s chart actually looks better than Rashid’s here and that Rashid has been quite solid for us.
So I think a number of factors made it seem like Sam had a lot more to do and was somewhat dramatic doing it: one, dramatic saves, two, a lot more action at the back, three, Sam had two bad passes, specifically, the ones that barely made it into the middle third of the field and went out of bounds, four, Sam’s frustration after these mistakes was visible across the stadium and finally, I was paying more attention to Sam since he was replacing Rashid. But the data here is clear Sam did just fine and Gianna is correct!
2) Were there a lot of midfield mistakes?
This question comes from friend of the column, Sean R, who wanted to see how many midfield turnovers we had. Well Sean, I don’t know how to pull that data specifically, so let’s look at our passing in the midfield instead.
Looking through these charts I’m not sure you can suss out much relevant information, but I’ll give it a whirl. Looking closely, I think there is a meaningful handful of passes that started and ended within the midfield that were unsuccessful that would have made an impression in Sean’s mind. Let’s drill down one more time to see if there is anything notable about those missed passes.
That’s actually a pretty ugly chart. We had 16 unsuccessful passes from the heart of the field. 8 of them were long passes toward goal which would have a lower percent chance of being completed. However, the other 8 passes were unsuccessful within the midfield area. If these passes were evenly distributed we would have been see one about every 11 minutes, but if you look below the field in the above chart, you can see they were densely clustered toward the end of the game.
In conclusion, Sean, we had a bunch of unsuccessful passes from midfield and half of them were very short and about half of them were in the last 20 minutes of the game.
3) Shak Adams *shiver*
It seemed to me that Luke Hauswirth was happy to be subbed off the field in the 73′, I can only assume he was relieved to see the last of Shak Adams. Sure he scored a goal and that was not our finest defensive moment, but it was his run and pass that created the chance in the 77′ for Sam’s big save, and his job tracking back to try and mark Christian Molina before he scored was preposterous (alternate angle here). Highlights aside, Shak consistently was in our penalty area. He had 9 touches in our box. Compare that to 6 for Evan Conway, 5 for Elma Nfor, and 4 for Ethan Vanacore-Decker.
Shak also had three, dribbles all in dangerous places. Compare them to every dribble our players had.
While Shak Adams impressed, we did a great job of defending him. Players with pace generally do a good job at drawing fouls but Shak drew one all night (Sousa’s yellow card the minute he subbed into the game).
For our last chart, we’ll compare Shak’s fouls won with those of the Triple E offense.
Just like our win last night, you love to see it.
Note: I enjoyed answering Sean’s question. If you have a post-match question you want me to explore tweet me @union_omaha_ben OR find me any other way you know how.
Who Gives A Hoot? 