If “Greg Hurst is on fire” isn’t still ringing in your ears or running through your head, are you really living right? While it is VERY tempting to give the hat trick hero all three bullet points in this column, I’m going to restrain myself. Somehow, other interesting things happened as well in the game against Revs II, so let’s dive in.
1) Greg Hurst is the poacher we’ve been missing
Who could have predicted that Greg Hurst would return home from a six game road trip and score a hat trick. Oh wait….
So Greg Hurst has scored 5 goals so far this season. 4 of them have been at home. 2 of them have won games against NE Revs II. 3 of them have been unassisted. 2 of them have been scored off of turnovers he’s forced. This seems like what a goal poacher would be doing, creating something out of nothing.
Another thing I noticed about this game is that Greg’s second goal had an xG of 0.45 which is the highest xG we’ve had on a chance all year.
g+ GameFlow: USL League One Regular Season @Union_Omaha v @NERevolution2 on June 12, 2021. #UpTheOwls #NERevsII #OMAvNER
Originally tweeted by GameFlow (@GameFlowxPG) on June 13, 2021.
Greg seems to be very skilled at turning small openings into goals. In fact he is the best in the league at it right now. According to the wonderful folks at American Soccer Analysis, Greg’s season xG is 2.52 (roughly equivalent to Dami’s expected assists at 2.53), but he has scored 5 goals. Thus his Goals minus Expected Goals is 2.48, good for first place in the league.
2) Did Devin Boyce really play forward?
Saturday saw the revival of one of Jay’s crazier personnel schemes from 2020 and one of my favorite: Devin Boyce as a forward. While definitely not his position, the reckless abandon with which Devin plays suits itself well for playing up top in our system, especially against teams that insist on playing out of the back.
The benefits were there for Devin and the team. A great goal to kill the game off and allow the home fans a chance to enjoy the end of the game. And, tired of his joint first status on the club’s all-time game winning assist leaderboard, a game winning assist to take sole possession of 1st place.
Last weekend, Jay started Emir up top, and it sure looked like he didn’t really play up top. So let’s check in on Devin and see if he played up top.
Sure looks like he played forward, but let’s look at a heat map for confirmation.
Interesting, all of a sudden I’m less convinced because to me that looks like Devin was just playing both wings equally. Let’s look at Evan’s heat map against Fort Lauderdale to get a better sense of what a true forward might be doing.
Evan seems to be playing on both sides of the field like Devin, but Devin seems to be playing closer to the sideline like you might expect from his role as a midfielder. I think we’ll give this one to him and say he did great at the forward spot. I have no complaints!
3) Opponents crosses
I have concerns about our defense. We’ve allowed 4 of the 6 total goals we’ve allowed this season in the last 3 games (at TFC2, at Madison, Revs II), 3 in the last 2. When it comes to expected goals, in those 3 game, our opponents xG was 2.63, in the last two games it was 1.35. Not a great sign or trend. Is this a real problem, is this regression to the mean, all valid questions but all for a different column for a different day.
Today I’d like to highlight a pretty crazy statistic. Of the 23 crosses attempted by Revs II, they completed ZERO of them.
You love to see if from our guys, and hope they can replicate that success in Richmond on Saturday.
Who Gives A Hoot? 