Home Blues
Yet again, for the third time this season, we fail to score at home. That third time as well happens to be with only 4 games at home, with the first game being a 3-0 win. So we are really talking about a three game, 270 minute scoreless streak when playing at Werner Park. That’s not great.
This was most of the talk I was hearing on the berm and on Discord this past week. Why can’t we score at home? It’s not that we don’t play well either, in the past three home games we were essentially equal or above the other team in xG. So we are expected to score more goals than them for the most part. Instead we end up with 2 draws and a loss, gaining only 5 points total at home so far. This is compared to 12 points from 7 away games at this stage. So what gives?
I don’t have a definitive answer, but I have a couple of guesses.
The first comes back to our old friend, possession. Teams know that we don’t like to possess the ball. But it’s harder to not posses it at home, the crowd is urging you on. That’s why even though teams know this they’ll try to possess it more when they are home, which allows us to do what we want to. On the other hand, we get that same feeling at home, so tend to possess the ball more, especially if we aren’t winning. Since we haven’t been able to score, we actually have ended up winning the possession battle in each of the past three home games, averaging almost 55% across them. So we aren’t playing to our strengths at home.
The other comes from this just being a new team comprised of mostly new players. They haven’t nearly had the time on this field yet. Remember that we’ve only had 4 home games at Werner this season. We’ve played 11 games. In fact, when we hit the halfway mark of our season, after playing in Madison midweek towards the end of July, we will have only played 5 home games compared to 10 away games. With only 1/3 of your games at home, you don’t get nearly as accustomed to the field than if you were playing on it more frequently (especially with how… questionable the field has been this season). This hopefully will change as players get more minutes as pros and become more comfortable in the system, but also as they get more playing time at Werner.
In all honestly, that’s what the month of August is going to be critical for. From July 30 to Sep 3rd, so just a little on either side of August, we will play 6 home games and 2 away games. This will almost equal out our home/away totals (11/12). Having so many home games so fast isn’t ideal, but hopefully it will get the players more used to the surface and to the home atmosphere. That stretch is really where we’ll see if we can turn around this lack of scoring, though hopefully we’ll find some goals against Tucson in lone home game before that period as well.
Seeing Red (…way more than normal)
Potentially one side effect of winning a championship and having players become better recognized is that there are seen as more of a threat, and as such are fouled more. That might not be the actual reason but it is one I’m trying to come up with as we see yet another red card for an opposing team this season. While this one could be argued, as us on the berm couldn’t see it that well (and seemed like a makeup for not calling a clear penalty just a minute prior), it still counts towards a total that is higher than you would expect.
In fact, we have the most Red cards against us in the league this season (4). We also are tied for 2nd most Yellow cards against us, despite having played fewer games than anyone else. Here is the full list:
(I’m never sure where to put second yellows that lead to reds. So I’m putting them in a separate column that indicates a Yellow card given that led to a Red card, which is not included in the normal Yellow card total)
So, not sure why, but another curious statistic to consider for this season.
Appearance Milestones Continue
Here is the updated League 1 appearances table for us (including playoffs):
Shido had his 50th league appearance for us this past game, a big congrats to him! He has just been so consistently a force in net for us. We also had Dalton hit 45 league appearances for us (67 overall) and Emir hit the 40 mark just after Connor did the previous week. Glad to continue to see these players hit these milestones for this club and hope to see more hit the 50 mark soon!
Who Gives A Hoot? 