I’m back after a three game week, which I have been unfortunately shut in my room throughout as Covid sucks. But thankfully, I’m feeling well enough to do another write-up as wow is there a lot to talk about. Let’s get into it!
Goals Find a Way
Thankfully, we found a goal right at the death to not only tie the game, but also end our scoreless streak. This 270+ minute scoreless streak over the past (essentially) 3 games was one of our longest in club history. It ended up being right around 306 minutes of game time if you include the extra time in both halves for each game. That puts the broken streak just slightly behind the stretch in 2020 and still a ways behind the goal-less stretch in 2021. It seems like right around the mid-point of each season, we run into one of these. Thankfully, we got through it, but hopefully we don’t go into another right away.
And that’s a worry, because our goal scoring stats …. really aren’t great this year. We have 17 goals, which is more than only Tucson who sit bottom of the table. And that’s partially from how many shots we convert into goals, which looking at the chart below, is the lowest in the league:
We have 17 goals from 144 shots, 51 of which were on target, giving us that 11.8% (rounded up on the image) conversion rate. We’ve talked a lot about how our offensive frustrations compare to 2020, so let’s actually look at some data on that. We are now 16 games through the season, the same number of games *in* the 2020 shortened season. So how did we fare that season?
2020: 20 goals on 186 shots, 71 on target, 10.8% conversion rate
Honestly not far off of what we are currently. We had a few more goals, but were taking more shots and had a slightly worse conversion rate. The shots really show the big difference here, as there have been just so many fewer. And if you don’t shoot, it’s a lot harder to score. So this season does actually track to 2020 fairly well. Hopefully though, we can get to the point where we are more along the lines of last season, which looked like this:
2021: 53 goals on 308 shots, 147 on target, 17.2% conversion rate, 28 games
Seeing Red Yet Again
There was another red card for an opponent this game. It has seemed that that situation has happened a lot this season … right? Yes! In fact, the 6 red cards against us this season is more than anyone else in the league has against them. Some of them have been straight reds (apparently the one from Tucson recently was a straight red? It seemed a second yellow from the berm), but many of them may be attributed to the large amount of yellows against us this season. We have the 2nd most yellows against us despite having at least 1 less game played than every other team. So that might play a hand in why there have been so many reds against us. It definitely did in this last game, as of the 3 yellows given to the opposition 2 were against the same player which resulted in the red card. The updated list as of the end of July for the whole league is below, where you can see how much of a disparity there is among the teams:
Records Shattered
While I was unfortunate in that I couldn’t go to this past game, there were sure a lot of people who did! 5,167 is a regular season league record for the club and that was just after the last league record was set against Tucson with 4,004. That’s a whole 1k jump in records in only a single game! Which is wonderful to see. 2020 was of course a bit hard to judge on, with Covid regulations limiting capacity. Last year we did pretty well in attendance, top in League 1, averaging about 3,350 a game. The lowest attendence was just above 2,700 and the highest was just shy of 3,900.
But then enter this season. No game (yet) has been below 3k, helping us to have seen 22,666 in total attendance so far this season. That gives us a current average of 3,778 per game, well above last year. It also puts us above a few solid USLC teams as well (as of the most recent collected stats I could find). Hopefully we continue to trend in that direction through our large amount of home games this month, even with the 2 Wednesday games which may drive it a little lower. But just 6 games into 15, it’s incredibly promising and hopefully continues to get better game by game as we see people coming back after their first UO experience. Let’s hope to see that 4k+ number consistently this month!
Who Gives A Hoot? 