No, not really.

I'll admit that he was ineffective early in the season. In the first 4 games, he only won 1 of 10 headers. I think this is another case in which a player gets off to a rough start, earns a reputation, and can't get rid of it no matter what he does. Since the West Ham game, Zamora has won more headers than he's lost. It might not sound like much, but that's hard to do for a striker. To put things into perspective, Brian McBride won 34% of his headers last season. Clint Dempsey won about 36%, and Shefki Kuqi 42%. Zamora is sitting at 43% so far, despite the slow start.

I've added a table on the right-hand side of the site for a Chances Created stat. This is essentially the same as Goals Created, using the assumption that each chance is attributed 50% to the shooter, and 50% to playmaking. This looks at all shots and passes leading to shots. The Nevland fans should enjoy this, although his 17 minutes doesn't really tell us a whole lot:

Name	M	CC	CC/90
Erik Nevland	17	2	10.588
Jimmy Bullard	893	38	3.830
Clinton Dempsey	167	6	3.233
Zoltan Gera	845	25	2.662
Bobby Zamora	867	24	2.491
Simon Davies	899	21	2.102
Andrew Johnson	569	13	2.056
Seol Ki-Hyeon	197	4	1.827
Danny Murphy	886	15	1.524
Brede Hangeland	900	6	0.600
John Paintsil	886	5	0.508
Paul Konchesky	810	3	0.333

All in all, this is probably just another way of looking at the numbers I posted yesterday, all of which can be seen on the squad stats page.

I had a post all ready to go explaining further why we can get by without Jimmy Bullard in the lineup, but then he just has to turn around and put in a solid performance at Everton. Roy's comments leading up to the game lead us to believe that Jimmy would be on a shorter leash, but he's probably earned himself some slack.

Regardless, no sense wasting some good stats. Good teams tend to take lots of shots. Good passes set up these shots, more often than not. Who makes the passes that lead to scoring opportunities? Opta is nice enough to tell us how many assists each player could have had, provided the shooter put the ball in the net:

Player	Assist Attempts	Total Passes	% of Passes Leading to Shots
Johnson	7	117	6.0%
Davies	17	343	5.0%
Dempsey	3	66	4.5%
Bullard	24	610	3.9%
Gera	14	355	3.9%
Zamora	11	288	3.8%
Seol	2	65	3.1%
Murphy	14	504	2.8%
Paintsil	5	441	1.1%
Konchesky	4	400	1.0%

We're already tracking goals created here, but with all the talk going on about creating chances, this gives us the base for calculating that. More in a bit.

On an unrelated note, I've updated the league tables with the latest marginal goals. Whoever says that there are no pushovers in the Premier League this season is right on. On their current pace, worst team in the league is 42 marginal goals better than Derby last season, and better than all of the bottom 6 of 06/07!

In any given game, Jimmy Bullard will pass the ball between 50-70 times. When you pass the ball that many times, you need to be accurate, and for the most part, Jimmy has been just that. Lately, there have been rumblings of too many misplaced passes and turnovers, leading to a lot of suggestions that he should be dropped.

	Passes	Completed Passes	%
@Hull City	46	38	0.826
Arsenal	72	55	0.764
Bolton	53	45	0.849
@Blackburn	63	52	0.825
West Ham	67	58	0.866
@West Brom	66	55	0.833
Sunderland	58	46	0.793
@Portsmouth	57	44	0.772
Total	482	393	0.815

He has regressed in each of the last 4 matches, but only the last two have really been sub-par. What can we say about this? That it's a bad run of from, it's just two games, and therefore not a big deal? Or that it's a disturbing trend? We won't know for sure without allowing him to play, but Bullard is our primary playmaker, and we can't afford mistakes. I see three options: 1) play better; 2) step aside and let Murphy (or Davies, or Gera) run the attack; or 3) Drop Bullard for a game.

Option 1 is no guarantee. Option 2 could work, but would we expose the back four? Option 3 might be the safest bet. Clint Dempsey has been in excellent form for club and country. He's even moved up to the top of Fulham's passing charts (among those with a minimum 90 minutes logged, at least). He defends well. He can score goals. While Dempsey hasn't shown to be a better midfield player than Bullard thus far in his career, it is growing more evident that he is the better player right now.

That all said, Jimmy Bullard isn't the beginning and the end of our problems. Don't worry, I've got more to blabber on about.

It's been awhile since my last post. I just moved into a new house, and most of my time has been spent on things related to that. With the move now out of the way, I expect things to be back to normal around here. Normally, I'll post a story on here whenever I see something interesting, and decide to investigate further. Such is the case today. Every year, Tom Tango does a survey where he invites fans to rate baseball players' defensive skills on a 1-5 scale. I decided to do the same sort of thing. I've included every current Fulham player with at least 90 minutes (from league play) logged with the club. Each player gets rated in 17 categories, and then we add up the results and see how everyone turns out. If I get a good response, I'll probably post a survey for each Premier League club.

The ballot can be found here.

Lately, I've been trying to come up with a defensive equivalent to the goals created statistic. Ideally, I would like to be able to add the two, and come up with an overall value of each player. I'm not quite there yet, but I've found something that makes sense for defensive contribution. When looking at Marginal Goals, we can determine how many goals (compared to a fictional "marginal" team) we prevented. With the percentage of shots saved by the goalkeepers, we can break it down further to see how many goals were prevented by the keeper, and how many were prevented by outfield players.

In the 06/07 season, I rated our outfield defence 15.768 goals better than the marginal team (think Sunderland of 05/06). How do we divide this up among individuals? The most fair method I've come up with this equation:


Here, we have MGP for marginal goals prevented; DA as defensive actions - including all clearances, blocks, interceptions, tackles, and offside provocations; and M as minuses - the number of goals conceded with a player on the pitch. The same variables with a lower-case t are the team totals for each. This gives us the following table for 06/07:

Name	Marginal Goals Prevented
Hughes	2.759
Bocanegra	1.820
Stefanovic	1.761
Hangeland	1.744
Baird	1.344
Konchesky	1.327
Stalteri	0.704
Davies	0.640
Murphy	0.628
Dempsey	0.622
Davis	0.622
Andreasen	0.376
Knight	0.358
Volz	0.211
Bullard	0.182
Smertin	0.176
Bouazza	0.170
Seol	0.141
Nevland	0.059
McBride	0.047
Kuqi	0.041
Ashton	0.041
Diop	0.012
Kamara	0.006
Johnson	0.006
Pearce	0.006
Christanval	0.006
John	0.000
Healy	-0.041

So what this means is that, by having Aaron Hughes start at CB instead of a generic player from the 05/06 Sunderland team, we prevented almost 3 goals. Brede Hangeland and Dejan Stefanovic still managed to prevent almost 2 goals apiece in their limited time. I think that all of this tells us that there isn't a huge difference between our top 4 CBs, but the difference does amount to about half a win, or 1-2 draws. As we have found out, that can be the difference between staying up and being relegated.

Another thing I found interesting is how this relates to our current central midfield dillema. I predicted that Danny Murphy and Jimmy Bullard will finish this season with almost exactly the same total of goals created, with roughly the same number of minutes. In defence, however, they differ quite a bit. Murphy, while not an idea defensive midfielder, was still ahead of Bullard. Leon Andreasen, projected over a full 3000-minute season, would have been more than a full goal better than Bullard. Would that goal make up for the loss in attacking ability? Or would Andreasen's presence allow Murphy and the rest of the team to attack more effectively? It's all difficult to say, but we're getting a little bit closer to understanding just what it means to replace a player in the lineup. The fun begins when we can look at marginal goals created. That's (hopefully) coming soon, and it should give attack and defence statistics a common ground, a way to say "Player A is better than Player B".

The past couple of days have been spent gathering data on all of our players, plugging it all into the computer, and telling it to figure out how everybody is going to do this season. I've talked about goals created a few times, which works on the assumption that each goal can be credited half to the goal scorer, and half to playmaking. Not all goals are set up by a second player, so this actually ends up being a little more than half of a players goals + assists, and differs from team to team. Another nice thing about this stat is that it allows us tp pull one player from one team, drop him in a new team, and determine how much better a player is in attack than another. For example, a weighted average of Bobby Zamora's last three seasons would project him at 1448 minutes this season with just over 4 goals created. The player he replaced, Brian McBride, created 2 goals in 1206 minutes. If you put each player in a vacuum (meaning that playing time is determined by only the player himself, and not the team's depth chart, squad rotation, etc.), this would indicate that Zamora is a two goal improvement over last season's version of McBride.

If I project all of our new signings the same way, and subtract the players we have lost, we're left with a net gain of about 7 goals. The raw numbers were actually higher than that, but I adjusted for minutes played - the Ins were projected to play quite a bit more than the Outs. Compared to last season, that would put us at 45 goals. In addition, several players underperformed in 07/08 and could bounce back somewhat. Danny Murphy, despite his late season heroics, was better in each of his previous two seasons. Jimmy Bullard missed at least half the year. David Healy, Paul Konchesky, Steven Davis, Seol Ki-Hyeon, and Collins John were also below their normal levels. Simon Davies and Diomansy Kamara, unfortuntely, are candidates to regress slightly. All in all, though, we should expect a slight improvement overall from our existing squad. My projection is 3 extra goals from our remaining 07/08 players, putting us up to 48 total.

Just for fun, I broke down every player's predicted GC into goals and assists. To do this, I used a league average goals/assist ratio, and determined that a 48 goal scoring team should pick up around 33 assists total. Then, I took each player's individual G/A ratio and broke down their GCs into goals and assists. Here's what I came up with:

Name	G	A
A. Johnson	8	3
Zamora	6	4
Murphy	5	4
Bullard	5	4
Davies	4	7
Nevland	4	2
Gera	3	4
Dempsey	3	1
Seol	1	1
Andreasen	1	1
Davis	1	0
Hangeland	1	0
Hughes	1	0
Smertin	1	0
Kamara	1	0
Healy	1	0
E. Johnson	1	0
Konchesky	0	2
Stoor	0	2
Andranik	0	1
Baird	0	0
Pantsil	0	0
Kallio	0	0
Leijer	0	0
Volz	0	0
John	0	0

Some might be surprised to see our top two striker's goal totals so low. My numbers suggest that Andy Johnson is going to play quite well for us, but his projected playing time is on the conservative side. A few things went into determining this - first, Johnson has had some injuries that limited his minutes at Everton. Second, recent Fulham teams have rotated their strikers quite a bit. Last season, none of them (aside from Dempsey, who also played in the midfield) saw more than 2000 minutes. I went into a bit more detail about Zamora yesterday, but the biggest issue with him is that he simply wasn't all that good last year. What the calculator doesn't see, however, is that injuries played a big part of that. If Zamora is fit to start 30 games this season, he could be our best player. Between those two and Erik Nevland, that does not leave a whole lot of playing time for Healy, Eddie Johnson, and Collins John. Diomansy Kamara is scheduled to resume training in December, which would likely put him back on the pitch by January.

No big surprises in the midfield. Bullard, Murphy and Davies are our best attacking options, and Zoltan Gera is not far behind. It may prove difficult to fit all four into the lineup at the same time, but we will try. Davies and Gera will see the most minutes, as they can play on the wings, with Bullard and Murphy being replaced at times by the more defensive players Andreasen, Andranik and Smertin.

Obviously, this table doesn't tell us a whole lot about defenders. The fullbacks can be expected to pick up a few assists on crosses, but these players generally aren't expected to attack much. Their real contribution is in how many goals they can prevent. Our friend Rich expects a 6 goal improvement over last season, and I think he's right. LB and one of the CBs is unchanged. We should see some improvement with a full year of Brede Hangeland in the other CB slot. Fredrik Stoor and John Paintsil are probably an improvement over first-half RB Chris Baird, but might not play quite as well as January loan signing Paul Stalteri. We don't know a whole lot about the new RBs, but it is safe to say that they should be at least equal to last season's players as a whole.

That's it for now! My current mission in life is to squeeze all of our defensive metrics into a quantifiable number of number of goals prevented, much like we have done already with goals created. Until then, we have our educated guesses. 48 goals scored and 54 conceded should leave us in a comfortable mid-table position. With a bit of luck on our side, this could push us up into Europe, or with luck working against us, back into another relegation fight. It all begins tomorrow at Hull, and I know I'm not the only one looking forward to it.

I'm working on a much longer 2008/09 projections post, but I wanted to share something interesting. Specifically, how good Bobby Zamora was prior to last season. You can see Fulham's Goals Created leaders for last season on the right-side of this page. This gives a good picture of the attacking contribution, essentially assigning credit for each of the team's goals to individual players based on goals scored and goals assisted. Thus, adding up the total GC for each player on the team will always equal the team's goal total.

In projecting Bobby Zamora's 08/09 season, I found that he led West Ham in goals created over the 05/06 and 06/07 seasons. He was better than Yossi Benayoun and Nigel Reo-Coker in the same period, better than Carlos Tevez in 06/07, and also more productive than Dean Ashton and Carlton Cole's 2007/08, the season in which these two players surpassed Zamora on West Ham's depth chart. GC is a counting stat, so perhaps even more impressive is that Zamora did this in somewhat limited playing time.

Zamora's 7.138 and 7.833 GC in those two seasons would be good enough to place him right behind Simon Davies at #2. I had to include the fitness concerns in my final projection (which I hope to be posting today or tomorrow), so they may not look impressive, but my gut feeling is that he's going to outperform and surprise us.

Remember when I said that we didn't need Andy Johnson now that we had the equally-capable Bobby Zamora? Turns out that my point was pointless, as we now have both. The fees for both players were high, but I'm pretty sure this is a good thing.

So, who starts? We still have a good sized stockpile of attacking midfielders who probably should play, but our newly acquired high-priced talent up front suggests that we may stick with some form of a 4-4-2. Which brings us to the subject of this post - who starts, who is on the bench, who doesn't play at all?

We've already established that most strikers look a lot better off the bench than they do in the starting lineup. But do any players look a lot better? Do we have any players who are close to the same as a starter OR as a sub?

I took all of our strikers (minus Eddie Johnson - detailed MLS stats are suprisingly difficult to come by), and divided their scoring rate as a sub by their scoring rate as a starter, over the past three seasons:

Player	Increased Likelihood to Score as a Sub
A. Johnson	2.883
Healy	2.832
Zamora	2.329
Kamara	2.208
Nevland	1.760
John	1.565
Dempsey	1.154

This suggests that Andy Johnson and David Healy are almost three times as likely to score when brought on as a sub, while Clint Dempsey is almost equally prolific either way. Does this mean we should start Dempsey, with AJ on the bench? Not at all. What this doesn't take into account is how well each player does in each situation compared to each other. AJ may still be better than everyone else as a starter, despite being so good as a sub...if he scores once every 3 games as a starter, and every else scores once every 4 games, AJ should start. Plus, we didn't just pay £10m for a bench player. I think most would agree that AJ and Bobby Zamora are the two best strikers in the squad. As such, those two deserve to start most games. What if one of those two goes down with an injury, though? That is where the numbers above may come in handy. If we had to choose between, say, Healy and Nevland to make a spot start, Nevland might be the best choice to start with Healy coming on late as a sub.

I did have another thought in all of this, though. Plenty of people have suggested that Erik Nevland is best utilized as a "supersub" - a player who can be counted on to come in late and give us a goal-scoring threat. Nevland may or may not be the best choice for this role, but the idea is a good one. Instead of rotating players in and out of the starting lineup, how about keeping one player out of the starting rotation, but on the bench and always coming on at 60 minutes? We saw several instances last season where strikers coming on late have turned the game around, and several other instances where late defensive replacements have failed to hold a lead. This is just an observation - I have no data to back this up, but I do get the feeling that the best defence late in a game might just be a fresh attack. Especially with 7 subs on the bench, every team will have tons of attacking options available.

On an unrelated note, I'm still working on getting the missing portions of the site ready for the new season. The tricky part is moving my old, custom player database schema to Drupal's format. It's a pain to set up, but it should allow us to do some neat things once it is all working.

As you can see, this page looks a little different today. There's actually a lot more going on behid the scenes - this site runs on the excellent CMS Drupal, and I finally upgraded to the newest major release. There are lots of things that don't work right, and I know my layout looks weird in IE, but I figured that I wouldn't ever get around to fixing these things if I didn't bring the new site live.

The stats pages are broken (and, as you can see, the links aren't even there), but never fear - all of that stuff is in The Fulham Review, so you could just get order one of those...