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:

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.