yellowforever wrote:
What I don't understand is that how during the course of the season our promising (but frankly average) full back can come ahead of our top scorer.
Well this actually comes down to the very reason that this feature was started to explore. I can try to give you an insight into this, based on the patterns and other things that I have noticed in the last five years of running this.
One thing that was noticeable about Ryan Bowman this season was that he didn’t score many points in games that he didn’t score a goal. Looking at Soccerbase, he scored 12 league goals in 35 starts. Including two braces, that’s 10 games out of a potential 46 that Bowman scored in. Take penalties out of this, which rightly or wrongly don’t always get the same credit as goals from open play, and it gets even lower. If you’re not scoring points in the other games, you’re not going accumulate many points.
Strikers have the potential to pretty much guarantee their inclusion at the top end of the points for each individual game if they score in it. In the past Rene Howe, who scored about the same number of goals as Bowman, got double the points over the season, largely I would think because he offered more to the team, aside from just his goals. The highest ever scoring attacking player was Chris Zebroski in 2010/11, who scored goals but also put in consistently high levels of performance every week.
Full backs have actually not done very well in this feature historically. Even when Kevin Nicholson made the PFA Team of the Year in 2011/12 he was quite a long way behind Olejnik, Mansell and O’Kane, who also made the PFA Team.
Ives did well this year because he scored average points in a lot of the games he played, which was pretty much the opposite of Bowman, who scored points when he scored but didn’t when he drew a blank.
If you read a recent edition of Highway to Hele, I did a brief intro into how this feature started. (Mustapha Carayol in 2009/10 was the inspiration. He was on fire from March onwards but barely played before March, and then did well in the End of Season voting). I was curious about how ‘fair’ it was that more memorable performances counted quite highly in the traditional end of season voting format, when you consider that all 46 games have the potential to give you three points.
That was how this began – all 46 games are added together to give a final total for each player in the same way as the team as a whole accumulates a points total from these games. You might think that being top scorer should automatically put Bowman ahead of a teenage left back, and if that’s your opinion, then fair enough. The idea of this feature was to see if generalisations like this are reasonable - it’s been running for 5 years now, so there’s a bit more data to use (it’s possible to compare from season to season as well as just different players from the same season). I can tell you that Bowman’s points total for a ‘leading goalscorer’ is pretty low, and is the lowest in the five years that this has been running. That is why Ives was able to finish ahead of him despite Bowman finishing as top scorer - a few more goals or better all round performances and Bowman would have been higher (the same as any other player would have).
Maybe Bowman just has the type of game that’s not suited to this type of feature. I imagine someone like Leon Constantine would have a pretty similar record. If Bowman is to do better next season then he’ll need to either score in more than 10 of our games or make more of an impression in games when he doesn’t score. Rene Howe and Elliot Benyon (first spell) have shown that both styles pick up points.
Anyway, this is just a bit of fun, based on some curiosity. It’s not a perfect reflection of what happened this season, and how well each player did, and I would never claim that it is. It’s just a total of all 46 match threads from the full season. The difference between this list and what your reflection of it was when looking back is actually the reason this exists in the first place.
