Jordan Pickford isn’t a danger to his team

Was Jordan’s Pickford’s howler against Liverpool a freak incident or a sign of an underlying weakness? We look at his save stats to find out.

Jordan Pickford’s error in the final minutes of the Merseyside derby on Sunday is likely to live in infamy long after he’s retired. The Everton keeper seems like a decent enough sort, though, so we won’t replay the video of the incident here.

Instead, we’ll look at whether England’s number 1 has been more or less prone to spilling the ball into dangerous positions than his peers this season. We’ll do this by dividing saves into three categories: Caught, Parried Safe and Parried Danger.

While the classifications are fairly broad, they do enable us to identify whether or not the immediate risk of conceding a goal was nullified by a goalkeeper’s save.

The “Caught” class incorporates everything that involves the ball sticking in the keeper’s hands. So at one extreme, it could involve picking up a mishit shot that’s trickling towards the goal at a snail’s pace. At the other, it might mean holding a well-hit strike that’s flying towards the top corner of the goal.

Similarly, a stop in the “Parried Safe” category could be a fingertip save that pushes the ball over the crossbar or a ricochet that rebounds to the side of the goal.

What we’re focusing on here is the “Parried Danger” classification, which Pickford demonstrated in tragicomic circumstances on Sunday. It can be seen on the right of the graph below.

And we can see here that although Pickford doesn’t excel in this metric, he’s parrying the ball into dangerous situations at well below the Premier League season average of 20.7 percent.

Spurs’ Paulo Gazzaniga has a perfect record in this regard, although he’s only played two games. For the record, his teammate Michel Vorm and Fulham’s Fabri have also appeared just twice, while Huddersfield’s Ben Hamer has only played 193 minutes over the course of three matches.

Pickford’s performing better in this metric than the likes of David de Gea and Hugo Lloris, two of the league’s most highly regarded keepers, and he’s on a par with Liverpool’s Alisson.

Looking at a map of the shots that Pickford has saved in the Premier League this season, it’s hard to see any clear weakness or pattern in terms of those that he’s parried into dangerous situations. One thing that does stand out, though, is the timing of those stops.

Despite Pickford’s howler at Anfield occurring in the dying moments of the game, overall five of the eight Premier League shots that he’s parried into danger have come during the opening half-hour of a match, which suggests he might not be at his brightest in the early periods of matches.

For the sake of completeness, it should be noted that Pickford has already made two errors that have led to goals in the Premier League this season, as many as any other keeper.

However, that other error, which came against West Ham in September, had nothing to do with his handling. Instead, it involved very different circumstances, with an errant Pickford pass gifting the opposition possession and Andriy Yarmolenko then scoring seconds later.