The Week in Stats: More reasons to doubt Jordan Pickford

This week we look at the woes of Jordan Pickford, a memorable day for Anthony Knockaert and the quirkiest score lines of the season in Europe’s big leagues.

Danger signs

Jordan Pickford has again been making headlines for all the wrong reasons, with his performance against Newcastle on Saturday causing pundits to express doubts over the Everton goalkeeper’s future in the England national team.

Arsenal legend Ian Wright also weighed into the debate, telling the BBC, “[Pickford] parries the ball back into the danger area far too often, and it led to Newcastle’s equalizer.”

We last looked into this subject after matchweek 15 at the start of December, in the aftermath of Pickford’s infamous error during the Merseyside derby, which it would be remiss of us not to revisit here:

Back then, we established that Pickford was in fact parrying the ball into dangerous situations at significantly below the league average for this season, which at that point stood at 20.7 percent.

Now, with a bigger sample size and the same questions being asked about the England number 1, it’s worth returning to these numbers to see if anything has changed.

Players with fewer than 400 minutes have been excluded, which means John Ruddy, Julian Speroni, Willy Caballero, Fabri, Michel Vorm, Paulo Gazzaniga, Ben Hamer and David Button aren’t on the list. Of course, given that Caballero didn’t have a single save to make during his one league appearance for Chelsea this season, there weren’t any figures for him to omit.

For purposes of clarity, “parried safe” includes both tipping the ball over the bar and deflecting it into a non-threatening area of the pitch.

Although Pickford is still parrying into danger at very slightly below the league average of 19.9 percent for all goalkeepers, he’s now doing so more often than the 18.9 percent average for the keepers on the chart above. So there’s clearly been a decline in his performances in this regard since December.

Some other obvious takeaways here are that (i) Tom Heaton deserved to replace Joe Hart in the Burnley goal; and (ii) Kepa is having a fine first season in English soccer.

If we instead sort the figures according to the proportion of saves in which the ball is being caught, then things look even worse for Pickford. Only five keepers in the league are managing to keep hold of the ball at a poorer rate than the Everton player.

Accurate reflections

Inter managed to score twice on Sunday despite producing just two accurate shots during the entire game, with goals from Matteo Politano and Roberto Gagliardini securing a 2-0 home win over SPAL.

This season, only three sides in Europe’s top leagues have managed the remarkable the feat of scoring more goals than they had shots on target in a match.

Two occurred in the Premier League — Burnley when beating Fulham 2-1 at home in January and Chelsea the following month in their 2-0 win over Tottenham. The other example came in Serie A, also in February, with Fiorentina scoring three times in a draw with Inter. The reason for this statistical quirk is, of course, own goals.

Thinking outside the box

Anthony Knockaert’s glorious 74th-minute winner on Saturday for Brighton against arch-rivals Crystal Palace was the club’s first league goal of the season from outside the penalty area.

That strike meant that all 98 teams in Europe’s top five leagues have now scored at least one goal from outside the box this season. Nurnberg have the fewest in the Bundesliga with two.

It was quite a day for Knockaert, who was voted the Championship Player of the Year in the 2016-17 campaign when Brighton were promoted. He also managed to get himself booked less than half-a-minute into the game, which was the fastest yellow card of the decade in the Premier League.