Player Review 20/21 Season — Strikers
Salutations fellow Leeds United fans, welcome to the beginning of the 2nd part of my season review. Previously I had covered our season overall, I broke down each half of the season and explained reasons why there was a change in the 2nd half of our season. This time I want to dive deeper into each
position and see who stood out most for us and how they did against other players in the league.
This will be the first in a series of articles of this nature, analysing statistically what the strengths and weaknesses of our players are.
I’m going to attack this the same way Leeds defend, from the front. I’m going to go from the fun end of the pitch backwards and see how we go. So the first position to be covered is our Centre Forward.
As we are all aware our leading man in the goal scoring charts is Lord Patrick Bamford, he’s led our line this year to great effect, he’s our leading goalscorer and also the first part of our press. He has started every game of the season besides the final game and as such he will be the only focus of this article.
This position in a Bielsa side like every position has to be hard working. They have to be an intelligent player who is aggressive, quick and always in the position where he can help out his team the most.
They also need to have superb off the ball movement, both to get into good places to score and to create space for other players by dragging defenders out of position.
This season Bamford has demonstrated all the above and more, however before the season began there was quite a large element even in our own fanbase who doubted that Bamford would be able to cut it in the Premier League. Granted he did have a poor season in terms of finishing last season, he finished the season on a massive under performance when it came to xG, he generated 24.82xG but only scored 16 goals.
However Bamford seems to have found his home in the Premier League, the type of chances we have created this year seem to suit him more. No longer is he faced with teams packing the box with 10 players and having to fight for an inch of space, a lot of the teams this year give us much more space. Bamford is a striker who thrives in space and space he has had this year. He’s been able to run on to chances and take that extra second to consider his finish, instead of having a split second in a packed box. There are players who thrive on these types of chances but not our Paddy. Every player has their strengths and their weaknesses, we’ve been able to display all of Paddy’s strength’s this season.
Non Penalty Performance
The above graph shows two things, firstly how many non penalty goals were scored on the vertical axis and if the player over or under performed their npxG(Non Penalty xG) on the horizontal axis. Bamford is the 3rd highest scoring Centre Forward in the league which is a huge plus in his favour, he did however have a slight underperformance on npxG, this isn’t a concerning performance as it is only 0.7 under.
Pressing & Defensive Contribution
Another one of the strengths that Bamford has is his contribution to the team’s defensive efforts. Most times Bamford is selected to do the post match interview and we all see just how tired he is after every game, he leaves everything on the pitch. He is constantly moving and running, closing down players when we don’t have possession of the ball.
As you can see above Bamford is in the place we would expect him to be, above average for both combined defensive actions(Pressures, Tackles, Interceptions, Blocks & Clearances) & successful pressures.
Bamford makes 20.45 defensive actions p90 which is 14th amongst his striker peers, and he makes 5.1 successful pressures p90 which puts him 7th amongst his peers. Not quite where I personally expected him to be given how exhausted he is after every game, however defending is only half of his work load. On top of his defending we also attack a lot, we have the 2nd most direct attacks(Open play sequence that start just inside the teams own half, have at least 50% of movement towards goal and end with a shot or touch in opposition’s half) in the league with 19 such attacks. This means we burst forward in attacks very often and with Paddy often helping to defend in our own defensive third he works extremely hard to get back to the other side of the pitch in time.
The below visual I borrowed from an Athletic article shows quite clearly how much running Bamford gets through. He makes just over 75 high intensity runs & sprints per 90 and quite surprisingly the 2nd highest average top speed at just over 34km/h.
Hold up play
The next part I want to examine is holdup play, this is vital in a Bielsa side. Bamford needs to be able to receive the pass, look after the ball and then pass the ball on for us to progress the ball further.
The best way to look at this with data is seeing how often the players lose possession. I did this by combining a number of metrics(Misplaced pass, miscontrol & dispossessed), this tells us how good the players touch is and how careful they are. Bamford doesn’t take a lot of risks with the ball and is capable of passing the ball on when he feels is best.
As you can see Bamford displays elite levels when it comes to possession control, he only lost possession 7 times p90 which was only bettered by 3 players in the league and he has a strong pass completion rate with 76% of his passes completed, also interestingly his long passing is superb at 81.5%. This may not seem like an attractive part of his game but this is exactly what Bielsa wants, for us to keep possession of the ball and progress the ball further up the field.
Movement Analysis
I have gone back and rewatched some of our previous games to try to find examples of the good stuff Bamford does that maybe doesn’t get credit for. Below is from the Burnley away game.
In the above still’s we see the ball being played to Harrison on the left, Bamford starts wide right and angles his run towards Harrison and as he does this he brings the Burnley defenders with him, he then meets the ball in a position where he could take a shot but instead he dummies the ball and lets it run through to where Raphinha is, Raphina tries a speculative overhead kick(Brazilian tax) which goes over. But this is a great example of Bamford’s selfless nature & superb movement.
Below is another example, this time it is of Bamford’s link up play which we mentioned, here we see the ball played from deep to Bamford from Ayling, Bamford plays it first time to Klich, who then plays it quickly back to Bamford as he had no options ahead of him yet, Bamford then moves the ball on to Dallas with a deft flicked pass. This is the kind of linking which he provides, it is a simple yet very important part of his game.
Creativity
Last part of Bamford’s game I want to look over is his creativity, while not being personally exceptionally creative Bamford has 8 assists this season which is joint 2nd in our squad.
Most of his assists have been simple passes and some of them have been very selfless assists as on a couple of occasions he could have gone for goal himself but put his teammate above himself and passed the ball, not many Centre Forwards have this about their game.
The above was especially true in our 2nd game against Leicester, Bamford finished this game with 1 goal and 2 assists. The below is an example of his selfless nature and teamwork from this game.
In the below visual we can see where Bamford ranks for assists & Key Passes compared with the rest of the league.
Bamford averages the 8th most assists per90 of any Striker in the league with 0.21 p90, but his key passes(Passes that lead to a shot) are lower than the average at 0.9 p90. While he has a high amount of assists he has generated these assists from quite a low amount of xA(Expected Assists), Bamford’s xA for the season stands at 4.1 but he has 8 assists, this means he has overperformed his xA by 3.9 goals. This means for most of the assists his teammates have improved the chance he provided. Looking back at a lot of his assists this is the case as most were a combination of either long shots or individual brilliance to score.
We of course shouldn’t discount this part of Bamford’s game but this maybe is something we may see drop off if the players he passes to don’t do as well with their chances next season.
Conclusions
Looking back now we can say that Bamford has had a very successful season, many of his supporters feel he was hard done by to not be part of Gareth Southgates selection for the England squad this year for the Euro’s.
Bamford himself has said that if you told him that he would be in the discussion for England this time last year he would’ve called you mad. But he has forced his way into the discussion by being the 2nd highest English goal scorer this season.
If he continues this form into his 2nd season of Premier League action with Leeds United, there is no reason why he can’t earn himself a spot for the World Cup 2022.
Patrick has silenced pretty much all his critics with his performances but there is still an element who are just waiting for his bad form to return so they can once again get on his back, but personally I’ll never lose my faith in Lord Bamford and I’m a permanent resident on Bamford Island.
