Longest Thread For Drivel (or the Romelu Lukaku thread)

[Hafnia]

I spoke a while ago about the fact that if he truly was to realise his "potential" which is a word that pisses me off no end then it's his head that needs sorting.

 

The fact is he was saying goes he was an all round forward etc etc in his 10 prem goals season. To anyone who wasn't brought into the hype that is lukaku - they could see he wasn't.

 

Potential is not just looking at an age and assuming they will get better. Potential is looking at how a person is prepared to work with their talent.

 

Is Rom talented? He knows where the net is.

 

Other than that he has a shite touch, people say it improved? See the semi final... shocking. Compare his touch to that of a van persie, rooney, ffs even a former non league player like Vardy has a far better touch.

 

He lacks heart and that is something you can't teach. He shits out in games where a centre half gives him an early "youre in for a game".... otamendi put a good tackle on him and he disappeared, sakho the same and as carragher said "lukaku marked himself out the game". Olssen, Dann, Morgan, blind all got stuck into him and he didn't want to to know.

 

So he can talk all he wants. Mourinho said he likes to talk... Doesn't he just.

Edited June 1, 2016 by Hafnia

[smeghead1]

I'm more shocked that after single handedly fucking up any chance we had in the semi final of the FA cup he thought he had a good season!

 

Biggest game of his career so far and he fluffed his lines well done lad keep talking someone may believe what your saying!

[Shukes]

He didn't actually say that though.

I want him gone, but even I recognise he is a help of a goalscorer.

 

Could get better? Well I hope so or Ross will be an also ran as well.

 

Does he have the heart? No idea, he's still a kid.

 

Goes he talk too much? Yes he does. Worst part of his character is his belief.

[Hafnia]

"I'm among the best"....

 

At

 

A) controlling a football further than Howard can kick it

 

B ) jumping underneath a ball

 

C) talking

 

D) pointing at a piece of grass 15 metres ahead of me

 

E) looking distraught after allowing a ball to bounce across the 6 yard box

 

F) pissing Hafnia off

Edited June 1, 2016 by Hafnia

[holystove]

Scored against Suisse just now, good finish but one most strikers would put away

And scored again tonight against Finland. Again one most strikers would score.. but benteke batshuayi and origi didnt. Lukaku does seem to be in the right spot a lot of times.

[markjazzbassist]

And scored again tonight against Finland. Again one most strikers would score.. but benteke batshuayi and origi didnt. Lukaku does seem to be in the right spot a lot of times.

 

he's a class player that's why. if he stays i'm getting a shirt with his name on the back.

[MC11]

Is he first choice for them or not?

[markjazzbassist]

Is he first choice for them or not?

 

better be with the other options of benteke and origi.

[Hafnia]

https://streamable.com/hsue

 

His goal...

[Chach]

"quality player, scored an absolute screamer from 0 yards against Finland" MJB

[markjazzbassist]

"quality player, scored an absolute screamer from 0 yards against Finland" MJB

Vic would have headed it over the bar, jelavic would have kicked it wide right and same with kone.

 

He's class because he gets the gimmes as well as the hard ones. Something few of them do.

[Hafnia]

Vic would have headed it over the bar, jelavic would have kicked it wide right and same with kone.

 

He's class because he gets the gimmes as well as the hard ones. Something few of them do.

Trying to think of the hard ones... the Chelsea goal aside I cant really think of any. Then again after the Chelsea game he went 10 games without scoring including the sitters and the penno miss in the semi final... now they were gimmes.... maybe he needed to be a yard ought there too.

 

Yep Deffo get his name on your shirt MJB.

[Shukes]

 

he's a class player that's why. if he stays i'm getting a shirt with his name on the back.

The face of football is really changing.

[holystove]

 

better be with the other options of benteke and origi.

 

Or Batshuayi. He started ahead of Lukaku against Finland.

 

Probably not a lot of evertonians are going to agree with me on this but I'd take Benteke at Everton any day.

 

 

-

 

 

It wasn't a difficult goal. The point is that he was in the right spot, where he seems to be quite often.

 

So other than a horrible first touch and his head stuck up his ass, he has great instincts of where to be in the box.

Edited June 2, 2016 by holystove

[pete0]

 

Or Batshuayi. He started ahead of Lukaku against Finland.

 

Probably not a lot of evertonians are going to agree with me on this but I'd take Benteke at Everton any day.

 

 

-

 

 

It wasn't a difficult goal. The point is that he was in the right spot, where he seems to be quite often.

 

So other than a horrible first touch and his head stuck up his ass, he has great instincts of where to be in the box.

I'd not want Benteke unless we were bringing Moyes back, you have to play a certain way to get the best out of him. He'd be a good option for West ham for when Carroll is injured.

Positioning is majorly neglected when we watch football pundits being insightful. At Premiership level football is more like chess, whereas it is sold to the masses as easy to understand entertainment. Michael Owen was one of the best for reading a play and getting on the end of it.

[Btay]

Here's a thought and I'm not sure if it's been brought up but would Martial have scored the same if not more goals this season than Rom playing for us? I personally think so.

[Hafnia]

Here's a thought and I'm not sure if it's been brought up but would Martial have scored the same if not more goals this season than Rom playing for us? I personally think so.

A fair few strikers would. Rom has been the figurehead, the sole striker of an attack that focused on him whilst defensive solidity was compromised.

 

All his goals bar one were in the penalty box.

[Lowensda]

Comparison with your fave, Giroud.

 

http://www.7amkickoff.com/2016/lukaku-v-giroud-dead-even/

 

 

Romelu Lukaku scored 18 goals for Everton this season. If Lukaku played for Arsenal, would he score more goals? Arsenal fans seem to believe that he would and there is some evidence to suggest that he might. But there is also evidence to suggest that Lukaku is only slightly better than Giroud and is only scoring more by virtue of taking more shots.

 

Lukaku might score more at Arsenal than at Everton. Lukaku took 118 shots for Everton. Everton only generated 491 total shots. That means Lukaku took 24% of Everton’s shots. If Lukaku took 24% of Arsenal’s shots, he would have gotten 137 shots last season. And if he would have been just the same average finishing he did this season (15%), he would have scored 21 goals (20.62). That’s an additional 3 goals over this season and 5 more than Giroud scored.

But what about his finishing?

You have probably heard of expected goals. Expected goals takes the average finishing from specific shot situations and then tallies those up for all the shots a player takes. In its simplest form, and something you can all do, you can take shots in the 6 yard box (average finishing 30%) shots in the 18 yard box (average 11%) and shots outside the 18 (average 3.5%) and get a pretty accurate expected goals number.

Again, we look at Arsenal’s shot creation. They lead the League in shots in the 6 yard box with 53. That’s 20 more than Everton who only created 33 and 2 fewer than the Mighty Barcelona who created 55. Lukaku took 17 of Everton’s 33 shots in the 6 yard box and he converted 29% of those shots, scoring just 5 goals on those 17 shots. This 30% conversion is bang average across all players in the Premier League. Giroud Took 12 shots in the 6 yard box and only finished 3, that’s a 25% finishing rate in the 6 and is below average for the League.

Other players who got a lot of shots in the 6 yard box are Luis Suarez (17 shots 10 goals), Robert Lewandowski (17 shots 5 goals), Zlatan (16 shots 8 goals), Aubameyang (15 shots 8 goals) and Harry Kane (14 shots 2 goals).

When I looked at finishing rate in the 6 yard box, across all players it’s 30%, but among top strikers in the top five Leagues, it’s closer to 45%. Lukaku’s 29% and Giroud’s 25% are average to below average finishing in those areas. To make sure that wasn’t just a one off finishing rate, I looked at Lukaku’s last four seasons compared to Giroud’s. Lukaku has finished 33% of his shots in the 6 yard box and Giroud 38%. Giroud has a slightly better finishing rate than Lukaku in the 6 but compared to the elite strikers like Suarez (48%), Lewandowski (50%), and Aubameyang (52%), both are well behind the average.

This idea of comparing elite forwards with other forwards led me to create a rudimentary “shot quality” metric. If I multiply the number of shots in the 6 yard box by .40 and the number of shots in the 18 yard box by .15 I get a number that looks like “expected goals” but which I’m calling “shot quality.” I remove penalties and shots from distance because both of them, while important to the game, I think tend to add noise to analysis because they are both random events.

Before I go too far down this path, a caveat. I am not challenging xG or criticizing it. I simply don’t have access to the same data sets that they have access to: the people doing xG either buy the data (and it’s prohibitively expensive), get the data because they work for Opta, or (in some cases) steal the data. Either way, the work they are doing is very complicated and not something I have time to do.

If you want to get fancy… you can take the data from Paul Riley’s Tableau, where he looks in more detail at the shots (was it a header, etc), and compiles a more accurate model using shots on target. In Paul’s consolidated spreadsheet Romelu Lukaku was #2 in shot quality for the season with 17.6 expected goals. Giroud was number four on the list with 15.63. And both players finished below 1 in terms of expected goal efficiency.

Despite not having the fancy data, I still like to make little statistical checks on what people call “the eye test”. In other words, I like a nice little stats way to compare what I think I am seeing to something else. I will just admit that I don’t think Giroud is a top level striker. And on the other hand, I do like Lukaku. So, I fully expected my little stats check to prove that I am right for liking Lukaku.

It didn’t happen. Just like Paul Riley’s database suggested, Lukaku and Giroud turned out to be almost exactly the same: both just slightly below par.

My analysis is a little more harsh on the two players than Paul’s. This is probably because he includes all goals and shots and I don’t. I am only interested in their finishing inside the box (minus pens) because that is where my perception of quality comes from (long shots are nice, but they are largely luck). I am also comparing percentages that other elite strikers would finish at: across the league is 30% finishing in the 6, but the top strikers finish at a higher rate of 44% so I compared that (with an adjustment). And the same for shots in the 18 yard box which is 11% for all players but 15% for strikers.

When I compare strikers against strikers I see that Giroud’s shots quality was 17. In other words, as a striker, he should have scored 17 goals (minus pens) from his combined efforts in the 18 yard box. He scored 15 giving him a finishing ratio of .88. Lukaku also had a shot quality of 17 and he only scored 16. Giving him a finishing ratio of .92.

You won’t be at all surprised to learn that the best finisher last season was Luis Suarez with 1.71. That means that if the average striker were given the shots that produced 100 expected goals, with those same shots, Luis Suarez would have scored 171.

Other top finishers among the elites were Zlatan (1.44), Benzema (1.56), Griezmann (1.42)*, Higuain (1.29), Lacazette (1.28), Vardy (1.25), Müller (1.2), Aubameyang (1.19), and Lewandowski (1.13). Since people will ask, Morata was below expectations with a 0.84.

So, there you have it. Lukaku and Giroud are both kinda average strikers. That doesn’t mean that Lukaku won’t score 21 goals next season or 40 goals the season after that. A lot of factors could change: he could get more shots in the 18 yard box and he could improve his finishing. If either of those two things happen, his goals tally will go up. All I can say is that for the last four years, Lukaku’s finishing has stayed between 0.95 and 1.06 — with one exception, last season when he was way below average scoring just 7 where I expected almost 13 and thus giving him a finishing ratio of 0.62.

I have to admit, a player like Griezmann looks like a sure thing and it looks like Lukaku would be a gamble.

Qq

*Griezmann is a fantastic player. He has two consecutive seasons of outperforming expectations, this year where he scored 16 where I expected him to score just 11 and last year where he scored 21 where I expected just 12.55. If Arsenal were going to break the bank for any player in world football I would hope it was Griezmann.

Highlights why we'd need someone like Lacazette to replace him. Much better all round player.

Edited June 2, 2016 by Lowensda

[Paddock]

I wouldn't be surprised if Lukaku went to Arsenal.

[Hafnia]

I didn't say Giroud was a fave of mine just that he is similar to Rom overall but would cost so much less, it's a great piece of analysis though... he is way down my pecking order but that puts perspective on my thoughts of Lukakus cost vs value. In short rom is a £20m- £30m striker at best who we can supposedly sell for double.

 

Giroud would cost somewhere in the region of £20m tops. So essentially that gives us giroud + lacazette for Lukaku.

 

But yes I agree a full rounded striker is priority and a supplementary striker like giroud would be good.

Edited June 2, 2016 by Hafnia

[markjazzbassist]

 

Or Batshuayi. He started ahead of Lukaku against Finland.

 

Probably not a lot of evertonians are going to agree with me on this but I'd take Benteke at Everton any day.

 

 

-

 

 

It wasn't a difficult goal. The point is that he was in the right spot, where he seems to be quite often.

 

So other than a horrible first touch and his head stuck up his ass, he has great instincts of where to be in the box.

 

depending on price i'd take benteke. not for 20-30m but for a cut rate deal and wages sure why not.

[Romey 1878]

I wouldn't touch Benteke with a shitty stick.

[Matt]

 

depending on price i'd take benteke. not for 20-30m but for a cut rate deal and wages sure why not.

Because he is awful?

[markjazzbassist]

Because he is awful?

 

for 8m you wouldn't take him? on 40k a weeik? shit, if he's damaged goods he might want to prove himself again. worth a punt, that's naisy money, and he could be good if he had a coach that believed in him.

[Matt]

 

for 8m you wouldn't take him? on 40k a weeik? shit, if he's damaged goods he might want to prove himself again. worth a punt, that's naisy money, and he could be good if he had a coach that believed in him.

i wouldn't take him on a free, he's rubbish.

[Lowensda]

I wouldn't touch Benteke with a shitty stick.

 

I wouldn't put the stick through the trauma.

Edited June 2, 2016 by Lowensda

[markjazzbassist]

i wouldn't take him on a free, he's rubbish.

 

wow. ok. you really don't like him. well we will see how he does on another squad next year. would be great at west brom with pulis.

[Matt]

 

wow. ok. you really don't like him. well we will see how he does on another squad next year. would be great at west brom with pulis.

its not that I don't like him, it's just that he's a Torres: 1.5 good seasons, horrible injury then shite since. I'd take Naismith back before I took him.

[smeghead1]

 

I wouldn't put the stick through the trauma.

 

Couldn't put it better myself!

[Paddock]

I wouldn't touch Benteke with a shitty stick.

This.