So as squeeky bum time draws to an end, deals are being made and transfer talk is eveywhere.

Who do you want, who's coming in, and who do you want out.

Chelsea have already got Marin, the German international, set up for next season. A very good buy IMO.

www1.skysports.com

Not convinced that qualifies him to be a part of a team that plays differently than to his strengths.

Nor am I. But he should be given a chance to before just being carted out, no?

Probably, yeah. But then we don't know there isn't more to this than is being reported, do we.

I do.

I take it Brendon told you himself then?

It's a secret.

I've never rated Carroll, I remember arguing with Geordie Steve about him becoming world class and so far I've been proved right, he doesn't have terrible footwork but it's not great either. Rodgers wants mobile players who can zip the ball around quickly and a big lanky pony tailed spastic like Carroll probably can't play like that. If you get 17m+ for him I would take it straight away, Liverpool fans can always console themselves with the knowledge that he's not Torres!

A quick note on data here; I’ve filtered out players who played less than 500 minutes across the season and where a statistic is a quantity rather than a percentage (e.g. number of passes), then I’ve converted it into number per minute played. This deals with players having differing amounts of time on the pitch across a season and makes them comparable.

First up, number of passes played per minute (vertical axis) vs. passing accuracy (horizontal axis). Liverpool players in red and Swansea in blue.



It’s immediately obvious that Carroll (bottom left hand corner of the chart) plays fewer passes per minute on the pitch and is less accurate with those passes than the majority of Swansea’s 2011/2012 team. Or for that matter, compared to his Liverpool team mates. The hypothesis that Rodgers favours a passing game also looks valid, with a cluster of Swansea players appearing in the top-right corner.

We can discount the two goalkeepers’ passing stats for this analysis, but Twitter provided some immediate and very interesting feed-back on other players who appear in the bottom-left of that first chart. On a purely passing analysis, Carroll looks potentially better than Swansea’s Danny Graham, who played under Rodgers, with Carroll playing more passes (0.35/min vs. 0.21/min) but being less accurate (64% vs. 77% accuracy). Maybe he could fit in a Rodgers team after all?

For me, it depends on how you view the Rodgers philosophy. A passing system could be looked at as favouring quality over quantity and in a “don’t give the ball away” approach, more passes and less accuracy would count significantly against a player. Carroll, on average, misplaced eleven passes per game, while Graham misplaced four.

By that measure, the players look much less similar and Carroll gives the ball away nearly three times as often as Graham.

Another point which jumped out from the first chart was that measured solely on passing accuracy and quantity, Suarez doesn’t look particularly good either, with only 75% pass accuracy and 0.42 passes per minute. If Carroll doesn’t fit, then maybe the same is true for Suarez?



It’s time to step outside passing stats and have a look at what else these players might add to a team. I’ve left passing accuracy on the horizontal axis, but now we have chances created per minute on the vertical and the size of the circles is shots on target per minute.

Suddenly, Suarez jumps to the top, with 0.023 chances created per minute and 0.019 shots on target. He’s less accurate with his passing than any player in Swansea’s 2011/2012 team (with the exception of Vorm, the goalkeeper), but valuable in terms of creating goal scoring chances.

Carroll also looks better in this second analysis and he created more chances per minute than any player who was under Rodgers at Swansea last season. As a side note, a few Twitter comments on the original passing analysis picked up that Jay Spearing scored well for passing, but he falls away badly here.

The question which Rodgers must be wrestling with, is how much he is willing to compromise a passing philosophy to generate more goal scoring chances, if at all? Carroll can undoubtedly do damage and create chances, but he will also give the ball away. He might well be an effective player, but is he an effective player of the type that Brendan Rodgers likes? This analysis and some of the manager’s early comments, would suggest not.

To an extent – although it’s possibly an unexpected result – Suarez presents the same problem (Editors note: Surely Suarez’s amount of shots and creativity show his value to the side?). He’s certainly a better player than Carroll, but his passing accuracy still falls short of the level set by Rodgers’ Swansea. Long term, are those goal scoring chances going to be worth the compromise?

All of the stats from this article have been taken from the Opta Stats Centre at EPLIndex.com – Subscribe Now (Includes author privileges!) See Demo’s and videos about the Stats Centre & read about new additions to the stats centre.

iNTERESTING THAT THE ONLY PLAYER NEAR cARROLL AT BEING BAD AT PASSING ACCURACY IS THEIR KEEPER, rEINA.

Are you for real? You've got too much time on your hands bro! Wanna come to the DSI office and pack some spotter card packs, and do something constructive with your time instead? We could do with the help! ;-)

Some short memories in here.

youtube.com

Plagiarism at its finest Dom!

eplindex.com

Edit: Oh ok it's pretty obvious if you read your whole post, but I got bored about a third of the way through ..

Yeah it's a copy and paste, I thought I put the link under it though. As Dave says though it's quite obvious if you read the whole thing.


Nobody is saying he hasn't scored with the ball at his feet. I'm saying that it's not his strength.

I'll give you that. I think he's better with his feet than we're giving him credit for here though.

Carroll trying to do the old tiki-taka could at least be entertaining to watch though!

Also go to youtube and have a look at his other 8 goals. Mostly they are balls up to him or smashers from the edge of the box. No intricate passing moves at all.

Not as funny as Torres trying it though. I think Torres would have been out the door quicker than Carroll had he still been there.

Torres would still be banging them in if he was still there! He scored a hat-trick on his last game!

He wasn't exactly prolific before he left though. He'd spent 18 months with an injury.