Chelsea Radial Passing Charts For Stoke City, WBA Matches

by Graham MacAree on Sep 6, 2011 8:28 AM BST in Statistical Football Analysis

Well my foray into making filterable radial passing charts seemed to go down a treat, so I decided to make some more. Chelsea FC are only three games into the season, after all, and what's the point of having maps for just one game? After the jump are the passing charts for Chelsea's 0-0 draw at Stoke City and the 2-1 home win over West Bromwich Albion - go ahead and explore to your hearts' content...

Figure 1: Chelsea radial passing maps at Stoke City, 8/14/11. Powered by Tableau.

Remember how good Fernando Torres was against Stoke? Yeah, that was because people were passing to him. Torres received nine passes from Florent Malouda and eight from Frank Lampard - 49 in all from his Chelsea teammates, and in consequence had a lot more of the ball. For the sake of comparison, that's six fewer passes than he's received in the two games at Stamford Bridge. Asking Torres to do well while never giving him the ball might be a bit much.

Oh, we have a post about Frank Lampard today. His passing was pretty dire in this one, wasn't it? Yikes.

Figure 2: Chelsea radial passing maps vs West Bromwich Albion, 8/20/11. Powered by Tableau.

Lampard's passing didn't get much better in game two, either - at least, not until the interval, whereupon he turned back into good Lampard and the team was much improved. It'd be nice if he kept that up for a little while, because as crazy as this sounds, he's the most creative midfielder in Andre Villas-Boas' starting XI right now.

One interesting comparison here is the difference between Jose Bosingwa against Stoke and against West Brom. Stoke was a fairly anonymous return for the right back, which basically featured him swinging in loads of pointless, useless crosses that didn't trouble anyone. Against the Baggies, however, Bosingwa was a major threat, and the winning goal came when he burst down the right to set up Malouda at the far post.

Is there a big difference in that radial chart? Nope, sure doesn't seem to be. But there is a major difference in the location of Bosingwa's work in the two games. Against Stoke, he was kept fairly deep, but he pushed further forward against West Brom (36 passes in the full back attacking zone against 23) and Chelsea were duly rewarded.

Anyway, I hope I've demonstrated that much fun can be had with these things. We're all caught up with Chelsea games (and no, I am not going to do them for the rest of the league, because that would take me 40+ hours a day of work) so there's room to add some features before the Sunderland match. Anything anyone would particularly like to see?

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Comments

Nice charts...

I have a feeling we’re playing alot more posession football now than last season. Which is the right route to go even if we don’t have the players right now to unlock defences at will and the backline is scarily high.

Does anyone have passing totals for us for each game this year?

A guy that likes the texans but live all the way over in Sweden

by Fredrik Nyman on Sep 6, 2011 9:08 AM BST reply actions

A small request

Could you overlay the quadrants onto the map? Obviously I know where forward, back, left and right are, it’s just it’s a bit hard to tell where exactly the cutoff is when flipping through so many different players’ maps.

by Al Benson on Sep 6, 2011 9:56 AM BST reply actions

Some more feature ideas:

1) Would be nice to have a drop-down to select specific matches or season-to-date rather than having each as a separate chart.

2) Having said that, it’s also nice to have multiple charts to compare different players/matches etc (as you’ve done above). Would it be possible (maybe with a pop-out window or something) to see two of these charts side-by-side to compare different players/matches etc.

3) Might be worth having a link to a different page where people can look at these charts without it being in one of your articles, that way people can look up whatever they like :-)

by deg0ey on Sep 6, 2011 10:46 AM BST reply actions

Well Done!

I’ve said this before, but the amount of effort you and Steven put into this site is amazing! What you did above goes way and above what is required for a blog site esp. since you’re not going to be paid. But you do it anyway. I’m very grateful.

KTBFFH!

P.S: As a Nigerian, I always appreciate more proof that Mikel is not as useless as people claim he is. Did you know he took a corner kick which Nigeria scored at the weekend?

The Nigerian Perspective!

by Iced O on Sep 6, 2011 10:50 AM BST reply actions