Quote Originally Posted by KeepTheMagpieFlyingH View Post
Metrics do matter and the majority of clubs use metrics in one way or another and have proved game changers for the likes of Brighton and Brentford..not only in terms of tactical efficiency but player recruitment. Players are signed using metrics across the board..more players moving into the league from non league is an example. Cameras now at every game down to step 2..all data collected..individual and team analysed and logged. Distance covered..duels won and lost..passes complete/incomplete etc..it goes on and on. Which is fantastic for the lads who’ve been missed and had to take the long route into the game..anything missed is quickly being picked up on.

Possession is a tricky one. It’s all good measuring overall %’s but you need to be measuring the effectiveness of the possession and that’s where Notts are failing in my opinion. I was critical even under Williams..the possession was slow and predictable even more so now under Maynard. A metric that should be used to measure the effectiveness of the possession is called packing..packing measures the teams and individuals ability to break lines..the receivers ability to hold the ball in between the lines and keep the chain going..the value in this metric is that only forward passes that break lines are scored..which gives a good indication of how quickly and efficiently your moving the ball forward. Notts are slow..which ends up with us playing high in front of deep compact units leading to difficulty breaking opponents down (low packing scores) and all sorts of trouble when recycling or on the turnover.

A google search on packing will give the ins and outs of how it works. A club that is heavily based on analytics are surely looking at this aswell as overall %’s but going on what I see they can’t be.
I can't remember which game it was, but I looked at the Fotmob app at half time and saw that we'd made something like 120+ passes, but only about 20 or so in the opposition's half. The opposition had made far fewer passes (I think they had about 30% of possession) but had made twice as many passes in our half, had more shots on target, and a higher xG.

If the vast majority of our possession is in our own half, we can't' claim we're dominating anything. We can't hurt the opposition from that position, only ourselves. This needs to change. I'd be happy for us to dominate possession if that meant we're all over the opposition, but that's not the case most of the time.