The Final Whistle
None of this means anything, but in a desperate attempt to have not wasted your time let me try and argue some meaning anyway.
I do find some of the stats really interesting. Seeing how Plymouth clinched the championship is interesting and speaks to a high level of resilience in the squad and a finishing mentality.
I’m also very pleased with how Lincoln performed. You can see how some teams scraped out the results needed to survive. Lots of similar names feature at the bottom of both the total-goals table and the top-teams table, for example. Whereas for the Imps you can see us pop up in some surprising places. We already knew our performance against good teams was solid and that we started brightly, but it’s nice to see it confirmed in real numbers. Realistically there is a play-off contending side somewhere in this squad, who just need to pick up perhaps four to six wins to pull it off.
Even featuring down the bottom of the goals-scored table and at the top of the draws isn’t the worst place to be. Without being prolific in front of goal and without being able to sneak draws into wins we landed solidly in the top half of the table. These are all things we can work on – we now know that picking up more goals and driving second-half results will propel us up the table. Presumably, Mark Kennedy knows that too and hopefully that will be our focus for next season.
So whilst it’s nonsense, and hopefully fun nonsense, there are some promising signs that suggest with the right work things are moving in the right direction for us as a team.
All of the data for these tables were pulled from API-Football and then processed using custom Python code (what? – Gary). If you have an idea for a fun table ping me on Twitter.