After the defeat at Wrexham, a debate has sprung up about our strikers.

Are they good enough? It’s an interesting question because while goals have been spread around the team, a certain wastefulness in front of goal has been a big problem. It got me thinking – how does the current crop stand in amongst all of the strikers we’ve had since being promoted to League One?

You know what that means? Yep – number crunching.

What I’ve done is take all of the out-and-out strikers we’ve had since coming into League One. That doesn’t include wingers or tens, the likes of Anthony Scully, Brennan Johnson and Morgan Rogers. I’ve also excluded those with fewer than 200 minutes of League action – out goes Jamie Soule and Rob Street. That’s left me with a list that looks like this:  John Akinde, Tom Hopper, Tyler Walker, Freddie Draper,  Callum Morton, Liam Cullen, Ben House, Jovon Makama, John Marquis, Dan Nlundulu, Luke Plange, Joe Taylor, Jack Vale, Bailey Cadamarteri and Tyreece John-Jules. FYI, I haven’t included 21/22 Ben House in this, as he played 185 minutes.

Before we go on, I’d like to address the elephant in the room, the fabled ‘eye test’. Whatever these stats say, if you think Jovon Makama is bad, they won’t change your mind. Our world is dominated by people who say what they see as if their eyes are an infallible measure of what is happening. All your eyes do is relay information to your brain, a brain loaded with preconceptions, assumptions and decisions already made. If you think our current strikers are bad, then your eyes will pick out evidence to support that. Even when your eyes see something different, such as the clinical finishing against Man City kids or Chesham, your brain adds a ‘yeah, but’. Yeah, but it was only a kid’s team. Yeah, but it was only Chesham. In truth, while your opinion is respected here, the eye test is as trustworthy as a politician telling you they won’t they won’t raise taxes. What you see is not fact. What I see is not fact. It is always interpretation.

I’ve then broken down the strikers by season to show exactly which players have had the best and worst seasons on a number of metrics. But what metrics? I don’t think that just ‘goals’ are fair, taking into account injuries and subs. So, I’ve worked out the following metrics that I think give an important overview.

Goals to xG

You might be surprised to know we have two players in our current squad who have vastly outperformed their xG. If a player has a positive number here, it means they’ve scored more than their xG suggests they should. It’s probably no real surprise to see 2019/20 Tyler Walker in there, nor Joe Taylor, but this season, Freddie Draper has actually done better this season than his xG suggests. He’s scored two league goals from an xG of just 0.65. Tom Hopper, surprisingly, comes out on top.

This is interesting, because it probably plays into dispelling certain narratives. Liam Cullen didn’t have a great time with the Imps, leaving labelled as ‘rubbish’ along with Morgan Whittaker, and these stats perhaps show why. However, he’s since been a big hit in Swansea and Wales. There’s also Ben House from last season on here, a man plagued by injury, and the list doesn’t have Luke Plange on it, a truly awful player for us.

However, it does have Jovon from this season, and his performance against Wrexham him above Callum Morton (-1.7) and Tyreece John-Jules (-1.7). For the record, the xG for his two chances was 0.5, meaning only once every two matches would those chances result in a single goal. The ‘obvious’ one he missed had a xG of 0.37, meaning is would be missed roughly twice in every three matches.

Minutes Per Goal

I know this will confirm what a lot of people believe, but Joe Taylor’s return was by far the best minutes per goal since we’ve been in League One. Tyler Walker being second will also be of little surprise, but the other two? John Akinde’s minutes in 2019/20 were 860, giving him a goal every 215 minutes. Bailey Cadamarteri is fourth on this table, with a goal every 244 minutes, again suggesting the current strikers aren’t as bad as people say.

There are only two out-and-out strikers who haven’t scored a goal, a very young Freddie in 21/22, and Luke Plange. However, aside from Liam Cullen, Jovon is the next fewest goal per minute on the pitch this season. It’s painful to see because he’s been in some good positions, and if one had gone in last night, he wouldn’t be on this list. Still, it does confirm that his finishing hasn’t been spot on. Dan Nlundulu is next, with 798 minutes per goal.

I also wanted to add this, because it is pertinent. Perhaps a striker should be judged on how many minutes he has played before being involved in a goal. For instance, a cross, a flick on, anything like that. I’ve gone to five on this graphic purely because it might surprise you to find that this season, two of our so-called ‘average’ strikers have a top-five ‘goal involvement to minutes’ ratio.

Goals Per Start

These graphics are getting challenging to produce, so I’ve decided not to do one for the worst because the outcome is the same as the previous one. However, there is an interesting outlier when it comes to goals per start. Freddie Draper has two league goals this season, and has started just twice. That surely points to him being given a chance in the coming weeks? Given how wasteful we’ve been, it makes sense to give him a start or two to see if perhaps we’re missing a trick?

That said, John Akinde barely started in the 2019/20 season, but two goals against Bolton in his final game did push him up the list. It just goes to show that stats can deceive, just like your eyes.

Shot Accuracy

Accurate shooting, that’s what we need, right? Well, not exactly. Yes, you have to hit the target, but as the great Danny Cowley once said, he’s happier missing chances than not creating them at all. Jack Vale is technically our most accurate striker since we’ve been in League One, as all his shots were on target. I say ‘all’, but I should say ‘both’. Liam Cullen, a player we know underperformed his xG massively, was also more accurate than Joe Taylor and Tyler Walker, the two ‘big’ strikers we’ve lauded since coming into the division. The fact is that you do have to have chances to miss. Also, Bailey is up there, underlining that his miss the other night was very much out of character.

By the way, of the 23 strikers we’ve had (remember, some have multiple seasons) the current punchbag Jovon Makama is 12th in terms of accuracy. Yeah, that’s right, the player most fans think couldn’t hit a barn door with a tractor has a shot accuracy of 43% – that’s more than Callum Morton, every Ben House season bar this (even the year he scored 12) and more than 20/21 Tom Hopper, a ten-goal season.

Other Numbers

There are other numbers for which I haven’t done a graphic. It is tough that only four of our out-and-out strikers have hit double figures since we’ve been in this division, and only two of those (House and Hopper) belonged to us. However, you could temper that by saying Brennan Johnson, Anthony Scully and Jorge Grant all reached the hallowed ten while playing in and around some of our forwards, underlining that a striker’s job is not always just to score.

I also think minutes per miss is important. The player with the fewest minutes between his misses is Joe Taylor (a miss every 66 minutes), while 2019/20 Tyler Walker is fourth (78 minutes per miss). For me, this is where the issue actually is this season – Jovon’s minutes per miss is 110, Freddie is 112 and Bailey is 146. That suggests the problem is not missing shots, but taking them. To score goals, you have to miss chances, and what we really need is to take more chances. The more times you roll a dice, the more likely you are to get a six, apparently. That plays into what Michael Skubala said before the Wrexham game, which is what I’ll leave you with.

“I think the hardest part of the game is scoring goals,” he said. “People forget that. But we’ve been getting goals from different players, which is really encouraging. The difference in games, though, has been how clinical other teams are in key moments. Can we be more clinical? That’s something we work on every day, and we’ll get there.”

“When we start scoring more consistently, it’ll make a big difference. It’s not that we haven’t created chances. Since the start of the season, across 17 games, we’ve created a decent number of opportunities. Now, it’s about converting more of those in open play. In other areas, like set pieces, we still look like a threat. The key is building that same level of threat in open play.”