How Do Our Current Midfielders Compare To Ethan Erhahon Last Season?

The defensive midfield area is one that causes quite a few people concern.

Football hipsters, with their beards, craft IPA and love of stats, will tell you it’s the heartbeat of the team; they’re the players that matter. Forget Matt Rhead, James Collins and Anthony Scully, it’s all about Liam Bridcutt, Alex Woodyard and Ethan Erhahon.

Yeah, we can be intolerable.

Then there is the other side, the eye-test brigade, with their second-half beer goggles and love of 5-4 wins and gung-ho attacking. They have no love for a midfielder that won’t waltz through the defence like a prime Georgi Kinkladze (look it up, kids), and one who doesn’t get forward may as well stay at home and Google clips of Paul Gascoigne.

In the middle, somewhere, is the reality.

Recently, I’ve been defending Tom Bayliss, not that I should have to, given his placement as one of the top ten holding midfielders in the division, but that’s the modern world. Anyway, in our Discord chat, I was asked how are numbers this season stacked up against last. Does Tom Bayliss hold his own when compared to our one-time £1m prospect (but in reality, £750,000) Ethan Erhahon?

Only one way to find out. Staaaaaats!

However, a couple of caveats. Firstly, in this piece, I am only comparing players who held our midfield under Michael Skubala. I’d love to throw Bridcutt in there, but each manager plays slightly differently, and to get an honest picture, I think we can only really go with Skubala players.

Also, all League One stats. None of this dominating Man City’s kids to get your numbers up. I only want the blood and thunder of league action.

Finally, I have not hand-picked the stats, they were picked by our Patreon Discord. There is no moulding to any particular argument here, it’s raw numbers, a story they’re telling, not a narrative I am creating.

Are we ready? I shall pour myself another craft beer, turn up the bottom of my jeans, and we can begin.

There are a lot of numbers here, so for any reasonable analysis, it’s going to be hard to pick a definitive ‘best’ player. However, before we start, I have done just that. I’ve taken each of the stats and ranked them from one to four. I’ve only done it (for example) for passes to the final third completed, not the volume and the percentage, if that makes sense?

That gives each player a score, and allows me to say that, based on the numbers above, Ethan Erhahon last season delivered better overall numbers than all the rest. I awarded four for top spot, down to one for bottom, and his average was 3.11.

That said, McGrandles and Bayliss this season were neck and neck, 2.55 McGrandles and 2.44 Bayliss, with McGrandles last season on 1.88. What does that tell us, without dropping into the stats? That as a pair, McGrandles and Bayliss work better than McGrandles and Erhahon.

I can pick apart the stats above, but there are a lot and in truth, there isn’t a huge amount between the players. Erhahon’s passing stands out – he topped the numbers in forward passes completed, having a larger volume and better percentages. The same goes for through balls, passes to the final third and progressive runs as well. It’s a surprise that those numbers, the more creative numbers, are the ones in which he stands out.

He did top interceptions also, but I expected to see him out front for defensive duels. That honour goes to McGrandles, and his performances this season are the ones that stand out. He contested more defensive duels than the other two, 6.5 and 6.25, with Bayliss and Erhahon in the fours. What struck me is Tom Bayliss posted better numbers this season than Erhahon did for defensive duels last season, pouring a little scorn on the ‘lightweight’ tag he’s been unfairly given.

Bayliss topped the shots created field, 0.53 per game being double that of both midfielders last season, and he tops expected assists. I find expected assists a tough one to take, as it’s reliant on the player you pass to keeping up his part of the bargain! What it suggests to me is that Bayliss is more attacking than Erhahon, who had better passing stats but fewer shot assists. Bayliss was second in both passing fields, but in fairness to Erhahon, he was a long way in front.

Do these stats tell us who the better player was? Numbers can be subjective. If you’re not a Bayliss fan, you’ll say ‘yes, Erhahon was better’ and the numbers back that up. However, if you want to extol the virtue of Tom Bayliss, you’ll say that he and McGrandles are more suited when playing together, offering a finer balance between the defensive work and the more forward-thinking stuff.

The issue that I see is expectation. When Alex Woodyard and Michael Bostwick played side-by-side, did we expect goals and runs from either? You’ll say no, but that was a 4-2-3-1, much the same as this. When Liam Bridcutt and James Jones played together, you expect the latter to get forward because he’s ‘that type of player’ and that’s a trap to fall into. Bayliss is perhaps more of an ‘8’ than a ‘6’, and this role is a hybrid, one that dictates he has to do both jobs.

It would be interesting to measure him against Tom Pett from the 2018/19 season, but again, there is always a caveat. The two roles were similar, and Pett was more of an ‘8’ playing in a different role, but it was also League Two and in a team stylistically, a little different.

I think my final word on this is you now have the stats (something I was accused of not doing, giving you all the stats, by a social media user), so you can draw conclusions. I feel that maybe this does outline how Erhahon was the better of the three, and few would really dispute that. As a functioning midfield, working together and complementing each other, I think the numbers are a big pat on the back for the McGrandles / Bayliss pairing.