Ahead of our live podcast this weekend, we asked Patreons to put questions to us about Lincoln City this season.

One of those questions we were asked was whether we have any concerns about our ability to create quality chances from open play. I decided that was something to look into in some depth, as it does feel, at times, that our chances have been limited and our opponents have not.

Personally, I didn’t worry, and having looked at the big chances we’ve created and conceded across our opening eight league games, I think there’s a reasonable basis for that feeling.

At first, I looked at games purely involving us, and I started with big chances. I appreciate that avoids the ‘open play’ bit of the question, but at the same time, I think it’s pertinent to look at chances as a whole first. I’m counting a big chance as any opportunity worth more than 0.20 xG, and I have excluded penalties from that data. Across those eight matches, we’ve created 22 big chances and conceded 13, which doesn’t strike me as evidence of a team struggling to give itself opportunities to win games.

We’ve created more big chances than our opponents in three matches, the same number in four and fewer in just one. Even in that one, we created more in one half, so the second period skews the numbers a little. That exception was Middlesbrough, and since then, the balance is 18 to seven in our favour, and nobody has bettered our tally in an individual game.

That doesn’t mean every performance has been full of flowing attacking football, or that we couldn’t do more in certain matches. Preston, for instance, finished with neither side creating a chance above that threshold, while Swansea was one apiece once our penalty was removed. I also think there’s a danger of treating a penalty as though it appeared from nowhere – ‘but a penalty doesn’t count’ is the general feeling. Fred was fouled in a position where he posed a threat against Swansea, so what might his chance have been worth had he been allowed to continue? We can’t award ourselves an imaginary chance on top of the penalty, but the attacking work which led to the foul still deserves consideration.

This is the bigger point for me: there’s one common factor in all our matches which isn’t there in everybody else’s, and that’s us. Our approach influences what both teams can create and how, so judging our attacking output without considering what we allow at the other end misses a significant part of the picture. Basically, you can’t hold up open play chances created in Norwich and Bolton and say ‘we don’t do that’ because we weren’t playing in the Norwich and Bolton game. Our games look different. By the way, the table at the end shows that even if you did, we’re not bottom of open play chances created according to WhoScored, who use something different than my rudimentary xG cutoff.

When another team posts impressive attacking numbers, you need to know who they’ve faced and whether they’ve played us. Creating six quality chances somewhere else doesn’t mean they’d create six at Sincil Bank, nor does it mean we must produce that many ourselves to have a good chance of winning. I’m more interested in the balance of opportunities in the games we’re actually involved in.

Southampton and Blackburn are particularly useful examples. We created six big chances (again, not open play, those xG 0.20 or over) to Southampton’s one and four to Blackburn’s none, giving us ten across those two matches while allowing just one. Whatever frustration we felt about the outcomes, those figures hardly suggest we were incapable of producing quality opportunities. Yes, there is a follow-up question here about taking big chances, but we do know we need to be clinical in moments. However, the starting point is to have the moments.

Portsmouth is another good example, because we created three big chances to their one, excluding our penalty. Losing doesn’t make those chances disappear, although it does leave us asking why they weren’t reflected in the result. Creating opportunities and making enough of them are connected issues, but they aren’t the same question.

The Swansea game needs a little more care because the big-chance count was level. My feeling watching the game was that we created the better chances overall, and our total xG was higher, but I can’t use a one-all big-chance tally as proof that we created more of those particular opportunities. It tells us that, without the penalty, each side had one chance above the threshold being used here.

There’s another distinction to make because the original question specifically mentioned open play. These figures exclude penalties, but they don’t separate chances from open play and chances from other set pieces. They support my broader point about the opportunities we’re creating relative to our opponents, while a specific judgement on open play needs that additional breakdown.

In terms of open play, we are bottom four for chances created from that route. I’d be worried if that was reflected in league position, appearances, or if we were bottom four for all chances created, but we’re not. We are creating chances, so should it be a worry if they’re coming from set pieces, while the actual open play numbers are much lower? Put it another way, look at the top six teams for chances created from open play: we’re above three of those teams. We’re above four of the top eight, and five of the top ten. There is no direct correlation between open play chances and success in the opening eight fixtures.

Perhaps part of the concern is whether we have somebody who can produce a moment of magic when a game is tight. I understand that, because we’d all like another player capable of turning very little into a goal. However, we’re heading into the international break in mid-table in the Championship, and if we finished there, I suspect we’d be a couple of places higher than plenty of people expected, would we be worried about anything at all?

That doesn’t mean I’m blase about the numbers, because anyone who reads me regularly knows I take them seriously. If teams were consistently creating far more quality chances against us than we were against them, I’d be concerned regardless of our league position or how they came. Instead, across eight matches, we’ve produced 22 of these ‘big’ chances to our opponents’ 13, with only Middlesbrough creating more than us in a single game.

I want us to improve in terms of taking those chances, but I also want to assess what we’re doing in the context of how we play and what we restrict the other side to. There is reason to examine the open-play figures a little more closely, and there will always be individual matches where we need to offer more.

For now, though, the balance of big chances gives me considerably more encouragement than concern.

The table below is ordered by set piece chances, but you’ll see our numbers for the others aren’t woeful by any means.