It stands for Expected Goals. There's a good article explaining it on the BBC (https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/40699431) but the long and short of it is that it's possible to work out the chance of a shot being scored by comparing it against hundreds of thousands of other shots that were taken at the same spot to work out how many goals were scored compared to how many were missed/saved. So the xG of a penalty is 0.76 xG meaning there's a 76% of a goal being scored from that penalty as that's the overall conversion rate from penalties. Of course these are just averages - some players will be better than others at penalties and same goes for open play situations. The ways of working xG out have developed and now it's possible to work out the chance of a goal taking into lots of factors (number of defenders in the way, height of the shot etc)
There was a fair few players in front of the shot and it was from range, was helped by Begovics positioning being off as well. Can see at the bottom the PSxG (post shot xg - the chance of a goal being scored if the shot is on-target) jumps up considerably so most shots from this range are missed altogether. Martins was a hard header to pull off from that angle and range, was v lucky imo (PSxG: 0.52)
Myself I prefer to live like it's 1983. No mobile phones, better music and Watford doing very nicely indeed .
xG is short for Ex Girlfriends. You'll see some on here are still in love with xG, for them it's all about what might have been. Sadly it means nothing in the real world but talking xG keeps them happy.
Awesome! Thanks @reids . Any chance of some clips of Chaks wonderful cameo? He went on one mazy run right through the middle and looked like it took 3 or 4 to stop him. His spin was sublime. And of course the pass to the ref just to rub it all in as to how easy it all was!
My son went and told me that we were just going through the motions 2nd half as the match was effectively won. The commentator on sky soccer saturday said the same thing almost word for word, except he added that it's a long season so the players eased off considerably as they were no doubt told to at half time. Even in 2nd gear we could have scored another 3 from what I saw on the extended highlights.
Yup, we dialled back completely. VI made the point the players also got more tired, it being the first game and all, and the sun warmed things up quite a bit. No point busting a gut when you're already coasting at 4-0.
Only took 8 clicks of the mouse from start to uploading the video so required very little effort on my part!
You can try to sync the video with Jon Marks' commentary for the goals which is available at wfc.net (click on extras)
Karlan Grant was prolific for them that season with 18 (4 pens), Robinson hit 7, which is OK, but nobody else even managed 5 in the league, even last season we managed 4 players to reach that mark, Louza being one of those, and he only played about half the season. With 2, possibly 3, decent strikers in the squad, Louza, and hopefully a decent amount from elsewhere on the pitch, I think we won't have the same problems in terms of scoring (even if the glory days of Deeney, Ighalo, Vydra and co are long gone!)
Yep I saw it and still thought we were comfortably the better side but everybody are their entitled to their own views
I don't fully understand xG and how to properly interpret it, but considering scores of 0xG are practically unheard of, and scores of 3xG and above are pretty rare, I think a gap of a whole 2xG is quite large?
I wasn’t at the game so I’m a little confused, why is everyone raving about this? His performance looks fine…not much else?
Think it was the fact that he only played 25 mins, so the sheer amount of dribbles in that time is quite impressive. Guess it also shows up more in comparison to the rest of our team who were basically coasting after the game was essentially won, but he was trying to make an impression so "looks better" compared to everyone else.
Typical Jurado performance, lots of nice touches, no goals and no assists . I thought he did more on the the day than those clips show, it's rather spoilt the memory actually !
The contrast to last season was there for all to see. Perhaps a less talented squad on paper but they performed very very well. QPR were absolutely dreadful- they could still be playing now and our clean sheet would still be intact. They made us look like Manchester City (in fact Begovic was the only one keeping it from being a similar scoreline to nearly every time we played City lol) Improvements can be made of course but a very positive 99! minutes to start things off. Plymouth will actually be a harder test- they too won convincingly at home and will be eager to follow that up in their first away game back.
Well, where the hell did that come from? Speaking to fellow fans pre match nobody seemed to have a clue as to how we would perform but perform we did. Although QPR were pants you can only beat what is in front of you. Nobody had a bad one and IMO Louza, Ngakia Martens were standout and Georgi what's his name looked like he could be a bit special. Tougher games ahead for sure but it was nice to win and more than that,nice to see the boys actually giving a f**k.
Let’s hope it wasn’t a one off against a poor side . We did win 4-0 twice early under Bilic too . Tougher tests to come . But hopefully the squad have gained a lot of confidence from Saturday. Shows how important it is to start games well!
