Jumanji said:
I know that Dzeko can't score penalties since his Wolfsburg days but why's that? He's a striker!
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If there's one thing dzeko lovers and 'haters' will agree on is that he can score goals. No question about that. So why the same goal stats every day? Where are the stats for being dispossessed, breaking down promising moves losing the ball, etc....
It's hard to generate these types of stats as it would need someone to watch every game all the way through and record it all. Something like "breaking down promising moves losing the ball" is also a very subjective thing to assess, so the numbers would vary depending on who was making the assessment.
However, it
is possible to show the effect a player has on the success of the team due to all aspects of his play, including the examples you gave, along with things like running off the ball to create space for others, assisting an assist, making a bad pass, etc. They do it in ice hockey, because they make so many substitutions during a game, so it's not easy to figure out which players are contributing more to the team. It consists of seeing how many goals the team scores and concedes while each player is on the ice. You can do the same in football, and I have done just that for Tevez, Dzeko, and Aguero for every competitive game last season, and also the season before (and also a combination of the two to improve the reliability of the stats). I also did the same analysis for each striker pairing. I already posted the results in a separate thread, but if you think it might be useful here so that we don't just focus on the goals scored by the strikers, but on their general contribution to the team, let me know and I'll post them again.
p.s. despite your optimism, I'm not sure everyone does definitively agree that Dzeko can score goals (at least not as a starter for us), but I can almost guarantee that even his staunchest supporters
will agree that he's bloody horrible at taking penalties and shouldn't take any more for us. Same goes for Spanish Dave, amazingly enough - can't he just pass it into the corner, for God's sake. I bet if he was surrounded by three defenders and Zabba made a run to the far post, he could place it perfectly right in front of him into the corner every time...
