One of the things that seems to be true in retrospect, is that when we are in close games, say 0-0 and its getting close to the end, we tend to over-index chances that players have to score and get upset when they miss. But just as Saka showed us v Ipswich, even top players in top form don't net every chance. I think that Martinelli got heat because he found himself in scoring position in important moments but failed to convert, which says nothing about his overall production. My 2 cents.
100% agree that fans' comparisons of our players to other teams' players can be terribly unfair, because they don't watch those other players with same level of intense second-by-second emotion-laden expectations. Highlight reels are lovely, but very skewed towards the player's few peak moments in a game, while ignoring the 98% of the time when a move did not pay off. This is one of the reasons I dig this blog: you can use stats to talk all of us emotional fans off our cliffs :D
One of the things that seems to be true in retrospect, is that when we are in close games, say 0-0 and its getting close to the end, we tend to over-index chances that players have to score and get upset when they miss. But just as Saka showed us v Ipswich, even top players in top form don't net every chance. I think that Martinelli got heat because he found himself in scoring position in important moments but failed to convert, which says nothing about his overall production. My 2 cents.
100% agree that fans' comparisons of our players to other teams' players can be terribly unfair, because they don't watch those other players with same level of intense second-by-second emotion-laden expectations. Highlight reels are lovely, but very skewed towards the player's few peak moments in a game, while ignoring the 98% of the time when a move did not pay off. This is one of the reasons I dig this blog: you can use stats to talk all of us emotional fans off our cliffs :D