Best finisher in the Premier League?
Who is the best striker in England at the moment? Most people would say Didier Drogba, Fernando Torres, Wayne Rooney and Robin van Persie would take some beating and I would agree with them.
Interesting
Sky Sports, with Opta, have looked at the stats for strikers in the Premier League so far this season and they make interesting reading.
They have come up with a top ten list for strikers in relation to goals per attempt at goal. In other words, they are looking at who is the best finisher as opposed to who scores the most goals.
Just
Interestingly, neither Drogba or Rooney make the top ten list. Torres comes in fourth and van Persie just makes the list in tenth place.
So who is the player who scores with the highest percentage of his attempts? Leading the way less than a third of the way through the season are Manchester City’s Craig Bellamy and Sunderland‘s Kenwyne Jones. They have both had fourteen attempts on goal and scored five times, giving them a success rate of 35.71%.
Robbie Keane is third, Torres fourth, with ten goals from thirty attempts, and Emmanuel Adebayor is fifth.
Success
Then come Gabby Agbonlahor, Louis Saha, Darren Bent, Jermain Defoe and van Persie who has found the net seven times from thirty-four attempts giving him a success rate of 20.59%.
Of those top ten players, the most attempts on goal come from Darren Bent who has tried his luck thirty-six times and been successful on eight of them, including the beach ball incident!
Relied
Sky Sports and Opta have also looked at which strikers are most relied upon by their clubs for the goals they score. They have looked at what percentage of the teams total goals have been scored by one player.
Leading the way in those figures is Everton’s Louis Saha who has scored seven of fifteen goals, 46.6%. Next comes Darren Bent who has scored 40% of Sunderland’s goals and Rodallega at Wigan who with five of thirteen comes in third with 38.5%.
Scored
Drogba and Rooney are ‘mid-table’ with just over 30% of their sides goals whilst Robin van Persie is second from bottom with seven from thirty-six. Of course, Arsenal have scored seven more goals than any other team in the league.
Statistics
So what does this all tell us? Well, not a lot really, it is just interesting to look at the statistics. Well it is if you are what David Nugent calls a ‘Soccerholic’ anyway!
The figures suggest that Craig Bellamy and Kenwyne Jones are the best finishers and Louis Saha and Darren Bent are the most valuable strikers to their team.
Statistics can show anything. Who would you prefer, Bellamy and Jones, Saha and Bent or Torres and Drogba? They’d all be alright but I think I know who most of you would choose despite what the statistics say!
