There is a tendency in the soccer analytics world to regard goals as lucky and shots as skillful. In a single game, for example, a good team may take a lot of shots from dangerous areas of the pitch which are either saved, miss or blocked, and still lose 1-0 to an otherwise poor team that lashed in a 30-yard stunner. Yet if that good team can take lots of shots from dangerous areas of the pitch consistently over the 38 game league season, more often than not those shots will go in and the team will finish relatively high up the table—think Chelsea.
Meanwhile, though a poor team like Stoke may get lucky on occasion as Charlie Adam did when he hit a 65-yard shot which landed in the back of Thibaut Courtois’ net last Saturday, unless they can pile up more dangerous chances than their opponents on a consistent basis they’re not going to amount to much come May.
We saw this view expressed after Charlie Adam’s outrageous long-distance strike near the end of the first half in Stoke City’s 2-1 loss to Chelsea FC on Saturday. Michael Caley cheekily summed it up in his Expected Goal’s visualization. The idea here is that nine times out of 10, Adam will miss that shot … it was a marvelous fluke but a fluke nonetheless.
Yet while the statisticians are certainly correct in their view about consistency and luck, I don’t think Adam’s shot is a good example of a flukey goal. I would argue in fact it is in an altogether different category than, say, the 40-yard screamer that weaves and bends its way through heavy traffic and just past the fingertips of the fully-outstretched keeper.
For one, though I don’t have access to the data, I would suspect that as a rule there are likely very few intentional shots—and here I mean shots, not clearances or long passes—from the area Adam took his chance. That’s because few players are willing to take it, yes, but also because few players are willing to observe whether the circumstances would allow it. To illustrate, let’s look at the goal.
