Boro's Blitzkrieg Bop, no growing pains for Ains, and the monster within Wrexham
25 November 2024 | Weekend Notes brings you the biggest stories, stats and insights from the EFL weekend
● BIG STORIES ● CHEAT SHEET ● 5IVELIGHTS ● THE VIEW FROM ● FANTASY FOOTBALL ● WATCHING BRIEF ●
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Welcome to Weekend Notes.
Recurring theme today. Not a single recurring theme, like last week’s slavish commitment to gaming puns. No. The theme is recurring themes. We are, after all, almost exactly a third of the way through the season – the metaphorical gloves are off.
The real ones, plus hats and scarves, are very much on (including some sweet NTT20 merch coming soon). Storm Bert put paid to four fixtures on Saturday. He also blew corner flags into wild arcs, with the bluster and carry of a windy afternoon making it a merry few days for centre-back goals — 15 of ‘em in all! Throw in Ben Cabango’s OG and that’s more than 20% of all EFL goals across the weekend.
Speaking of bluster… there’ll be none of it when Under The Lights returns on Wednesday, with George Elek and Matt Watts analysing the thick, fast and full-throttle fixtures on our midweek bonus pod exclusive to NTT20.COM subscribers. Sign up for that and it’ll drop into your inbox like an old-school lob.
🚨 Big Stories
A selection of decisive moments from across the EFL.
💣 Boro’s Blitzkrieg Bop — Oxford 2-6 Middlesbrough — Ruthless finishing combined with a consistent pattern of high chance-creation has resulted in Michael Carrick’s Boro scoring four, five and six goals in consecutive Championship games. They had time to go behind here before unleashing a wave of devastating finishing, or at least just finishing — Jamie Cumming in the Oxford net could’ve done better with three of the six. Emmanuel Latte Lath notched a hat-trick within Boro’s first sextuplet of goals since 1960, when Frank Sinatra’s Nice ‘n’ Easy was in the charts. Despite the hot streak, it’s worth pointing out that Boro are yet to string together more than three games undefeated, though it feels like it’s coming — they face Blackburn on Tuesday. The only real criticism you can level is the away shirt: it screams ‘home kit’, which is fitting for a side who’ve scored the most goals on the road this season (17).
🧙♀️ Wycked — Lincoln 2-3 Wycombe — Matt Bloomfield’s side extended their lead at the top of League One to four points, with 35 goals and 35 points from their opening 15 games. You can discount the first two losses; they’ve drawn two and won every other game this season. They deservedly edged this affair, where Lincoln made early dominance count, but not quite enough. Wanderers, buoyant, created great chances and took them when momentum swung their way. If there is one bell-clear theme this season, it is Wycombe: 7 EFL wins on the spin for the first time in their history.
🤢 Sick of it — Crawley 1-0 Rotherham — Rotherham’s latest away defeat means they’ve lost 35 away games since the start of the 2022/23 season, and won only three. The average Londoner could have seen the Northern Lights from their window more often in that time. Saturday wasn’t even a what-might’ve-been; Rob Elliot’s side had the better chances and saw out the win relatively easily. Post-game Steve Evans summed it up:
"We're here without big players. Illness has been in the camp since Wednesday, Thursday. Credit to five or six of the players: they've gone out to play. They've not played very well, but they've gone out to play."
🪤 The Shrewprint — Shrewsbury 3-2 Birmingham — In his first game in charge, with just 20% possession, Gareth Ainsworth’s side produced 4 shots on target against table-topping Birmingham. With 80% possession, Chris Davies’ side produced 5 shots on target against former bottom club Shrewsbury. Shrews sat off, allowing Blues to meander with possession in their own half, punishing them with two swift (if amusingly finished) counter-attacks. It’s a great start for the new manager – no better way to buy up buy-in – but are we also seeing a recurring blueprint for stopping Birmingham, now without a win in three?
👹 More curses? — Swindon 2-3 Morecambe — Swindon had won just one of their last 10 league games going into this, and manager Ian Holloway followed sage advice to attempt to banish a training ground curse. It reminded me of a quote from The Exorcist: “You probably know as much about possession as most priests.”
What followed sage wasn’t exactly a stuffing, but you’d want some onions to go with the tripe defending for Morecambe’s opening set-piece goals. The Robins have now conceded six goals from set-pieces in their last three matches. Swindon got themselves level after early impactful subs from Holloway and set-piece goals of their own, but then they left themselves exposed to hope for Morecambe, of the Hallam variety. Previously of the Swindon Parish, he raced onto a through ball to take Derek Adams’ Shrimps off bottom. Swindon are winless in 11. Pass the ouija board.
🛑 QP Aren’t — QPR 1-1 Stoke — They aren’t winning (that’s 12 league games without a W). They aren’t scoring (nobody’s scored fewer than their 13 goals). And they aren’t taking their opportunities to reverse their fortunes. And they had some against Stoke, not only in open play: when QPR were awarded a penalty, the beleaguered Zan Celar stepped up and blazed confidently wide. He has taken 22 shots without scoring, only finding the target 5 times. These could be costly patterns for Martí Cifuentes, who sounded resigned to his fate in the post-match despite being gifted an equaliser courtesy of an own goal.
🩶 Shades of Gray — Plymouth 2-2 Watford — Argyle have scored after 90 minutes in 5 of 9 home games this season, following a late flash of quality from Andre Gray, who had flashed already, like a shaken battery-powered torch, to equalise in the first half. Watford missed a hatful of chances; both of their goalscorers, Vakoun Bayo and Ryan Porteous, should have netted twice each, but they didn’t and Watford were left head-scratching. Wayne Rooney’s side created too little, and that’s a theme. Argyle have registered an xG under 1.0 in 12 of 16 matches, scoring 17 goals from 11.7 xG. Is it “never-say-die” or “get out of jail”? They’re just two points above the drop zone, with abject away performances wiping the sheen off any Home Park heroics.
Still, heroics there were. Against his former club, Gray’s first equalising goal dropped out of the sky. His second, on 90+6, was pure “Gone Fishing” — one touch, and away…
🔁 Wrecurrance — Wrexham 3-0 Exeter — Having suffered on the road last week, as they often do, Wrexham duly showed up at home, as they always do. More on that below, in The View From. But Sunday brought an exceptional exception to the recurring theme of recurring themes…
🤯 Seven-goal adventists — Swansea 3-4 Leeds — [Huw Davies] Where in the bloody hell did that come from? Swansea scored as many goals in one Sunday afternoon as they’d managed in their previous eight matches, as Leeds, so tight at the back since their opening-day aberration against Portsmouth, shipped three in one go after conceding six in their last 15. Yet the most important thing is that they scored a fourth of their own, and they did – in the 91st minute. The stuff of champions?
📊 Monday Morning Cheat Sheet
From the WhatsApp group to the watercooler: stats to keep you ahead of the game.
💨 When weather puns write themselves — Hats off to Gabriel Breeze: the 20-year-old Carlisle goalkeeper has not only coped since Mike Williamson gave him the gloves but, in the eye of the storm, both literal and metaphorical, he has kept two clean sheets in three. A 0-0 draw with Doncaster took his save percentage up to an admittedly-small-sample-size 89%; it seems that at least one answer to Carlisle’s defensive problems was blowing in the wind.
⚽ Obligatory Barry — Just stop it, mate – nobody likes a smart alec, especially one who keeps scoring the same goal (we love you really). Louie Barry netted his 12th and 13th league goals of the season this weekend, making him not only the top goalscorer across all four English leagues but, by our calculations, the top goalscorer at this stage of a League One season since Kieffer Moore for Rotherham in 2017/18.
🥚 Record Breaking Bad — Hull are winless in their last 8 league games, drawing only 3 of those, and have lost 3 on the spin for the first time since 2022 – ominous for Walter (Tim, not White).
🎳 Ten Win Balling — Only three teams in the EFL have won 10 or more games this season, one in each division: Sheffield United, Wycombe Wanderers and Port Vale.
🆒 Stoked with Chicho? — Following their 1-1 draw with QPR, Stoke City have lost just one of their last nine Championship games (W3 D5), having lost 5 of their previous 6 games before this run.
😮💨 Col Phew — Colchester United won their first away game in 9, and their first without conceding a goal away since January.
🔥 No crash, all Burn — Burnley’s clean sheet against Bristol City means they have conceded just six goals across 16 Championship matches: the fewest by any team at this stage of a second-tier campaign since the 1920s.
🎯 Lowe aims high — Young Player of the Month in League Two, Nathan Lowe has 6 goals and 3 assists in his last 9 games. Ali Maxwell caught up with him last week.
✋ Azazazazaz — Count ‘em on one hand each: 5 goals and 5 assists for Boro’s Finn Azaz in his last 6 games.
🧮 Aggregate Hudds — Huddersfield Town have won all of their last five league games against Charlton Athletic, with a combined 14-2 scoreline.
♟️ Teamsheet formation — More like an “Ooh sheeeeeeit” formation from Notts County this weekend:
Goal Quality Average
Ali and George mentioned a nascent “Goal Quality Average” metric on last week’s Monday Pod. Well, reader and listener Jamie Rylance came up with a quantitative measure by looking at players who have scored 5+ non-penalty goals in the EFL this season, omitting penalties altogether. To calculate a rank and a GQA, he took the total number of goals and the total xG from every goal each player has scored in the EFL this season, then divided the goals by total xG, giving them all a score out of 100. Here are the results (correct as of Friday 22 November 2024):
🎦 5ivelights
In no particular order, a collection of our favourite goals or clips from across the 72, where at this point we might as well stop including Louie Barry’s repeated right-foot, off the left into the right-corner efforts…
Gnoto problem: appendages in the away end as Gnonto strikes late in Sunday's Swansea thriller.
Get off the road: Tendayi Darikwa turns Edge-of-the-box Baggins for Lincoln.
Dentist-quality smiles all round for WBA, after a clinical flick from Holgate.
Harvey Knibbs nabs another, following a comic rebound off the keeper’s face.
It pains me to paste it in, but sh*thousery incarnate as Bassette plays the victim and the villain following Anel Ahmedhodzic’s red card in Cov 2-2 Blades:
The View From…
Wrexham: The ultimate Hyde & Jekyll team
Eh? Shouldn’t that be Jekyll & Hyde?
Bear with me.
The cliché of a Jekyll & Hyde team is that they’re strong in home games, poor in away games. The term comes from Robert Louis Stevenson’s fantastic 1886 novella, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde, which (spoiler alert for a 140-year-old book) is about a doctor with two distinct personalities – one good, one evil. You’ve no doubt seen the films, the TV adaptations, the memes or The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. That film, and the even more abysmal Van Helsing, created the pop-culture vision of Hyde: a big, hulking brute of rage, born from a mild-mannered scientist. Basically, he’s the Hulk.
Obviously it’s more nuanced in the book (Hyde is actually much smaller than Jekyll, for a start), but to return to football, the comparison is made when it seems impossible to explain why a team can be so good in front of their own fans and so, well, Van Helsing on the road. Jekyll is good. Hyde is bad. That’s it.
Now, Wrexham have played eight home matches and posted a goal difference of +15. They’ve taken 22 points from 24 available, the most in the division and their best start to a home campaign since the 1960s.
Wrexham have also played eight away matches and posted a goal difference of -1. They’ve taken 9 points from 24 available, losing more games than they’ve won.
So far, so common. Why Hyde & Jekyll, then, and not the right way around?
The way I see it, Phil Parkinson’s Wrexham embody the cliché in results terms but reverse it in their approach. When Henry Jekyll is hosting guests, he’s propriety itself: kind, charitable and warm-hearted. He doesn’t seek to impose himself on anyone, and he is generous to a fault. That is Wrexham away from home. Take them outside of their own domain and they’re pretty meek.
At the Racecourse, though, they’re Edward Hyde – a ruthless, snarling beast with violence on their mind (though they do stop short of child-trampling and MP-murdering*). They’re dominant, not dominated. We saw that again at the weekend, seeing off Exeter 3-0 for their fourth three-goal victory at the Racecourse this season.
[*Don’t worry, the child is fine]
The difference between the two Wrexhams is stark. Without wanting to go full insufferable undergraduate on you, raising my weary eyes heavenward as I sigh that Frankenstein is the name of the creator, actually, something I do find interesting about the original Stevenson story is that the first transformation we see is FROM Hyde INTO Jekyll – not the other way around, as shown in a million monster movies. It feels to me as if Wrexham undergo a similar transformation when they take to the road. They don’t set out their stall. They set out to stall.
In their first league away game of 2024/25, at Bolton, Wrexham had one shot in the first half. It was blocked. Away at Birmingham, they again had a single shot before the break, scoring this time. Their first half at Leyton Orient: two shots, of approximately 0.01 xG apiece. Their first half at Stevenage: three shots. At Stockport: two. When visiting Rotherham, Paul Mullin’s goal within 16 seconds prefaced just two more shots for his team over the next 45 minutes. There are exceptions – scoring twice in the first half at Peterborough, for example – but generally Wrexham are in no hurry to attack their hosts. How polite. Very Jekyll. Not very Hyde.
It’s different in North Wales. Exeter had the league’s best defence until last weekend, conceding 0.7 goals per game, then Wrexham put three past them. The Welsh side led 2-0 at half-time, for the fourth time this term; they’ve won seven of their eight home games and been ahead at the break in all seven. Start fast, then keep going.
The two Wrexhams’ defensive record is broadly similar: 4 goals conceded from 9.33 xG at Cae Ras, and 7 conceded from 9.6 xG everywhere else (side note: some variance may be coming their way, especially with goalkeeper Arthur Okonkwo out until Christmas). At the other end, however, they average the most goals at home of any side in League One and the fifth-fewest goals away.
As for why, that’s something of a mystery. Almost any club will fare worse on their travels, but how to explain Phil Parkinson’s intent, or lack of it? If Home Team Wrexham don’t fear the vulnerability that comes from going on the attack, much like Edward Hyde, then why are Away Team Wrexham less sure of themselves, more like Henry Jekyll?
The simplest theory is sound: a hypothetical season of winning at home and drawing away ends with 92 points, which is probably enough for promotion. It’s also true that there’s more expectation on Wrexham as hosts, not least with extra documentary cameras present, and thus more onus on Parkinson to attack. This does make for a more open game, but that seems to suit them, even if they do give up good chances as a result (albeit mostly once ahead).
Wrexham’s home displays have been excellent; it’s their priorities when travelling, and the performances that follow, that could be questioned. Their next two fixtures are at home but a number of very winnable away ties follow, and represent an opportunity.
Look, it’s clearly going well. Parkinson’s men are 2nd in the table, 3rd on PPG. Yet they can put less pressure on their home games, and give themselves a greater chance of automatic promotion, if they also view away games as an opportunity to display their dominance as the bigger, richer side, and unleashed the beast within.
“My devil had been long caged. He came out roaring.”
🏆 Fantasy Football
Go head-to-head against team NTT20 in our EFL Fantasy Football league
Before we talk about this week, we should note that George’s double game-week picks really paid off — we’ve found our feet. And Ali has picked up the slack in a full-double game week with a defence-first formation:
It would’ve helped if those defenders picked up clean sheets. We didn’t rack up too many points in the first half of the gameweek, but we go again midweek. As do league-toppers Flossie's Foxes and the top-scorers this weekend: Plateau United, with a perfect Nelson.
📺 Watching Brief
Upcoming live EFL games
Monday 25 November
20:00 Port Vale vs Crewe
Tuesday 26 November
20:00 Sunderland vs West Brom (All other EFL games at 19:45 on Sky Sports+)
Friday 29 November
20:00 Sheffield United vs Sunderland
Saturday 30 November
12:30 Watford vs QPR
12:30 Middlesbrough vs Hull
12:30 Oxford vs Millwall
As a general observation, for anyone with a wider interest in football outside the confines of their own club this is an excellent service which I hope is enjoying the level of support it deserves. Keep up the great work, chaps.
Agree re: Wrexham that dominance is a definite factor. For a team that is quite direct, in away games when our midfield is 10 yards further back, we just can’t seem to get any control in the oppositions half.
Though our backup goalie Burton has started off excellent, so no concerns there.
Great read!