FINISHERS: The good, the bad & the xG
When presented with a chance, why are some forwards flying and others flailing? Huw Davies analyses the shooting styles of Szmodics, Rutter, Langstaff and more
When a player bears down on goal, there are many factors competing to influence what happens next – physical, psychological, technical, tactical and more. As a result, with so much going on, the art of scoring is sometimes seen as a mystery.
I hate mysteries.
Armed with reliable shooting statistics from Fbref and Opta Analyst, FotMob.com’s great shot maps and video after video after video, I’ve taken a look at the players in the Football League whose goal return this season is most different to their expected goals tally, for either better or worse. Ideally I’ll come to understand the successes and figure out the failures, earning their club’s thanks, adulation and offer of employment, but failing that, I’ll notice a few interesting trends and show you some good goals. (And don’t forget: expected goals stats are instructive but not perfect.)
In picking the highlights and the lowlights, I’ve tried to focus specifically on finishing. It means there’s no discussion here on the Championship’s most overperforming forward: Morgan Whittaker, whose season to date has brought him 9.4 expected goals and 18 actual goals. That’s because we know how he’s done it. Finding the net from outside the area half a dozen times does tend to inflate your finishing stats somewhat, and that’s quite the asset to have – it’s just not the focus here.
Three questions, then. Who’s clinical? Who’s clunky? And why?
Championship
Sammie Szmodics (21 non-penalty goals from 15.6 xG)
None of the Championship’s top five goalscorers this season is a striker; instead, each cuts inside from the wing or plays off a No.9. It’s enough to make a Blackburn Rovers icon weep, in Alan ‘let strikers be strikers’ Shearer. But a Blackburn player is top of those scoring charts.
By his own admission, Sammie Szmodics hoped just to reach double figures this season, yet here he is on 21 goals without a penalty in sight – not since he hit the post with one in August. While he has played further forward more often as the campaign has developed, his primary focus was to attack from midfield, and he was initially the beneficiary of a team creating chances at will. However, his scoring has continued even as those chances dried up. Szmodics has found the net five times since Rovers last won a game; they’ve registered only two other goals in those nine matches.
He isn’t just reliant on good service. Although he modestly told Sky in the good old days of December that, “We create so many chances and I’m fortunate at the moment that every shot I take seems to be going in”, he was probably closer to the mark when he also said, “I’ve always been a finisher”.
Even so, he’s 28 and his two previous Championship campaigns brought him just 11 goals across 50-odd 90s. He’s getting into better shooting positions, yes, with 0.46 xG per 90 well up from last season’s 0.16, but he’s overperforming his xG as well, scoring 21 goals from 15.6 expected. So, what’s he doing right?
Though Szmodics has been scoring all kinds of goals – a couple of headers, some rounding of the keeper, a small portion of chips – his ball-striking technique plays a big role. When shooting ‘across himself’, if you like, he’s able to find the corner with power and precision; finishes against Ipswich and Middlesbrough (the first one) spring to mind.
When approaching from the left, he opens his body well to place the ball into the far corner, something seen in most top 21st-century forwards whereas strikers from the 1890s to the 1990s more commonly opted to whack it. You can see that with the cluster of bottom-right-hand-corner goals in his shots-on-target map, as well as a tendency to hit the ball low – so low, the standing goalkeeper can’t get an outstretched hand down to it in time (as with the aforementioned strike against Boro), and placed far enough away from them that their feet won’t be of much use, either.
And, of course, confidence is a preference for the habitual scorer. Szmodics’ most recent goal, against Plymouth, epitomised the combination of instinct, technique and conviction that has made him so clinical this season. Before the ball reaches his feet, he knows exactly where in the net it will rest two touches later. Szmod-like finishing.
Jon Rowe (12 non-penalty goals from 5.2 xG)
Josh Sargent (13 non-penalty goals from 8.4 xG)
Norwich are 6th in the Championship with an xGD/90 (expected goal difference per 90 minutes) of zero. Ten teams have better underlying numbers. They’ve scored 65 goals from 50.3 non-penalty xG.
No need for Colman’s, because there is some hot finishing in Norfolk right now.
Between them, Jon Rowe, Josh Sargent and Gabriel Sara have scored 35 non-penalty goals from 18.7 expected. That’s just silly. They’re three of the league’s five most overperforming finishers, and one of them – Sargent – has only started 16 matches.
While Sara’s brilliance is crucial, he isn’t a forward and the general gist of his 10 goals from 5.2 xG can be summarised in one word: kapow. Also driving Norwich into the top six have been clinical campaigns for first Rowe and now Sargent.
Rowe, unlike Sargent, isn’t a particularly high-volume shooter for someone in his position, and yet he scores all sorts of goals. Five with his right foot (including a beauty from 20 yards). Five with his left (including a beauty from 20 yards). Three with his head (not including a beauty from 20 yards). Laces, instep, outside of the boot, toepoke – every part of the foot has been used for the purpose of getting that round thing into that rectangular thing.
Here’s Ali writing back in August, when Rowe won the first of his two NTT20 Young Player of the Month awards:
This month, Jon Rowe has been the definition of End Product. A screamer into the top corner from 20 yards with his weaker left foot. A header from a corner. A quick-release right-footed shot, curled into the far corner with no backlift. And a poacher’s goal, sprinting into the box when the ball was out wide, outpacing his marker and finishing a low cross first time.
Yep, that pretty much summarises it.
Sargent, though just as prolific, could hardly be more different. With his long legs and ungainly gait, Sargent’s goals can look scruffier than they are. He’s scored more than once while in the process of falling on his arse, alongside a few rebounds to his own saved efforts (albeit with a brilliantly improvised shinner against Cardiff) and a chance that fell to him after hitting both of his hands. Yet the shots themselves are sweetly hit – pure connections, struck with power. Scruff, but no scuff. Take his goal against Sunderland: what first seems faintly farcical does require Sargent to beat two men in the air, react quickly to the bouncing ball, swivel and try to decapitate the goalkeeper.
Even so… you wonder if his scoring rate is sustainable. Putting more than half of his shots on target is laudable, and relatively rare, while nobody in the Championship averages more shots on target per 90 (1.85). But he hits the goalkeeper a lot with the ball at his feet. Take out headers – and open goals, too, because come on – and only two of Sargent’s goals have found the net untouched. It doesn’t matter as long as they go in, and one of those was a lovely take against Southampton on New Year’s Day, but there’s a lot of shots being let through by a goalkeeper who could do better.
Look, the data’s good. He outperformed his xG last season as well. It’d just be better if Sargent gave keepers less of a chance:
Georginio Rutter (6 non-penalty goals from 11.4 xG)
How’s this for a trade-off? You can be an excellent all-round forward, able to press, tackle, create and shoot with either foot… but with the accuracy of a blind spaniel.
Georginio Rutter has been a star in 2023/24. He also has six goals from 11.4 total xG. It is, unsurprisingly, the biggest underperformance in the Championship.
There are two problems. Firstly, he’s missing the goal (stop me if this is getting too technical). Around 31% of Rutter’s efforts are on target, even though he takes three-quarters of his shots from inside the box, so he should be testing the goalkeeper more often than one time in every three. Partly it’s because he has quite a lot of shots blocked, as a result of decisions such as these:
Secondly, when Rutter is hitting the target, he isn’t hitting the corners of the goal. In this map of his shots on target in 2023/24, there are so many efforts hit close to the goalkeeper and at a saveable height.
It happened against Watford, against Hull, against Middlesbrough and in his most recent appearance, against Millwall, when the Frenchman sidefooted a very presentable chance straight at Matija Sarkic.
Now let’s look at Rutter’s team-mate, Crysencio Summerville. By fun coincidence, he’s had almost exactly the same number of non-penalty shots – 107 to Rutter’s 106 – and, like Rutter, he averages 0.11 xG per shot. Yet he has 13 non-penalty goals to Rutter’s six. Here’s why:
Summerville isn’t completely ruthless, no, but he’s outperforming his xG and that’s in part because he puts many more of his shots into the bottom corner of the goal rather than the keeper’s lapel.
To return to Rutter: he’s still a tremendous talent. In comparing him with other forwards in ‘second-tier’ competitions (your Serie Bs, your 2.Bundesligas, your MLSes and your Eredivisieseses), fbref places Rutter in the 7th percentile for finishing but the 95th to 99th percentiles for assists, key passes, goal-creating actions, progressive carries, take-ons, fouls drawn, tackles, interceptions, recoveries and a whole lot more besides – plus he’s still young, with his 22nd birthday coming up in a few weeks’ time.
What to get the man who has everything? Another few extra sessions of shooting drills, that’s all.
League One
Stephen Humphrys (9 non-penalty goals from 3.81 xG)
The best finisher in League One this season is actually Chris Martin at Bristol Rovers, with 15 goals from just 8.92 xG. However, my analysis of his 35% shots-to-goals ratio wouldn’t be too in-depth. He is, in short, on one. The 35-year-old has taken nearly every good chance that has come his way, converted headers with the aplomb we’d expect given his calibre, and thrown in a near-post flick, a backheeled lob and a chip over Stevenage’s keeper hit from just outside the centre circle. No wonder he couldn’t keep that up into March (prove me wrong, Chris, prove me wrong).
A more puzzling case is Wigan’s Stephen Humphrys, approaching double figures for the season from a lowly 3.81 xG. He hasn’t quite found his place at the DW, playing in various positions across the attack and losing his starting berth in January, but he has managed to score the same goal several times, cutting inside from the left and finding the bottom right-hand corner – despite playing most of his minutes on the right wing or up top. Even as a striker, Humphrys seems to have an almost thanatophobic fear of the box, preferring to shoot from the fringes of the area, or outside it, than from central positions (although considering that his only effort in the six-yard box – also his only headed effort – was a 0.55 xG chance and he missed it, who can blame him?).
And yet there’s something repeatable in that trio of strikes from outside the area, cutting in from Wigan’s left, despite what three goals from xG values of 0.01, 0.02 and 0.08 would suggest. Humphrys’ shooting technique for each goal is poetry in motion. Against Fleetwood and Shrewsbury, his efforts were clipped with real power from the inside of his boot, while against Leyton Orient he used his laces – as he also did for a thunderbolt in the aforementioned meeting with Shrewsbury, this one well saved by Marko Marosi.
The way in which Humphrys absolutely smashed one in against Charlton using his left foot shows his preference for power, but his shots on target ratio isn’t bad for a player who averages 0.06 xG per effort. He wants to dribble and shoot. That’s what he does.
So, is the answer just to play Humphrys on the left and let him do his right-footed reverse-Robben thing? Maybe that’s too simplistic. It’d be fun to watch, though.
Aaron Collins (5 non-penalty goals from 9.17 xG)
Colby Bishop (10 non-penalty goals from 13.49 xG)
League One’s most under-performing finisher is Aaron Collins, thanks to a little thing called variance. 2022/23: 16 goals from 9.25 expected. 2023/24: 5 goals from 9.17 expected. Not much in his game has changed, apart from confidence, although a shortage of confidence can lead a player to aim his shots just that little bit closer to the centre of the goal, not wanting to miss. That’s arguably been the case with Collins.
But sometimes variance is just variance. Look at Colby Bishop at Portsmouth. The league leaders’ leading man has 16 goals, of which six have been successful penalties (he’s also missed two), so he has only 10 non-penalty goals from an xG of 13.49. Last season he scored 15 from around 10. He’s hitting the target with broadly the same number of shots, and they’re going in broadly the same parts of the goal – or not in it, as the case may be – but this time, more of them are being saved: 73% of his shots on target, to be precise, when in 2022/23 it was just 52%.
Bishop’s methods haven’t changed. He’s underperforming where once he was overperforming. But Portsmouth are top of League One with their No.9 considered to have had a good campaign, so without wanting to undermine this whole article or anything, it is possible to worry too much about some (some!) statistical anomalies.
League Two
Will Evans (18 non-penalty goals from 11.52 xG)
Will Evans is having the time of his life. In only his second season as a professional, the former farmer and Cymru Premier forward is averaging exactly a goal every other game with Newport in League Two, and finishing like a man possessed. Has he rubbed a magic lamp, or was the magic inside him all along?
He scores plenty of poacher’s efforts, either by getting ahead of a defender with a smart run (just ask Manchester United) or by pouncing on a loose ball in a scramble, but naturally those goals aren’t the xG-breakers. They do showcase his fast reactions, though, which have resulted in goals against Colchester, via an instinctive movement to divert a well-struck but wayward shot goalward, and Gillingham, with an excellent volley in off the post.
That volley doesn’t connect without decent technique, either, but then not many League Two forwards have the technique and the belief to also curl in goals from 20 yards using either foot. As the man himself told NTT20:
“I’ve had some jammy goals, but I look at the Gills one: that’s a strike of pure confidence. Nine times out of 10, that goes wide of the post and you get a little ‘ooh’ from the crowd and that’s that.”
‘Nine times out of 10’ is pretty accurate. Multiply the 0.11 xG on that shot by nine attempts and you get… well. One hell of a goal. There was a cracker against Walsall, too, when Evans won the ball near the corner flag, beat a man and finessed his shot from a tight-ish angle into the place where the owl sleeps. It’s as if everything he’s tried this season has come off.
Lately, things have arguably regressed to the mean. Evans hasn’t scored in March, despite playing 426 minutes, and it’s likely that he was running hot for a time. But we’ve seen he has the tools to keep producing goals, potentially at a higher level.
Macaulay Langstaff (21 non-penalty goals from 24.43 xG)
Matt Smith (23 goals from 17.67 xG)
Buh? League Two’s top scorer, underperforming? ’fraid so, albeit not by a huge amount.
It’d be wrong to go in hard on Macaulay Langstaff – his xG underperformance isn’t to blame for Notts County’s slide, which is almost entirely down to their putting in a defensive disasterclass on repeat, and he did score eleventy billion goals in the National League last term. But it is interesting to consider in the context of narratives around strikers. Langstaff, eh? Poacher. Clinical. Doesn’t need many chances. Matt Smith? Big lad. Wins headers. Scores a few as well, but it’s not his job; his best league return in a season is 13.
Except now it’s 23, at 0.64 goals per 90 minutes.
Smith has scored 12 headed goals from 8.17 xG. I know, I know: ‘tall man scoring headers shakes nation to its core’. It’s an impressive rate, though, with more behind it than just being 6ft 6in of Ivan Drago lookalike. Compare and contrast his (red) and Langstaff’s (black) headed shots on target, here.
Height difference notwithstanding, remember that not every header is contested, and when he does find space away from bigger defenders, Langstaff could follow Smith’s lead in being more ambitious with his placement. Langstaff has scored four headers this season, all from very close range – which is a good thing, to be clear, as it shows great movement. But he has also failed to put away high-xG headed chances against a number of sides, regularly putting the ball the one place it can be saved.
On the floor, it’s most likely just variance. Langstaff is coming off the back of a 42-goal season (no penalties) and has one of the highest xG-per-shot ratios around, at 0.18, so any misses are magnified.
Conversely, Smith, as a left-footed player, is unlikely to score another six goals from just nine right-footed shots on target – not least as two were deflected volleys from set-pieces, another was a tackle and a fourth hit while falling (tidy finish against Tranmere, mind). He’s an elite header of the ball and some 59% of his shots in 2023/24 have been headers. Salford play to his strengths.
Dan Crowley (14 non-penalty goals from 4.24 xG)
We’ve had a few impressive overperformers already, but Dan Crowley takes the biscuit with 14 goals from an xG of 4.24. He scores one goal for every 2.5 shots he takes, which is ridiculous. Even more ridiculous: he’s scored 14 goals from 19 shots on target.
So what’s the deal? Is Crowley bribing goalkeepers? Has he signed a Faustian pact with his demonic namesake from Good Omens? Or has he just learned the secret of finishing?
It certainly seems to be a recent development. Across six previous seasons for which we have data, encompassing spells in the Championship, League One, Eredivisie and Eerste Divisie, Crowley was hitting the target with 25% of his shots. This season, in League Two, he’s operating at 56%. Playing at a lower level has its benefits but it doesn’t magically make you more accurate.
He’s also shooting a little less often, suggesting he’s taking his opportunities more wisely. He is, in a word, clinical. Of those 14 goals, 10 had an xG rating (per FotMob) of 0.11 or lower.
Most importantly, you can see from his shots-on-target map that Crowley places his efforts extremely well. Try saving those:
Helping his general overperformance are some very good finishes on the (half-)volley, adding to the threat from crosses provided by Jodi Jones. Jones has set up seven Crowley goals, many of them headers, as the most prolific combination in League Two (followed by Jones to Langstaff, Jones to Nemane and Jones to McGoldrick, because he really is a cheat code). Incredibly, Crowley has had five headed efforts this season and scored with all of them. He’s shown some impressive aerial technique, too: his looped header against Sutton was superb, the Notts No.7 deliberately dropping the ball into the one place it couldn’t be reached by defender nor keeper.
Crowley also has this whipped instep of a right-footed strike, hit with top-spin that gives the goalkeeper less time to get across to the bottom corner, bringing Crowley goals from outside the box against Sutton (see above) and Gillingham, with two very precise finishes. All of his other goals have come from inside the area, several of them with fast reactions and minimal backlift, as we saw against Bradford in November and against Salford last week.
A hot streak, or a sign of Crowley’s future? Whichever it is, it isn’t just luck.
If you enjoyed this post, please do shout it from the rooftops so that others may do so, too.