Statistics & Miniskirts
A longer form look at the defeat to St. Mirren.
Abysmal. Embarrassing. Calamitous. Disgraceful. Shocking. Comical.
All words that have been used at some point over the last few days to describe Aberdeen’s latest defeat in the SPFL Premiership – this time, St. Mirren taking the points from Pittodrie as our winless run in the league extends to a whopping thirteen games.
The game itself has prompted so many talking points from the initial starting XI to the manner in which goals were conceded to everything in between.
Starting XI – A Manager Hoping to Find a Solution?
Despite a win against Elgin City last time out, Thelin made five changes to his starting XI – Shinnie, Clarkson, Okkels, Keskinen and Gueye all coming back into the side with Palaversa, Morris, Duk and Ambrose all dropping to the bench with Polvara out of the squad altogether.
It certainly seemed odd for Thelin to drop as many players from the game at Borough Briggs. Whilst we, perhaps, made slightly harder work of the tie then we needed to it can’t be understated that the side registered a clean sheet for the first time in a while and we actually scored goals.
Morris looked lively throughout and Duk notched his first goals of the campaign. It seemed a no-brainer that both Duk & Morris would retain their places in the starting lineup as you would expect their confidence to have been boosted.
The big question mark was, probably, around whether Gueye would come back into the team but there seemed ample opportunity to play him in the No. 10 role or off the left flank where he has been effective earlier in the season. If Thelin had stuck with Ambrose, you were also bolstering our physical stature against a Buddies side who are no shrinking violets.
The inclusion of Shinnie and Heltne Nilsen together (again) in the centre of the park also raised eyebrows. St. Mirren have legs-a-plenty in the middle of the park with the likes of Phillips, Boyd-Munce and O’Hara and it certainly felt like a game where more running power could have been useful.
Notwithstanding pure physical attributes, the match up of Thelin’s 4-2-3-1 against Robinson’s well drilled 3-5-2 was also going to lead to an issue in the centre of the park – Saints go with a fairly flat middle 2 of Boyd-Munce and O’Hara with Phillips being given more of a roaming role. That said, when Saints are out of possession, they drop neatly into a flat 3 – outnumbering the Dons central midfield pivot of Heltne Nilsen & Shinnie time after time. Even if Clarkson dropped in to support, we all know that tough tackling and battling for every scrap is not really his game.
It was no real surprise to see Thelin stick with his 4-2-3-1, it appears clear that we are going to have to accept the fact that this is the system he wants to use and very little appears to dissuade him from doing so. That said, it feels like a more pragmatic approach would have been to put Palaversa into the side instead of Clarkson and push Shinnie further up the pitch – similar to the way we started at Fir Park recently where we had a decent opening spell.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Saints were combative when it came to battling for loose balls – Saints winning 43% of loose ball duels compared to Aberdeen’s 35%.
What does the sheer number of (continual) changes point to? Long and short, it looks like a manager who is hoping upon hope that he can find a solution that sticks. There are a lot of grumbles amongst the Red Army about how Thelin has to “change things”. There’s no question that he’s willing to change up certain elements of his personnel but concerns are more than valid as to the fact that Thelin is only willing to change so much. Heltne Nilsen, for example, remains almost undroppable despite a run of performances that have been below the standards he set for himself at the start of the season.
Rubežić
One of the more interesting elements of our setup last weekend was the fact that we saw Rubežić deployed on the left hand side of the centre-back pairing with Kristers Tobers. Following his suspension, Rubežić was put straight back into the side at Elgin alongside Tobers with Rubežić on the right hand side, Tobers on the left.
For some reason, this was reversed against St. Mirren - Rubežić taking up the left side. This was a curious tweak in and of itself, Rubežić has shown limited ability to play the ball on his left foot during his time at Aberdeen. Whilst it’s not a necessity for your left-sided CB to be able to play with his left-foot, it certainly helps to ensure your tempo is kept up – particularly if you are looking to play from the back.
A big challenge for Rubežić has always been when coming up against a pacy, physical striker who is willing to make the run in behind him. We’ve seen plenty of evidence of his struggles against sides who play this way and Olusanya is a player who has given us plenty of issues in the last 18 months with his style of play. Indeed, he’d already scored 2 this season against us due to his pace and power. This was not an unknown and this also makes the selection of Rubežić an interesting one.
From our understanding, Alfie Dorrington is not 100% fit as yet and there was a reluctance to play him as a result of this but he’s not the only player carrying an injury at present and those players are being asked to play so the question has to be asked about why the same doesn’t apply to Dorrington.
St. Mirren clearly picked up on this positional shift swiftly within the game, here’s the average position map for Aberdeen together with Mandron & Olusanya’s average positions overlaid.
You can see Mandron & Olusanya are basically tripping over themselves to be in the same area of the pitch as Rubežić. Neither appeared interested in engaging with Tobers, instead, continually working to get themselves in and around Rubežić and that’s where their first half goals came from.
You can also see that Rubežić is/was terrified of the pace of Olusanya, in particular. He is by quite some distance the deepest lying Aberdeen player.
There are 2 schools of thought as to where blame lies on the opener – the truth of the matter is that it probably is a combination of both Doohan & Rubežić’s actions. Doohan is overly keen to exit his penalty box to act as a sweeper and it’s not clear if he would actually make it to the ball anyway. That said, Doohan has not shown such an eagerness in previous games so you have to imagine that he was told by the coaching team that he had to be ready to jump from his box to deal with balls played in behind for Olusanya to run onto.
Doohan clearly makes a shout and there’s definitely an argument that in doing so, he’s taken charge of the situation and Rubežić should leave the ball and try to block Olusanya’s run to enable Doohan to clear. If Rubežić decides to take matters into his own hands, then it’s unconscionable to only just nod the ball into the path of the striker, he needs to be getting more contact on it to force Olusanya wide at worst and out of play at best.
There’s little doubt about the second goal and where fault lies. Again, a long punt up the park is our downfall against St. Mirren - Rubežić has a 5 yard headstart on Olusanya when the ball is played – Olusanya is quick but Rubežić has to do better to manage that situation to begin with. There’s opportunities to play the ball out or, at worst, bring Olusanya down and reset. One of Rubežić’s key attributes has been his physicality but Olusanya schools him in this regard, he waits for the moment that Rubežić decides to try and barge him off the ball and he uses Rubežić’s momentum against him, managing to slip past him and lay the ball into Mandron’s path to slide home.
St. Mirren clearly had a game plan to isolate Rubežic – the most common player that they passed to across the entire team? Mandron – on 20 occasions, he was the player picked out by a pass by any St. Mirren player. Olusanya was 3rd with 15 passes played to him.
Compare this to the way Aberdeen build play (rightly or wrongly) – on Saturday, Jensen was our most sought outlet – on 74 occasions the ball made it’s way to Jensen, this is followed by Shinnie on 63 and then Devlin on 46.
To exemplify this further, here’s the Aberdeen passing plot:-
And here’s Saints:-
Pretty stark, eh?
The likelihood is that we will never get to the bottom of Rubežić’s request to come off the park thereafter. Was he ill or injured or was this just a headloss moment? Whatever the reason, the game was effectively lost already at this point but it wasn’t a good look and it will be interesting to see how he bounces back from a rough forty minutes.
All Doom and Gloom?
The general consensus after the game (and in the days since) has focused mainly on the result itself and the manner of the goals that were conceded. For all of that though, were there any positives to take from the ninety minutes?
Possibly…
Jeppe Okkels had a promising opening to the game. Linking well with Alexander Jensen, the Danish duo were, by far, the Dons’ most promising outlet in the first half. Such was Okkels’ performance, Saints had to withdraw Penman on 26 minutes. Okkels was unfortunate that his play in the first half didn’t lead to at least one goal. If there was a recognised (and in form) No. 9 on the pitch, you feel that we’d have found the net at least once. The big positive here was that this was a performance from Okkels that gave us more of an indication of the type of player we may have on our books after an underwhelming couple of outings.
Alexander Jensen also had another impressive outing but he does feel a bit “square peg/round hole” out on the left side as he continually needs to cut in on his right foot. That said, the boy is clearly talented and I am excited to see what he can do in a side that is performing.
One of the interesting nuances from the game on Saturday is when you look at the underlying numbers.
A lot of discussion post-match focused on us being outbattled and outfought…
Interestingly, the numbers indicate that we actually won more duels compared to St. Mirren:-
The only area where we were on the losing side was on those loose balls.
This also is one of these areas where statistics tell you one thing but, ultimately, you can be winning the majority of duels across the pitch but if you lose one crucial one (Rubežić v Olusanya in the run up to the second goal, for example) it doesn’t really matter!
As a whole, the data makes our performance look like a dominant one:-
Yes, statistics, mini-skirts, etc. Some of the numbers are also reflective of the way the game panned out – Saints were more than happy to sit in and allow us to come at them for much of the game – particularly in the second half.
Ultimately, the end result is a 3-0 humbling at home but the numbers are actually “better” than our 3-1 win over the same side back in August – there Saints actually dominated possession (52/48), xG was much closer (1.60 Aberdeen v 1.13 Saints) and we had more shots on Saturday (14 v 11). Even more interestingly, back in August, it was Saints who were more aggressive – winning majority of duels, ground duels and aerial duels…
So what does this tell us?
Perhaps the thought process earlier in the season that we were overperforming was correct?
Perhaps we are just over analysing things and this is always heightened when you are on the sort of run that we are just now. It’s known that Thelin and his coaching team do invest a lot of time in analytics and it’s here that they are probably seeing elements of hope.
Is this simply a case of a team that is no longer taking the chances that it creates with the same ruthless efficiency that it was earlier in the campaign? Crippled now with a self-sabotaging streak that is almost unheard of in our history? Has any side gifted the opposition as many easy goals as we have this season?
Perhaps more importantly, are we capable of digging out a result on Saturday in Leith and using that as a springboard to launch back from?
The answer to that question rests within the walls of Cormack Park, fingers crossed that we are just a goal away from moving back in the right direction.
COYR!
Data Source - WyScout Match Report