Wilko named in FourFourTwo's team of the year

[marinermick]

ursus said:

Spot on analysis.
I too have not been overly impressed with the other keepers mentioned above.
I would take Bolton after Danny but well in front of the others. Some of them are good stoppers only some of the time. Some of them I would not feed.

this is all true but in terms of who had the better season then bolton would be ranked lower down the order

doesn't make him an inferior keeper - just the circumstances of HAL 2

[brett]

Good points all round.

Jaza's comments were certainly welcome...applause for Reddy, Beltrame etc not totally warranted.

As Mick said though, Bolton didn't really have a standout year.

For me it would be Danny, daylight, Theo, faulty Bolty. There would be more daylight if Danny's kicking wasn't so bad at times. But most saves in the league, in a team that had quite a tight GA as well, should be an obvious standout.

Well done Wilko! Well deserved.

[jazasydneyfc]

Oh yeah - Bolton winning that award was f***ed. Just as I think he would've romped it in Season One, Vukovic romped it in Season Two and can feel very hard done by.

The fact that Vukovic's two closest contenders each had the league's best two defences in front of them as opposed to the pourous Mariners one he had to deal with says a lot for him as well.

[brett]

Yeah, it does.

Our defence was the third best, although a way off Syd and Melb, yet Danny had the most saves by FAR,

www.a-league.com.au/default.aspx?s=playerstats&seasonid=18

It obviously equates to our defence letting heaps through, hence the saves, but Danny keeping a lot out, hence the good goals against. He pretty much kept our season alive before and after Mori was here.

[Andy]

Having such a high amount of saves such as Danny's, doesn't say a good thing about our defence. However, it is extremely hard to have a consistently good defence when induring the amount of innjuries that our defence did.

• Vidmar spent most of the back-end of the season on the sidelines
  
• Boogard didn't play
  
• O'Grady missed 8 or 9 games after his injury at EAS
  
• No-one remembers much of Clarky this season
  
• We were forced to play a Midfielder at CB on at least 2 occasions
  
• For most of the year our Fullbacks were midfielders
  

With defensive pronblems like that it was always going to be hard to reamin strong at the back. All I can say is thatnk Christ for Danny or Wilko, or it possibly could have been a lot worse than it was.

[Bearinator]

Remember when Wilko slid from out of nowhere to stop Romario's tap in at our end, that was brilliant. Magic even.

[Andy]

That was Sully, not Wilko.

[bobandbill]

True.
I think Wilko is a great player, but not the best in the club in my opinion. Occassionly he does kick the ball out too many times for my liking. Congrats to him though.
Bolton??? Very questionable. Who decided it? And 7 players from the Victory...

[Andy]

Muscat won Player of the Season, Allsopp took out the Impact Player of the Season and Brazilian attacking midfielder Fred walked away with the Best Import of the Season.
Victory also won Team of the Season and seven players from the championship winning side were chosen for the A-League Dream Team.

[ausfft]

To answer why Clint Bolton was goalkeeper of the season when the obvious choice may have appeared to have been Michael Theoklitos due to the number of clean sheets. We tried to bring in some science to it on the basis that from a team perspective a clean sheet in a 1-0 win is a better goalkeeping performance for the team than keeping a clean sheet 4-0 win or even conceding a goal in a 2-1 win is better for the team than a clean sheet in a 6-0 drubbing. We added up the points the goalkeepers won their teams over the regular season in the following way….they were awarded 2 points if their team won the game by one goal as that’s the points the team would have lost if the keeper concerned conceded a goal dropping from 3 points for the win to 1 point for the draw and similarly they were awarded 1 point for a draw when conceding a goal would have lost the team one point in going from a draw to a defeat.

Under those calculations in the regular season the points were as follows:

Bolton 16 points won
Theoklitos 15 points won
Vukovic 11 points won

Hopefully that shows our reasoning…even if you don’t agree with it…there was an objective measure to the choice.

Cheers

Andy

[~Floss~]

Oh no, they tried to bring science into it?
That's what went wrong with the Vidmar thread, which i believe reached the conclusion that it was religion, not science.

[greenpoleffc]

So Danny was undone because we couldnt score to win a substantial bet eh??

Flawed system IMHO. Use as a criteria something the players concerned could do nothing about.

Tools

[Jesus]

You cant base a system on the best goalkeeper, based on the quality of the team around him. That is absurd, and not science.

They should have looked at their actual performances. The olyroos won 1-0 over chinese tapei, but danny didnt touch the ball until the 70th minute, and only made one save. Yet by that tally, he would have got good points for that showing.

A reasonable account would be to look at the games, and take note of the actual affect the goalkeeper had on the game. This could be looked at by viewing some of thiese things, though not limited to:
- Affect of distribution. If the GK starts the attacks that is a good GK trait.
- Big saves. Big saves win games and lift team morale immensly.
- Smaller saves. Smaller saves are not as important on a match as big saves, but smaller saves can be the result of things like positioning and hence can be a suggestion to the quality of the keeper.
- Goal kicks. If the keeper cant kick, then it hampers the teams play.

It would be a bloody easy job to watch every aleague game, and pay close attention to the keeper for these sorts of things. 4 games a week, means 360 minutes, or 6 hours work.

Go through, makes notes of those stats, and also notes about the perception of how he is playing too. Then each week add these sorts of things together to give the keeper a rating out of whatever, and add them up over the season.

If 442 is not paying enough attention to the game to do that sort of thing, then all their "best player" etc awards are bogus. I know i would have no trouble sitting down for 1 day a week, watching football for 6 hours and deliberating with someone for simple wage.

I thought journalism involved some sort of actual research? Thats why they arent statisticians. You cant look at the numbers of a game and get a fair appreciation for the qulaity of the game, the quality of the teams, or the players in it.

This "science" they used, is about as much science as throwing rocks into the air, and then claiming the sky is falling

[brett]

Isn't it great having someone called Jesus bagging out science yet no controversy?

I totally agree, the best way to judge a keeper is to watch and compare their skills against others. You can't really use a formula relating to goals. Sometimes a keeper will have a blinder and let in 3, sometimes he'll do nothing in a 1-0 win. To say that a 2-1 win is better than a 4-0 win from a keeper's perspective because the game was closer...how about take into account whether that 1 goal was a howler or whether a keeper might have saved his team losing 5-4.

Strikers CAN in my opinion be judged to an extent purely by goals, because it doesn't matter whether they score long bombs or tap-ins, they're all worth the same and the striker's 'job' is to score them. All keeper saves are not equal though.

It is disappointing to hear that 4-4-2 has seemingly dodged some relatively straight-forward football analysis for a formula that is far from defining. Fans would look to that magazine for opinions but they have shirked that task!

[~Floss~]

I would suggest that stats could be useful if you had time to watch all the games and jot down some extra stats as you go, other than simply saves made and the score. For example, award points for quality clearances, controlling the defence, positioning, timing, deduct points for errors and crap clearances, etc.

...But if you haven't got the time to do that (or didn't plan ahead to be working on it during the season), why not have a panel of experts retrospectively rate the keepers' perfomances for the season or vote for them and tally their results?

To me, the formula used is fundamentally flawed.

[Jesus]

wyomingtiger said:

Isn't it great having someone called Jesus bagging out science yet no controversy?

To be fair, I was bagging out their so called "science" for being far from science itself.
Not that i dont appreciate the irony.

[Ursus]

You are right Jesus, what they used is not science. It is just a method they created and described as science.
Does that make it created science? ;D

[~Floss~]

Precisely. The figures calculated could not indicate conclusively who is a better keeper. It is simple way of avoiding a much more laborious yet trustworthy alternative.

[Jesus]

After readint their post season review, it seems they did pay people toi watch every match. So why not ask them to keep an eye on the goalkeepers so they could have some actual idea of how the keepers played? Although i guess they could simply have sat in a room throughout the season reading the aleague reports on twg or aleague.com or other?

[~Floss~]

Would have been pretty straight-forward to get those people to vote on it or rank the keepers.

Anyway... it was probably intended to create controverseyand spark debate.