I've copied and pasted the Rangers section from the Modern Fitba article linked below. It was looking at certain measures of a centre halfs performance last season.
https://www.modernfitba.com/blogs/2...sing-centre-backs-in-the-scottish-premiership
Connor Goldson is a player that
I have written about quite often this season & often it was
highlighting struggles he had as a
ball playing center back. However, when you look at the league leaderboards for both shot & Scoring Chance suppression -
there he is. The numbers verify the narrative that Goldson’s addition to Rangers backline has truly solidified the team defensively.
There has been a bit of a revolving door for other center back slot this season between Joe Worrall & Nikola Katic. Worrall took a back seat to Katic for the last month or so of the season & the team played its best football of the season in that time. It’s also the time in which the club settled on a midfield of Steven Davis, Glen Kamara, Ryan Jack & Scott Arfield.
Additionally, Steven Gerrard’s tactics were clearly modified whenever he had Jermain Defoe in the lineup.
Ok…just trying to soften the blow for what you’ll see next…
I teased this blog post by sharing the chart above on my Twitter feed…& it didn’t land all that well. Again, the team did play much better at the end of the season, but I wonder to what extent that comes down to the presence of Katic in the lineup or was having a solidified midfield of Davis, Kamara, Jack & Arfield more influential in the team’s overall play?
All I know is the following:
Katic spent 95% of his minutes playing as a left-sided center back & when he did…60% of the shots & 67% of the Scoring Chances came from his main zone of influence.
This does not mean that I think Katic is bad. What it does is, once again, bring up the belief that these kinds of objective facts give performance analysts something to really focus on when evaluating Katic’s play this season. How different were these numbers with Kamara & Davis playing in front of him? What impact did having the likes of Joe Flanagan & Andy Halliday as the defensive support from the left back position have on these results? Or is there something that Katic does/does not do in his defensive play that is leading to the discrepancy in shots coming from his main area of influence?