Carroll and Crosses
In Michael Cox's weekly chalkboard round up for The Guardian this week, he pointed out how Liverpool's crossing had been poor in the draw with Manchester United at the weekend.
The suggestion was that without Andy Carroll on the pitch, there was often no-one for the wingers to aim for in the box.
Using the statistics for each of Liverpool's league games this season, I thought I'd see if there was any correlation between the amount of time Carroll has played in a match, and how accurate the Reds' crossing has been.
Broadly speaking there has been. It's important to remember that the crossing accuracy figures are for the whole match, and not just the time that Carroll has been on the pitch though.
Similarly, the data is not available to show what percentage of the crosses the Geordie striker got himself on the end of, so it's impossible to state definitively what Carroll's influence has been.
But it does seem that if Carroll is not on the pitch, then Liverpool need to find a different way to feed chances to their other strikers.
Statistics sourced from EPLIndex. Please take a look at my other articles, a list of which can be found here.