Football is such a stupid sport it often defies rational explanation. How can you possibly hope to rationalise Liverpool’s record in front of goal in 2022/23?
To recap: the Reds have scored six-or-more goals in four separate matches, the most instances they’ve recorded in a single season since Beatlemania had the world in its grip. Yet they’ve also drawn a blank eight times in the league, last ending with nil more frequently when Kenny Dalglish’s 2011/12 side found the woodwork with alarming and unparalleled regularity over a decade ago.
How can a team put seven goals past Manchester United yet fail to score away from home against any of the bottom ten sides in the division? The 6-1 win at Leeds put an end to the latter half of the previous sentence but much was made of the issue prior to the trip to Elland Road. A Liverpool team which came within a whisker of an unprecedented quadruple last season has since failed to score at Bournemouth, Chelsea, Crystal Palace, Everton, Nottingham Forest and Wolves.
Aside from their blunt offerings at Stamford Bridge, the Reds averaged 1.6 expected goals and always at least 0.9 in the other five matches. The most wasteful games occurred at the City Ground and Vitality Stadium, with Liverpool somehow contriving to miss four clear-cut chances on both occasions.
And here’s a little context for their profligacy. Since the start of the 2018/19 season, there have been 105 instances of an away side having a quartet of Opta-defined big chances in a Premier League match. These teams have scored an average of 2.3 goals per game, and they have blanked out just seven times; five in total across the four previous seasons, twice by the Reds in 2022/23.
Thanks to the combination of individual shot xG values and a simulator, we can calculate how unlikely it is that Liverpool would fail to score during their six road games against the relative and actual strugglers. The findings show the Reds’ attackers and opposition goalkeepers have combined to laugh in the face of mathematical impossibility.
Even by the end of the third game, it was roughly a 1-in-800 chance that Liverpool would not have scored at least once. You can see from the post-shot percentages being higher than those for the standard xG that the Reds did themselves no favours with their finishing. Nonetheless, by full time at Bournemouth, probability thought it impossible for them to be without a goal, yet they were. Take that, Rachel Riley.
It’s only fair to highlight that the collective opposition should’ve scored more than the five goals they mustered between them too. But they had the disadvantage of facing Alisson Becker, the world’s number one number one, not the more standard shot stoppers with whom the Reds were tasked with beating.
That’s before we get to Illan Meslier. Perhaps facing him was all that was needed for Liverpool to break their duck away from home against a bottom half side? The Frenchman is second worst among the 185 goalkeepers who’ve appeared in Europe’s big five leagues this term for difference between xG on target faced and goals conceded. Liverpool tested him hard, in fairness to the 23-year-old, but they still scored six times from chances valued at 4.0 in the post-shot model.
Per FBRef, Liverpool have scored 56 times from 54.7 expected goals in the league this season. Those figures go perfectly well together but as a pair alone they utterly obscure the key truth of the campaign. For all the Reds’ issues with injuries, their midfield, a lack of investment in transfers, their midfield, an inevitable hangover following a draining 2021/22 campaign and their midfield, the simple fact is that their finishing has deserted them at key moments.
For it to do so repeatedly in theoretically more winnable matches is a real slap in the face. But Liverpool slapped back hard on Monday night, let’s hope there’s more punch left for the trips to West Ham, Leicester and Southampton.