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Oct 3Liked by Andrew Beasley

My friends and I had spent the summer chatting about “The Best Goal” from the Klopp Era but came up with a list “full of emotional ones ” like you suggested. But the Gakpo and Salah City goals were on our list, too.

I’d wonder about the Salah Spurs goal that so resembled the City goal. It should have been the 2-1 winner that day. But Jon Moss found it in him to give Tottenham two pens in the final 20 minutes. (During a period where we had 1 Anfield pen for 18 months?)

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I forget the specifics re the penalties but it was along those lines, yeah.

The Tottenham goal doesn't make the cut here because it was deemed a very good location by the time he took the shot, though of course it took a lot of work to get there.

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Oct 4Liked by Andrew Beasley

Mane's solo goal against arsenal would score low then for similar reasons? The final shot was high xG but the entire move was impossible!

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Probably, but it pre dates the available data unfortunately (same as Can vs Watford). It was another finish across the goal, though, so would imagine from what I found writing this post that it would score highly on xGOT.

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Oct 3Liked by Andrew Beasley

Well that was very enjoyable, always had a soft spot for Emre Can’s overhead kick Watford away 01/05/2017, wonderful read & watch this week Andrew.

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The funny thing there is that I've often wondered if Opta account for the difficulty of an overhead kick - I suspect not! Thanks, Chris.

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Oct 3Liked by Andrew Beasley

I'm guessing the Alisson-to-Mo goal against Man Utd that set off "We're going to win the league" won't register very high on these metrics because the situation outweighs the finish. That's my favorite goal of this era though. The standings, the rival, the audacity of the pass, the celebration from everyone.

And I imagine Opta doesn't factor in Bobby's no-look technique for difficulty either!

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That's definitely an emotion over data goal for sure! But funny thing about that... the Opta model says the post-shot xG (0.24) was worse than the raw version (0.3), suggesting it was a poor finish. It looked alright to me!

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