Big Questions for GW7
What's on our minds going into the seventh week of the season?
Summer has come and gone, the innocent can never last. Incredibly we’re about to say goodbye to September and enter the third month of the Season. Even at this point, the table is a fun mix of “well yeah, duh” and “hmm, wait what?”. Sure, you could probably have picked first place at this point. Yeah, you could’ve got good odds on the current bottom three. But there’s a whole lot going on in the middle, particularly with Newcastle United, Manchester United and Chelsea all sitting between 8th and 14th at time of writing.
We also had cup ties in midweek, which mostly gave us a glance at the depth options available for most teams. But we did also see a fairly changed Newcastle side prevent Manchester City from achieving the Quadruple, we saw plucky Chelsea defeating their South-Coast parent team and we saw Wolves do that thing they do where they can’t score enough goals and get beaten. It was pretty fun for a Carabao Cup third round.
But as normal service resumes, we’re back to tell you what we’re looking out for. And this week we are asking:
Can you start Villa assets in big games?
Everton Football Club: Actually OK?
What does a cup win do for the vibes as Chelsea face Fulham?
Is this DGW just a giant trap?
Is Darwin finally nailed?
Will Unai Emery be adventurous enough for his players to have Fantrax value against the Seagulls?
Like a broken record, we return to talking about Unai Emery’s big game tactics this season. It’s only Week 7. With the help of a red-card decision, they came out of last week’s matchup with Chelsea fairly ok, but it didn’t make us feel a whole lot better about the way they’re setting up the team in these clashes when it comes to trusting them for Fantrax. In the first half last weekend, they basically just let Chelsea have the ball and generated 0.02 xG in open play (a Matty Cash chance which he actually did pretty well with). In the second half, even with the man advantage for a third of the game, they were only able to muster a further 0.69 open play xG, much of it still coming on the counter (including the goal from Ollie Watkins). If we were to adjust out the Clean Sheet points for now, they’d have seen just two players (Watkins and Boubacar Kamara) finish with double figure Fantrax points and with the majority of the names you may have considered starting having disappointed (the likes of Douglas Luiz. Nicolo Zaniolo, Moussa Diaby or even John McGinn in particular, but Matty Cash and Lucas Digne too).
It might be too early to call it a pattern. But if we look at the two other big games Villa have played so far (Newcastle in Week 1 and Liverpool in Week 4), we see a really similar story. Moussa Diaby and Ollie Watkins got goal contributions in GW1, which lifted them above an otherwise forgettable team points tally, with the next best player being Boubacar Kamara on 5. The majority of players finished with below 3.5 points. Lucas Digne had 10.5 points against Liverpool and the next best player had 5 points. Effectively, every time that we’ve seen Villa in a big game, we’ve only been able to trust three names: Ollie Watkins, Moussa Diaby and Lucas Digne. It’s a hard thing to parse, given Villa assets have been pretty good when playing teams below them in the table.
This weekend they draw the early kick-off for the visit of Brighton. Our default is to assume that we’re going to see more of the same here and to not consider any Aston Villa names for streaming. The only reason we pause: unlike Chelsea, Newcastle and Liverpool (who are 3rd, 4th and 5th respectively in xGA this season), Brighton are allowing their opposition far more chances to hurt them and are 14th in xGA at the moment. Brighton’s defence has not been a unit teams can’t target this year so far, so we’re looking at you with hopeful eyes Unai: be brave!
Aston Villa vs Brighton - 12.30pm UK, 7.30am US kickoff, Saturday
Are Everton… just midtable-level good?
Lets start with the caveat: we’ve been mostly amazed that Everton have remained in the Premier League the last few years. At times it’s felt like a slow Sunderland-style circling of the drain for them on the field, whilst financial sanctions are applied to them off the field, limiting their ability to work their way out of that spiral. And they’ve started this year with just a single point from 5 games, despite playing Fulham, Wolves and Sheffield United. So far, so similar, right? Well… we’re not actually sure. What if we told you that Everton’s underlying metrics (in particular their expected goal-difference per 90) this season sandwiches them firmly in 10th place, one spot behind this season’s Cinderella-story Tottenham and one spot above this season’s horror-story Manchester United? If that number and those comparisons have got your attention, lets talk about what that means in practice.
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