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Post by gateman49 on Jun 13, 2022 8:25:20 GMT
There is an article on the current BBC web sports page about Reep who was reckoned to be the first football analyst. Apparently he helped a number of teams to success by using his analysis and transferring it to the pitch. He was active from the 1920's onwards and along the way he helped Brentford, Arsenal, Wolves, Sheffield Wednesday and a number of other clubs, including Torquay United in the '60's. I don't recall seeing his name linked to us before but we obviously had considerable success in that decade under Frank O'Farrell. The article is here: www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/61648608 Can anybody shed any more light on his connection with the club? p.s. I also posted this on BTPIR and Merse has pointed me to some posts on the subject earlier in the month in a different thread. |
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Rags
TFF member
Posts: 1,210
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Post by Rags on Jun 14, 2022 13:56:28 GMT
Uh-oh, the myth of Charles Reep rearing its head again...
I'm intrigued by this article for a number of reasons. Firstly it completely ignores Charles Hughes who was the FA's DIrector of Coaching and acted as something of a conduit between Reep and the FA.
I see it credits Reep for the victory of Egil Olsen's Norway over Graham Taylor's England, yet Taylor was more of a student of Reep's work than Olsen. At least, he was at Watford until he realised that Reep's stats were simply statistics rather than a methodology. Taylor's pressing game was a descendent of Viktor Maslow's pressing game created at Torpedo Moscow, and nothing to do with Reep. Reep claimed that a goal was scored every nine shots to the extent that a team would be in credit or debit based on previous games. Score no goals in none shots one game and you will score two goals in nine shots the next game because you are a goal in credit.
In one two-legged cup game against Southampton, Watford lost the first leg 4-0 so Reep wrote to Taylor urging Watford to attack. They dis and won 7-1 after extra time, but would any manager of any value defend a 4-0 deficit? Watford wre basically an attacking team who would obviously attack to try and get a goal or two back early, For Reep to suggest Watford won due to his methods is absurd. Of course, his attacking methods failed Watford in the next round when they were beaten. Random chance, claimed Reep. So when a team wins its thanks to him, when they lose it's random chance.
The article quotes Rep as establishing that "seven out of nine goals came from moves of three passes or fewer; moves starting with a long pass from your own half meant a goal was twice as likely to be scored when compared to using only short passes to progress up the field; " Back in those days, games were played on mudbaths. What was the point of taking more than three passes to get up the field when the ball might stick, or the defence would get back in any case. The point about this is that there were significantly more passing moves of three passes of fewer in a game, not that goals were more likely to come from shorter passing moves. Reep is not comparing ten passing moves of each type: few passes and more passes. He is only looking at the goals scored and working backwards to see how many goals were scored.
This is a classic case of correlation rather than causation.
No surprise that the article connects Reep to xG. Expected Goals is a metric that takes a completed game, calculates how many goals should have been scored, and compares that to the number of goals that have been scored. Yet xG is rarely accurate, even accounting for rounding, more than 1 in 20 games. Useless!!
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