Awful Sunderland statistic shows Tony Mowbray wrong to blame strikers for slump
As Sunderland have slipped down the Championship this season, Tony Mowbray’s criticisms of his strikers have grown considerably.
On the surface, it is easy to see why. After all, getting shots on goal has not been a problem at all for Sunderland and yet here we are in December and no striker has registered a single goal for the Black Cats.
Mason Burstow was the latest to get a second chance at Millwall as he was handed the start ahead of Eliezer Mayenda and Luis Hemir. Nazariy Rusyn, meanwhile, continues to nurse a groin problem.
“I think it is because we have young attacking players, inexperienced attacking players who are not really ready to play for our team,” Mowbray told the press after the stalemate at The Den.
“And yet we have to play them and we are playing them and we are not suffering the results but we are trying to develop them and get them up to speed to be able to be a striker in the Championship.”
In another interview, this time with the club’s own media team, he double-downed on those comments.
“I’ve been saying for a few weeks we need the strikers to score. We need strikers to have a basic number of goals between them and yet here we are again toiling a little bit at that.”
It is clear, then, that Tony Mowbray is, very publicly, blaming the strikers for the lack of goals or, perhaps more specifically, the recruitment team.
There is, though, one major problem with his thinking there: Sunderland strikers are not missing chances. They are not the ones wasting the majority of the shots Sunderland are having.
In fact, in the last eight games, just 15% (22) of the 146 shots that Sunderland have had on goal have been taken by strikers. If you want some context on that, defenders have had 32 shots (22%) in those games.
| Opposition | Total Shots | Shots by Strikers |
|---|---|---|
Stoke (A) | 18 | 0 |
Leicester (A) | 13 | 1 |
Norwich (H) | 17 | 3 |
Swansea (A) | 25 | 1 |
Birmingham (H) | 22 | 8 |
Plymouth (A) | 24 | 3 |
Huddersfield (H) | 27 | 4 |
Millwall (A) | 10 | 2 |
It seems very obvious, then, that while strikers are not scoring, it’s difficult to blame them as they are not missing chances either.
You could possibly make the point that the paltry number of shots the strikers have had during this run highlights a possible problem with their movement, but Mowbray verity clearly isn’t saying that. Ultimately, if he wants credit for the amount of shots Sunderland are having, he can’t also blame the players who are not having them for the failure to convert those shots into goals.
After all, as Ice Hockey great Wayne Gretzky once said, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.
It looks a lot more like a problem with Mowbray’s system because the fact is that Sunderland’s strikers are not even getting into the game, and you don't need statistics to know that. Just eyes will do. That doesn’t substantially change when the striker does either.
A final important point to consider here is that, in the last eight games, Sunderland strikers have only out-shot the defenders on two occasions: against Norwich and Birmingham. In other words, the only two games in the run that Sunderland have won.
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