Sunderland v Bolton

The new Picklive dataclock provides a very useful pair of numbers for analysing previous matches. Looking at the dataclock for the Sunderland match against West Ham (and selecting 'All Actions' in the drop-down) you can see 574-464. These are the totals of all the actions for both teams (home then away) during the match. A quick look at the BBC match report shows that Sunderland had 58% of the possession. This maps roughly to the amount of 'actions'. This could be very useful when picking your Big Game team...


Lets have a quick look at all the matches Sunderland have played on Picklive this season (home team numbers listed first):

H West Ham
Actions: 574/464
Possession: 58/42
Big Game: 4/1

H Everton
488/579
45/55
2/3

A Chelsea
576/460
47/53
1/4

A Blackburn
400/530
50/50
1/4

H Arsenal
502/547
48/52
3/2

What can we do with this information? Well we also need to look at Bolton:

H Blackburn
421/440
51/50
3/2

H Spurs
469/578
55/45
2/3

H Liverpool
462/559
50/50
1/4

H Birmingham
466/405
51/49
4/1

What jumps out here is that Bolton have always had 50% or more possession but yet have only turned in between 421 and 469 'actions'. Sunderland in contrast have had between 45% and 58% and have converted that into a range of 460-574 'actions'. So Sunderland convert their possession into more Picklive points.

How does that help us? Well, if you think that the possession will go something like 51/49 in favour of the home team today then you could assume that Sunderland will get around 500-530ish actions and Bolton 420-450ish. Matching that split against the games above would suggest that Sunderland should have 3 or 4 of the 5 top-scoring players today.

Goals and cards do distort this picture somewhat. The Chelsea game saw the home team on top massively in terms of Picklive actions despite only having 47% of possession and they only got 1 player in the top 5. I think this can be explained by the three Sunderland goals (catapulting a couple of players to the top of the points charts) and Chelsea's excellent possession to actions ratio. Likewise the Arsenal game is skewed slightly but I think that oddity is explained by a red card for the Arsenal in the 55th minute.

So, recommendation today: pick 3 or 4 Sunderland players if you think the scores will be level - adjust accordingly either way for goals and cards. Henderson, Bardsley and Robinson are certainties for my team.

Good luck!

by BensBulls
(Ben Wraith)