Hugo Lloris ‘is Bearings

It’s all about goalkeepers in the press this week innit? Well just Joe Hart really, and we already jumped on that bandwagon last time out. So who’s getting it in the neck this time? Old Hugo Lloris down at White Hart Lane, that’s who.

Ok, so it’s not really topical this one – we’re just using last seasons numbers to show what our keeping model can do to highlight positional problems and offer a solution. Differentgame’s friend, fellow keeping stats enthusiast @colinttrainor, used his model this week to rank last season’s goalkeeping performances over at Statsbomb. Colin’s model ranked Lloris fairly poorly but our model ranks him as having a real stinker last season:

To quickly explain, SOT stands for shots on target and the final column there normalises each keeper’s opportunity to prevent goals. For example, Jussi Jaaskelainen having to make 200+ saves gives him more opportunity to prevent goals, so we’ve done it per 100 saves made to give the final rank.

It’s the middle lot in that graphic where rankings get a bit different (top and bottom looks very similar) and Lloris was seen as quite an important signing for Spurs. An interesting subject we hope you’ll agree so we took a closer look at his save %s:

We can see that just right of the central middle zone, Lloris had a save % of 25 when the average was 76%. This looks like a pretty big hole in his game. He actually conceded 3 goals from 4 shots here. The numbers aren’t huge but there’s still something that may be gleaned. The 3 goals were against Liverpool when he came rushing out of his area to stop Downing and missed completely. The other two were slaloming efforts from Kevin Mirallas and Ramires:

On the face of it these look like two very well taken goals, and they are. It would be churlish to suggest otherwise. But as a keeper, and an analyst you’d be looking at ways to stop such goals. Using the excellent StatsZone App we can look at the two goal in a bit of detail. The red x on the graphics shows Lloris’s positioning:

The positions look ok there, nicely in line with the ball which were simply struck too fiercely for Lloris. However, there may be more too it. The area where Lloris conceded these goals from is actually the back half of that 25% save rectangle. We looked at the keepers with 100% save records from this area. Out of 26 attempts at them from this same zone, only 4 times were they as far forward as Lloris tried to make these saves here. 2 of those were from point blank range right on top of the shot. The red x’s here show where the other 22 were stopped by the keeper:

In his  big post about keepers during the summer, Colin Trainor suggested there might be general trend of keepers over compensating on their near post. We were hugely skeptical at the time but looking at this, he may well have been right. Lloris is giving himself no time whatsoever to react to any shot hit remotely well and not straight at him.

As a small double check, we looked at Wigan’s Ali Al-Habsi as his numbers were poor from this area too. He let in 2 of 5 shots from here. The two he let in he was set up in the same position as Lloris. And the 3 he saved? Yup back in the positions the 100% keepers favoured.

As a small triple check, we looked what Lloris had been like this season from the same zone. He’s faced a couple of shots from there and saved them. Guess where he was positioned?

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