We Can Expect Attacking Football
The good news for the neutral is that goals per game have been increasing slowly but steadily as the tournament has progressed. The chart below demonstrates this with goals per game (total goals scored per round of matches/matches played) shown by the upwards sloping green line. The increased number of goals per game is welcome news, as too is the increased number of shots per game (and also the shots on target).
The Semi-Finalists have become more accurate and more effective in front of goal
The next chart I have made plots the shots taken per shot on-target on the x-axis against the shots taken per goal scored on the y-axis. Shots taken per shot-on target is a figure representing, on average, how many shots the team needs before it shoots one on target. The shots taken per goal scored figure is, plainly, how many shots it takes, on average, for the team to score a goal. I have labelled the data points with the three-letter country code and the game-round. So, DRC 1 means Democratic Republic of Congo's 1st Group game. CIV QF means Ivory Coast's Quarter-Final. What's important to note from the chart below is the generally downwards trend towards the bottom-left corner of the chart. If you look specifically at Ghana it is almost a linear relationship downwards.
In short, teams are getting more shots on target and needing fewer shots to score.
Another way of looking at this improving efficiency and potency of the attackers on display in the Semi-Finals is by returning to the 'Attacking Effectiveness' graph I have used in the past based on concepts from Ben Mayhew of experimental361.com. The higher the amount of shots taken and the lower the number of shots to score a goal is the key bit of information needed in this chart. The DRC are way out in terms of shots taken but their Quarter-Final was a bit of an exception to the other three and so seem an outlier. The other three teams, Equatorial Guinea, Ghana and the Ivory Coast are all pretty well clustered together and there is not much between them in terms of attacking effectiveness...
Defensive Weaknesses or no?
Turning our focus onto defence our next charts focus on defensive games. The chart below focuses on the shots faced per game against the shots taken. The important pieces of data to look out for are how the data move from game 1 to the quarter-finals. By that, it appears Equatorial Guinea and the Ivory Coast have the most consistent styles of play in that they both generally take below average (indicated by dotted blue line) number of shots, and cluster around the average number of shots defended (faced). This means they have reasonably busy defence and attack in their games. Ghana and the DRC are both harder to pin-down as a style as their data points variate over the chart.
Ghana's data point 'GHA 1' in the chart above is from their game against Senegal - their only defeat so far. What this goes some way in telling is that if teams apply enough pressure on Ghana's defence it will eventually leak. However, if you look at Equatorial Guinea's data for shots taken they rarely take over 10 shots per game. As I have mentioned in my posts on the role of luck, Equatorial Guinea have plenty of it on their side, particularly in front of the home crowd. I just feel Ghana have too much strength in their attack for a defence like Equatorial Guinea's to withstand.
In the other contest, the Ivory Coast's defence has yet to stand up to an attack which shoots as many times in a game as that of the DRC's. The Ivory Coast did well to withstand Algeria but their back line looked shaky at times. Similarly, the DRC were made to look silly twice against Congo, and barely crawled out of the group stages. In the last meeting between the two nations the DRC won 4-3 so again I am expecting a lot of goals.
I am expecting a lot of goals actually, because:
These defences struggle to prevent chances being made inside their own penalty area...
What I have done with the chart below is illustrate the proportion of the total shots the Semi-Finalists have faced against their opposition in their four previous games in this tournament, that have been within their own penalty area (data from the fantastic whoscored.com and idea vaguely based on work by Seth Dobson).
In short, I expect goals.
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