Manuel Pellegrini’s West Ham United may have virtually dominated the statistics against Tottenham Hotspur in a fierce London derby on Saturday afternoon at London Stadium in the Premier League, but they were still edged out by a single goal by Mauricio Pochettino’s men. Today, we crunch and analyse all the main team statistics from the pulsating affair, join us.
Possession
There are few surprises when we take an in-depth look at our first match stat from two days ago, possession, the share of the ball that each team were able to keep, with this visitors dominating.
Spurs were always expected to see more possession, registering 56 per cent of the overall share to the Hammers’ 44%, however, this is one of the only stats where they come out on top despite winning the game, with the Irons being statistically superior, as aforementioned.
Shots
The West Ham superiority begins when we start to look at shots and shots on target, we will start with the number of shots, with the hosts more ambitious in the final third and posing more of a threat to the opposing goal.
Pellegrini’s men enjoyed three more overall attempts than his old rival from both Spain and previous encounters in England, Pochettino and his players, that’s 10 to 13. As we will find out as we go along, there was an element of luck in victory for the North Londoners.
Shots On Target
At this point, you would expect us to outline that the Lilywhites left Stratford with the three points because they were able to test out Lukasz Fabianski more and get a larger share of their efforts on target.
However, this just wasn’t the case as the home side registered two more shots on target than the away team, which was double with four to their two. But there is a case for the North London outfit being more clinical, scoring with every other shot on target.
Pass Completion
One clue that the stats do offer us when we are trying to piece together the mystery of the PL’s fifth-placed team pre-match beating the 15th-placed side lies in pass completion, the percentage of passes that successfully reached their targets.
Here, Tottenham flourished with an eye-catching 86.4 per cent, West Ham still managed over 80%, which is more than respectable, but 81.4% is never going to match up to 86.4%. Although these numbers also tell us that for a London derby, it was a very free-flowing game of football.
Key Passes
Key passes are the split-second moments of magic that can cut through a defence, make a goal and change a game and in spite of the fact that only one goal was scored in East London, these were in no shortage.
Incredibly, over 56,000 fans at London Stadium were treated to a total of 20 key passes and three fifths (12) of these were created by the Hammers as they were kept out by Hugo Lloris on numerous occasions, while just two fifths (8) were mustered up by Spurs.
Corners
Both teams have a fair amount of height in their ranks, which is why they would have both been disappointed to have not made more of the vast amount that they won.
16 were taken in total and barely a single dangerous situation occurred from any of them, the hosts would have been most angered by this as 10 of the 16 belonged to them, not making use of the likes of centre-back pairing Fabian Balbuena and Issa Diop and star striker Marko Arnautovic, from them.
Clearances
The final two team stats in this analysis are ones that focus solely on the defence and goalkeeper of the Irons and Spurs as it was a relatively busy day for the backline and shot-stopper of both sides.
First up is the defences with us looking at clearances made, a measure of the workload enforced on them throughout the 90 minutes and it seems like the away defenders had much more to deal with than the home ones, clearing the danger 25 times to their 14. This matches the trend we’ve seen so far.
Saves
And last but not least are the two goalkeepers, Fabianski of Poland in the Hammers end and France captain and recent World Cup winner Lloris between the sticks for Spurs.
Lloris had four times the number of saves to make than Fabianski, keeping the Irons at bay with his own intervention on four separate occasions, three of which were saves to deny Arnautovic. Meanwhile, his opposite number had just one slice of meaningful work to do, a world-class double-save to prevent the visitors doubling their lead at the end of the first half.
So, now that all the team stats from a mixed but ultimately disappointing 90 minutes to be a member of the Claret & Blue Army have been well and truly crunched, will West Ham be able to turn their statistical dominance into a result next Saturday against Leicester City? Join us once again, this time next week, to find out.
