A quick explanation

You can skip this if you’ve seen these before.

As usual, here are timeline graphics for the latest round of matches. There’s a full explanation of these here, but in a nutshell they track how each club’s expected goals tally (the number of goals that the average team would have scored from the chances that they created) increased over the course of the match.

This allows us to get a better sense of how each game played out than from just watching the highlights. Every jump in a line is a shot, with bigger jumps corresponding to more promising chances (at least as far as I can tell from the limited data available at this level).

There are two numbers next to each club’s name: the first is how many goals they scored and the second (in brackets) is how many goals the average club would have scored from their shots. The latter number is what the lines track, with dots on the lines denoting the goals they actually scored.

Championship

It’s not quite a case of “I told you so” yet, but Aston Villa‘s performances haven’t looked quite as good as their results so I’m never all that surprised when they get a disappointing result. There was yet another match in which Brentford created chances like a promotion contender but failed to make them count, while Wolves reasserted their own credentials by comfortably containing Reading.

League 1

There was yet more disappointment for Bury, who created just as much as Peterborough but were sunk by a late goal that keeps them nine points adrift of safety with 10 matches now remaining. A huge win for MK Dons kept their survival hopes alive and torpedoed Rotherham‘s chances of a late dash for automatic promotion, while Blackpool‘s late reward did Charlton‘s play-off ambitions no favours in the “we hate our owners” derby.

League 2

Barnet paid the price for not capitalising on their early goal and allowed Port Vale to peg them back, keeping them in relegation trouble. Luton‘s comeback at Coventry was typical of the Hatters’ clinical finishing this season, while Exeter were unable to make their chances count at home to Yeovil.