Once again, Chin Heng takes over the writing of this article, and he lends his unique statistical analytical mind to the page. Enjoy! I am kinda glad I don’t have to comment on this trainwreck of a game.
I could save myself a few minutes by copying-and-pasting some paragraphs from the last few Post-Match articles because we once again witnessed a Sailors performance that left much to be desired, except this time we were up against a team that actually had the quality to punish us.
This was set to be a very close encounter on paper, with Sailors and Tampines having identical records on multiple fronts coming into the game – both teams had 6 wins and a draw (beating every other team in the league except Geylang), and had scored 24 goals (8 in the 1st half, 16 in the 2nd half, 3 set piece goals). However, the final score was anything but close.
It was a disastrous performance by the Sailors but as they say, you can only beat what’s in front of you, Tampines still had to do their part and the result was a resounding 5-0 victory in Gavin Lee’s first ever win against coach Rankovic.
Tampines were the better team and deserved the win for sure, but I felt that they were definitely not better by 5 goals.
Be Careful What You Wish For
Coach Rankovic mentioned during the pre-match interview that he hoped the referee would ‘let things go and let the game flow’, and he got what he wished for in the 3rd minute when Boris Kopitovic left his trailing foot in a challenge with Zharfan, resulting in his heel striking Zharfan on the face. The referee didn’t even give a card initially, but after a VAR review, settled on a yellow card to Kopitovic.
In my opinion, this was clearly a deliberate action by Kopitovic to leave his foot in, either in an attempt to earn his 97th penalty of the season or to leave a hole in Zharfan’s face. However, since he didn’t achieve either goal, I agree there wasn’t quite enough in it to warrant a red. It’s a close one though, and I suspect that if the referee had given a red initially, the VAR would not have overturned the decision either.
Nevertheless, I’d like to state that this is not an excuse for our loss. Red or no red doesn’t seem to matter when you put in such a bad performance.
On that note, we can’t help but wonder if the Sailors could have made a difference to the result by engaging in similar tactics to stamp our authority on the game, going a little harder into each challenge, or leaving a foot in here and there, just to show the other team that we are there. There’s no right answer to this of course, a mistimed attempt could easily leave us playing the rest of the game with 10-men as well. There’s just something about watching the other team pass pretty patterns around but us not doing much to leave our mark on them.
Change in Formation
The Sailors lined up with 5 at the back this game, after making 4 changes from the win against Balestier, with Anu, Hafiz, Lionel, and Shawal coming in for Adam Swandi, Chris, Hami, and Song.
For the first 40 mins, this all seemed to work as each of the 3 centre backs were winning their individual battles, putting in important blocks and tackles to contain the variety of attacking threats coming from Boris Kopitovic, Seia Kunori, Faris Ramli, and Glenn Kweh.
Then came the disaster in a span of 10 or so minutes either side of half-time.
Tampines scored 2 goals in quick succession at the stroke of half-time, first from Boris Kopitovic after a well-timed run to beat the offside trap, followed by a Glenn Kweh tap-in after Zharfan inexplicably spilled the ball on the goal-line, straight onto Glenn’s foot.
Changes were made at half-time as we switched to 4 at the back with Song coming in for Lionel to chase the game, but seemed to have no effect as 3 more quick goals by the 55th minute left the Sailors shell shocked. Glenn Kweh beat Sergio a little too easily down the right on the 47th minute before squaring the ball for Kopitovic to finish, then former Sailor Faris Ramli received the ball wide on the left and cut in to finish into the bottom corner on 49, before Irfan Najeeb wrapped up the game through an open header from a corner kick on 55.
There is an argument to be made that all 5 goals were down to our mistakes, something that I am sure the team will examine closely back on the training ground.
Positives
You would have to dig very hard to find positives from a 5-0 loss, but I think there may still be a silver lining or two to be found.
There has been some criticism directed at Song in recent weeks as he did not seem to be performing at the same levels as he did before he left in 2023, but in this game we saw glimpses of the old Song. It may have been due to the scoreline, but he appeared to be fired up, ready to take on defenders and chase loose balls like he used to. Not quite where he wants to be I’m sure, but a commendable effort nonetheless.
We also saw Rui Pires coming back from injury to finally make his SPL debut, after playing exclusively in the ACL last season due to the foreigner restrictions in the league. As Eddy mentioned in his preview article, we once again showed a lack of willingness to play the ball through midfield in this game, restricting our options when going forward, but the introduction of Rui did seem to help a little on this front as he showed some effort to orchestrate the play in midfield with the limited minutes he got, ending the game with a 94% pass completion rate.
The Crew’s Got Your Back
Despite our on-field problems, the Crew put up a performance to be proud of, as almost everyone sang our hearts out and cheered throughout the 90 minutes, despite the scoreline, with every single opposition goal simply pushing us to sing louder. The brilliant atmosphere made the loss just that little bit more bearable.
Win, Lose, or Draw, you’ll always hear us roar indeed.
The Stat Pad
Just like my last post match article, this section is a space for us to delve deeper into the underlying statistics of the game for us to examine how the game played out.
Our lack of end product in front of goal really hurt us, because Syazwan Buhari was the worst starting keeper in the league coming into this game, and I am not just saying this because I am sore about the result.
[Editor’s note: Grab a coffee or put some bleach in your eye or something to wake yourself up – this part is tough haha]
My evaluation of keeper ability is derived from the Expected Goals on Target (xGOT) stat, which is slightly different from the xG. A xGOT value is only assigned to shots that are on target, and the value is largely based on the location of the goal where the shot ended up at. A shot with 0.8 xGOT basically means that the shot ends up as a goal 80% of the time, while the keeper saves it 20% of the time. A summation of xGOT across all the shots would give a number which represents the number of goals an average keeper would concede over that series of shots, and a ratio of Actual Goals Conceded/Cumulative xGOT then provides a metric to judge if a keeper is over or under performing.
In Syazwan’s case, he had conceded 7 goals from 5.37 xGOT, which equates to a ratio of 1.30. This means that Syazwan is conceding 30% more often than the average keeper, making him the worst starting keeper in the league. (In case you were wondering, Aizil Yazid from Young Lions is the best performer on this metric, scoring a ratio of 0.73 i.e. he is conceding 27% less goals than the average keeper)
Unfortunately, Syazwan didn’t have to make a save all night, so we never got a chance to test his goalkeeping abilities. The best chances created by Sailors was a 0.39xG chance by Shawal and a 0.36xG chance by Song, both header opportunities in the six-yard box from a cross. Neither of these chances managed to test the keeper, with both efforts flying well over the crossbar. Against one of the best defences in the league, we really had to make such chances count.
As I mentioned at the start of the article, Tampines were the better team but the 5-goal margin was perhaps not an accurate reflection of the performances. The xG timeline shows a much closer margin of 1.03xG vs 2.53xG.
There was indeed nothing between the 2 teams in the first 40 minutes of the game, but a devastating period of play either side of half-time gave Tampines an unassailable lead. From that point, Tampines pretty much sat back and created no notable chances after the 55th minute, while Sailors created several significant chances later in the second half which were not converted.
The Monte Carlo Simulation of the shots and corresponding xG indicated that Tampines were always most likely to win, coming out on top on 75.1% of simulations (equivalent to an Expected Points value of 0.42 for Sailors and 2.42 for Tampines).
Well-played, Tampines.
Conclusion
With our next game coming up just 4 days later, there really is no time to be upset about the result. 19 points from the first 8 games is still solid, and we next face against a Young Lions side which started the season with some good performances but have since dropped off in recent games.
Young Lions averaged an Expected Points value of 1.58 points across their first 5 games, but that has since dropped to and average of 0.34 points in their last 3 games, indicating a drop in performance level. This seems like a good time to play against Young Lions, though I am taking nothing for granted after our recent performances.
I hope next Monday is Blue!
Written by Tan Chin Heng
Edited by Eddy Hirono
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