Matches between Liverpool and Everton have ended goalless more times than any other fixture in the history of English top flight football. We should not have been surprised that the latest edition ended without either goalkeeper being beaten.
After all, Jurgen Klopp has now visited Goodison Park on seven occasions, and were it not for a 94 th minute goal from Sadio Mane back in 2016 , five of the matches would have ended 0-0. The Reds have often struggled to create chances in away derbies under their current manager but that wasn’t the issue last weekend.
Liverpool had 23 shots against Everton, a tally they’ve topped just eight times in an away Premier League match under Klopp. In only one of those games – a 2-0 loss at Burnley way back at the start of 2016/17 – did they fail to score.
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Their attacking efforts at Goodison were far better than they were at Turf Moor six years ago though. On that occasion, Liverpool had nine shots inside the box and five on target (with four of them from further than 18 yards out). The figures in their latest league fixture were 20 and eight respectively, and on this occasion seven of the efforts on target were hit from within the box.
As with the total shots, it’s rare not to score when testing a goalkeeper with eight attempts. It has only happened on one previous occasion for Klopp’s Liverpool in the league, when they drew 0-0 with Southampton in May 2017. Since the summer of 2016, just 11 of the 198 examples of a team having eight shots on target in a Premier League match have resulted in zero goals.
How much you choose to praise Jordan Pickford or bemoan Liverpool’s finishing at this point probably depends on whether you are a Red or a Blue. There are at least some statistics which can put the England international’s efforts into context.
Expected goal statistics (which assign a value to a shot based on the historic conversion rate of similar opportunities) have entered the mainstream in recent years. What remains more obscure is the concept of post-shot expected goals. This looks at on target efforts only, and values them based on the power and placement of the strike, again using previous examples as a precedent.
Per FBRef, Liverpool generated 2.2 expected goals in the latest Merseyside derby, but only converted that into 1.9 in the post-shot model. This contrasts sharply with their previous visit to Goodison, where 2.1 xG became 2.9 through finishing. If anything explains the difference between a 4-1 win and a goalless draw, that’s a decent place to start.
Nonetheless, 1.9 post-shot xG is still a healthy total. There were nine prior Liverpool games in the Premier League or Champions League in the last five years in which they hit exactly that mark, and they always scored at least twice and bagged 2.8 goals per match on average.
It appears the needle is swinging back towards Pickford as the primary source of frustration for the Reds, rather than their own finishing. FBRef’s database contains detailed data on 240 Liverpool matches, and in only three has the opposition goalkeeper prevented more post-shot expected goals from going past them.
Coincidentally, two of the examples were 2-1 wins over Tottenham Hotspur. The first occurred at Wembley, early in the 2018/19 campaign, the second at Anfield in December 2020. Michel Vorm and Hugo Lloris respectively deserve credit, even if they couldn’t prevent a loss for their side.
The ultimate example occurred in the biggest game in European football though. Thibaut Courtois kept out a scarcely credible 3.5 post-shot xG in the Champions League final in May, ensuring Real Madrid’s entirely undeserved march through the knockout phase of the competition was completed.
Pickford might not have needed to hit those heights, but he still recorded the second-best figure when keeping a clean sheet against the Reds in recent years. That he did shows that Liverpool’s attacking was working last weekend, even if they didn’t score.
With several disappointing results already in 2022/23, the Reds and their fans will have to trust the process and not the outcome for a little longer. Liverpool are unlikely to pose as severe a test to a goalkeeper without scoring again any time soon.
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