Liverpool Must Think Outside The Box
Alisson Becker was beaten from outside the box when Liverpool lost to Nottingham Forest. How do he and Giorgi Mamardashvili compare with long-range shots?
There’s an account on Twitter with the handle cursedfootball which has almost half a million followers. It is, as you may imagine, mostly tiresome attempts at *shudder* banter.
The name on the account is ‘football images that precede unfortunate events.’ They would have enjoyed Liverpool’s 1-0 defeat to Nottingham Forest even more had they seen a screenshot from Stats Zone which I shared on Saturday morning.
The Reds don’t usually lose after international breaks, but then they did. Hilarious. There were other images last week which in a sense preceded unfortunate events for the goalkeepers for the likes of Liverpool and Everton. They jinxed them into being, if you believe in such nonsense.
BBC Sport ran an article called The slow death of the screamer. It focussed on the decline in shots and goals from outside the penalty area, with suggestions that this could be down to the influence of analytics or changes in playing style. You can’t argue with maths, whatever the cause.
Winning goals for Aston Villa, Newcastle and Nottingham Forest then came from outside the box in the latest round of Premier League fixtures, with Marcus Rashford scoring for the first time in 189 days after hitting a shot from 23 yards out, per FBRef, too.
They didn’t take the article personally, it’s just a coincidence. Harvey Barnes, Jhon Durán and Callum Hudson-Odoi certainly proved there’s still a place for long-range goals though.
The combination of two events on Saturday - Alisson Becker conceding from a chance valued at 0.07 expected goals and Durán scoring from a different postcode - brought a fact to realisation: the last three goals the Reds have allowed have all been from outside the penalty area. Aston Villa’s Colombian (who assisted Luis DÃaz for a goal in the last international break) scored from 22 and 21 yards when Liverpool were in the west Midlands in May.
Has a new weakness emerged in Alisson’s game? After all, he only conceded 13 goals from further than 18-yards (if we exclude deflected efforts) in his first 247 league and European games for the club, and now he’s been beaten three times from distance in the last six matches. The post-shot expected value for any of the trio of strikes didn’t go above 0.29 either.
It’s far too soon to be alarmed. From the data available on Fotmob, the Brazilian has conceded eight goals from outside the box from an xG on target of 16.1 in recent seasons.
While far from a perfect metric (though far easier to collate en masse), SofaScore provides the Premier League numbers from 2017/18 onward for save percentage from shots on target from beyond the 18-yard line. Their data reveals that there are 20 goalkeepers who have been challenged with at least 400 efforts in total in that period.
(As an aside, the statistics also show there were more shots on target from beyond the boundaries of the penalty area last season than in any of the six campaigns which preceded it. That suggests that while total shots from far out are down, players are making smarter choices regarding when to have an effort; strike when the path is clear, not when there’s a defender liable to put in a block).
Future Liverpool shot stopper Giorgi Mamardashvili is is obviously worth including in the analysis although he is just outside the top sample bracket, with 393 faced. Here’s how often the 21 men were challenged with a shot from outside the box in league football plotted against the proportion of them that they save.
It is as well for Manchester City that they concede fewer long-range attempts on target than any other club as they have the worst goalkeeper when it comes to saving them.
Ederson is level for this brand of save percentage with Adrián from the smaller sample goalkeepers, which isn’t a great look. He is at least ahead of Kepa Arrizabalaga, the most expensive player in his position in history. Chelsea’s transfer business hasn’t only recently got confusing, in case you’ve forgotten.
As for Mamardashvili, he is a shade above the Premier League average since the summer of 2017, by 85.2 per cent to 85. He is, however, a touch below the 86.1 per cent mark by the other 20 men on the above chart. It’s natural that the better goalkeepers will play more than the worse, so the bar in this group is understandably higher.
The Georgian is having an odd campaign. His La Liga save percentage for shots from outside the box was 87.3 before 2024/25 got underway. This term Mamardashvili has been beaten with three from six.
He’s better than average for dealing with shots from further than 18-yards but on a less good run at the moment; the 23-year-old looks like an even more appropriate replacement for Alisson the more you dig into his numbers. Both goalkeepers will be under closer scrutiny the next time an opponent lines up a screamer, nonetheless.
We don’t want another unfortunate event, do we?
It was common knowledge that later-stage Klopp was purposely channeling attackers to shoot from distance rather than work better percentage chances against us. I wonder if this strategy has been altered by Slot and Alisson is struggling to adapt to the new holes left?
Is Allison brilliant as a shot stopper because he gets down so early, but the longer range curling shot evades him as he's already on the deck?