Blackburn Rovers have endured a turbulent start to the season and head coach Jon Dahl Tomasson is potentially facing the sack after four straight defeats with the Lancashire club.
The Riversiders travelled to the Ricoh Arena last night to take on a struggling Coventry City, hoping to put an end to their losing streak. Unfortunately, a late goal from USA international Haji Wright piled on Rovers’ misery.
Tomasson’s men are now two points above the relegation and face Queens Park Rangers, who are sitting third from bottom, at Loftus Road on Saturday in a must-win game for both sides but particularly for the Danish head coach’s future at Ewood Park.
Same old statistical story?
The defeat to Coventry must have felt like Groundhog Day for Blackburn fans, watching their team dominate possession and fail to convert while being punished at the other end for being far too open.
In fact, throughout the match, Rovers registered 66 percent of the share of possession and created 14 goalscoring opportunities. This doesn’t seem so bad, right?
Statistics are a great method to analyse a team’s performance in a given match or over any period of time. However, when inspecting stats such as shots, the sheer volume of pops at goal doesn’t tell the full story. For instance, were these shots any good?
To answer that question, let’s have a look at Blackburn Rovers’ expected goals (xG) on the night. Over the course of the game against Coventry, Tomasson’s side accumulated an xG of 0.71 from 14 attempts on goal.
Breaking this down further, this averages out at 0.05 xG per shot which means that each shot taken by Blackburn last night had a five percent chance of hitting the net and a 95 percent chance of either being saved or going wide.
To contrast this with the hosts, Coventry City boasted merely 34 percent of the ball but had the same number of shots on goal with 14. The Sky Blues ended the match with an xG total of 1.19 or 0.085 xG per shot.
Coventry’s chances of scoring each shot were 8.5 percent compared to Blackburn’s five percent even though the former had far fewer touches of the ball on the night.
This has become a familiar story for supporters of Blackburn Rovers. Against Leicester City at the weekend in a 4-1 home defeat, the former Premier League champions had 15 shots to the Foxes’ 11, yet the visitors wiped the floor with Tomasson’s side.
The chances being created by Blackburn are not good enough and, despite dominating possession in most games, they are far too open at the back. This is unsustainable and Tomasson’s job seems almost untenable at this point.
And it’s not just this season that this trend is rearing its ugly head. Rovers ended the 2022/23 campaign in seventh place with a negative-two goal difference, having scored just 52 goals in 46 matches and conceding 54.
Writer’s View
Blackburn Rovers are not good enough going forward and are simply putrid defensively, especially in transition where the team suffers the most.
Many may point to the sheer number of opportunities being created each game, but these attempts on goal are low-quality chances. Saturday’s trip to Loftus Road may be the final nail in the coffin of Tomasson’s time at Ewood Park.
