Number crunching as Wrexham prepare for the Championship

I was young and carefree and clearly hadn’t had that very British fear of numbers properly drummed into me in secondary school.

Anyway, half the course was pure maths, which was all Greek letters and balancing equations. It was as much fun as it sounds.

Frankly, I didn’t know my epsilon from my elbow.

The other half was statistics, though, and I enjoyed that. It felt grounded in the real world in a way that working out the value of θ to the power of ɛ̝ to fifteen decimal places didn’t. (That last character is epsilon, by the way. I just wanted to prove that I do know what it looks like really. I just don’t know what its value is.)

Stats felt useful though, and the data revolution in football has made it even more relevant for me.

The problem is that clubs are rightly protective of their proprietary data, harvested painstakingly by their analysts, and won’t share their findings with some bloke who wants to reveal it all in the local paper.

Likewise, if you want to look under the hood at the sort of fun statistics that really tell you something about your team, you’re going to have to pay through the nose for it.

Meaningful free data doesn’t really exist at the levels we’ve been playing at. You really need to be playing at a higher level than League One.

Hang on, that’ll be us next season!

It will be fascinating to be able to really drill down into the numbers to assess our performances, not least because we succeeded last season in a manner which confounded most fans.

As fans, we are preconditioned to expect certain things of teams. If a side is doing well, it will be playing free-flowing football, dazzling all and sundry with its verve and creative qualities. Likewise, a relegation-haunted side will struggle to get out of its own half, and take the battering it deserves.

Both these things can be true, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are in every case.

Even teams that are cast adrift at the bottom of the table don’t tend to turn up and roll over every weekend. Our famous 6-5 win over Dover Athletic illustrated that point perfectly.

Instead, they tend to underperform at both pointy ends of the pitch. Again, this was something Dover proved, up to a point. Obviously, scoring five goals at the home ground of a side which was gunning for the title was an aberration.

However, they lived down to expectations when they didn’t have the ball: the way they capitulated in the last 20 minutes when they were put under pressure illustrated this.

I’ve seen plenty of cup ties where Wrexham have looked very impressive against top level opposition and even enjoying more of a share of the game, only to lose heavily – 5-0 and 3-0 home losses to Everton in the League Cup, separated by 12 years, spring to mind.

We were stunningly good when we faced Sir Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United in 1995, took the lead and were one of just two sides to score more than one goal in a game at Old Trafford that season. However, we lost 5-2.

Superior sides might not dominate their inferiors, but they will have extra quality in attack to take fuller advantage of their opportunities, and better players at the back to ensure their opponents don’t capitalise on possession and pressure.

To win a game of football, you don’t have to be spectacular; you just have to score one or more goals than your opponents. That’s x ≥ y+1 where x is how many goals you score and y is how many goals the opponents score, of course.

Last season Wrexham exemplified this point. As the season progressed, we became increasingly workmanlike, grinding out results. Lots of people I know started to enter panic mode, concerned about where the panache of our early season performances had gone.

The simplistic answer was that they began to dissipate when Jack Marriott’s superb run of early season form ended with a freak injury. Shorn of the player who was consistently putting the cherry on top of our performances, we had to find a new way to win.

Luckily, Phil Parkinson had been there before. We weren’t letting goals in, and under his guidance we developed a way of winning which wasn’t necessarily pretty but was exceptionally effective.

The stats show us that our success was based not on free scoring strikers, but on a terrific defence. Our xg conceded was 46.3, but in fact we only let in 34 goals.

Furthermore, only one side in the top four divisions last season – Burnley – had a defence which exceeded expectations more than ours did. The differential of nearly 12 goals which we were expected to concede but didn’t happen, was bettered only by the Clarets.

Parkinson knows how to handle a promotion campaign, and as the numbers show, the key attribute that helps you get there is ability to adapt to the standards required.