Owatalk

• Home
• Contact
• About

A drawn round

Last week's A-League's round 14 had all the matches drawn with just four goals scored and this was the first time in the short A-League history that all the matches for a particular round have been drawn.

Previously the highest number of drawn matches in a round has been three and this has happened three times before, twice this season in the first two rounds and once in the inaugural season in round 2.

The drawn round means that the number of draws this season so far is 23 out of 56 matches played so far which is just over 40% of the matches. To me that looks like a big percentage of drawn matches but I think it is to be expected from teams which are nearly of equal strength.

A quick comparison with the English Premier League will show that so far this season there have been 37 draws which is 26% of all the matches played. It will be interesting to see the comparison at the end of the season and if I get the time I could add some graphs to the analysis.

The draws meant that the league ladder did not change at all in terms of positions which I think could benefit the teams near the bottom of the ladder as the points difference has remained the same.

For Melbourne Victory, unfortunately instead of seeing more goals, what we are witnessing are more red cards. The match against Wellington Phoenix was a good chance to get all three points and overtake Sydney FC on the ladder but with Kevin Muscat's red card, the task was made harder and it now looks like its going to be tough reaching the finals.

Last week I said that it was important to get four points from the matches against Phoenix and Perth Glory and now it looks very hard because in order to do that the team has to win in Perth and thats not going to be easy against a resurgent Glory team which may include returning Stan Lazaridis.

Thankfully Muscat will be back for the crunch match against Adelaide at the Dome and assuming there are no reds in Perth, Victory could have a strong line-up for the grand final rematch.

Post a comment:

Name

(required)

E-Mail

(required, but not published)

Website

(optional)

Comment
Enter Code


Notify me of follow-up comments via e-mail