There is going to be a fair amount of expected goals (xG) chat in this piece. So for those not familiar with the performance metric, I'll leave it to former Chelsea head coach Thomas Tuchel to broadly explain.
"You can lose games in football by being unlucky and you can win games with luck and the result does very often not reflect what happened on the pitch," Tuchel said in an interview with Sky Sports last year. "So expected goals gives you a clear view: how many chances you allow, how many quality shots you allow. It's good to have that figure.
"As with every number, the more you look into it you can find your benchmarks. So we know how over a season or half a season what the level of Expected Goals is if you play in a certain structure. If this is suddenly higher we ask ourselves, 'What's happening within the structure?'
