Ghost Assists
The vicissitudes of chance creation
Kyle Edwards has never really caught a break in his Ipswich career. His injuries seemed to coincide with periods where the team was in flux, his promising substitute appearances generally came when the starting eleven was too settled to admit him. It has also sometimes felt like he had this uncanny knack of contributing to goals in ways that never boosted his personal numbers. Runs that drove us up the pitch where someone else got to make the final pass, shots on to the post that dropped invitingly to team mates, mazy dribbles that got him chopped down and a penalty opportunity for a team mate.
Kyle's first telling contribution in an Ipswich shirt was in such a vein. Away at Wycombe, with the game at 1-1, just after half time Edwards stood up the opposition full back, jinked his way past him to the byline and put a left foot cross into a dangerous area. Wycombe keeper David Stockdale flapped at it and the ball dropped to Macauley Bonne, who trapped it, spun and scored from close range. The circumstance of the goal was largely Edwards, but that brush with Stockdale's gloves robbed him of any numerical credit, as he would be for Wes Burns’ late winner against Portsmouth a year later.
Ghost Assists.1 Goals created by no-one, opportunities conjured into existence by unknown forces, the immaculate conception of goals. Ghost Assists are more frequent than we sometimes think. Across Ipswich's 17 league goals this season, only 10 resulted in any credit for an act creativity. Take Saturday. To the untrained eye, Brandon Williams' late equaliser came directly from Leif Davis' well-judged back post volley pass. Unfortunately for our regular assist king it took a flick off Sorba Thomas on its way to Brandon's blonde bonce.
Davis, currently sat on a frankly pathetic (by his standards) 2 formal goal contributions, is our ghost assist MVP this season. His pass inside unlocked QPR, but Chaplin’s brief entanglement with Steve Cook meant no notch in the "A" column. His curved ball down the line sent Kayden Jackson away for our first at Leeds but only the hapless Joe Rodon's name goes on the ledger for that one. Against Cardiff, it was his short corner routine that caught Manolis Siopis in two minds, resulting in a fortuitous deflection to Fred (Again). That was one of two Ghost Assists that day. Omari Hutchinson probably has even more reason to feel aggrieved that the history books won’t put a scratch next to his name to commemorate him burning Mark McGuinness alive.
Assists are an American invention. The first football league to keep statistics on goal creation was the old North American Soccer League (Go Cosmos!) in 1968. Not until the 1990s did the stat travel across the Atlantic, when La Liga started marking asistencias de gol. The Premier League only began keeping assist numbers in 2006, inaugurating its Playmaker of the Season award to recognise top assisters in 2017. They are a curious statistical category. Most statistics in football are ephemeral in nature. People capture all sorts of intricate data about football matches, but most are only partially in the public domain and don’t stay there long. The average football fan does not know or care about George Hirst’s average sprint distance per 90, being largely content with the summary headline that “he really put a shift in today”. When George’s career finishes, his Wikipedia entry won’t feature his aerial duels won and the statistical regularity with which he threw centre backs around like rag dolls will be lost to the sands of time.
What it will include is his goal record. The ability to force the bloody thing between the sticks and over the line remains a concrete fact about a footballer’s career. Tap-ins, composed finishes, flying headers and thunderbastards, they all count the same and we know where we are with goals. But assists increasingly occupy a sort of middle ground. They aren’t solely the preserve of the data whizzkids. They’ve become award worthy, part of the career headline, part of how you understand a lifetime of attacking output. When the Messi and Ronaldo fanboys throw their stat graphics at each other, goals and assists will be there.2 Sometimes they now even get squashed together as “goal contributions”, elevating the passer to the same level as passee.
Yet assists also aren’t nearly so concrete as a goal. They’re messier as a “contribution”. All goals involve the same most difficult act in football, scoring, but not all assists involve an act of game-breaking creativity. In the same game that Kyle Edwards got no credit for carrying the ball 50 yards and tearing his man to shreds, Sam Morsy posted a plus one in his assists column for gently rolling the ball sideways five yards so Bersant Celina could take a potshot. On Tuesday night Marcus Harness may have humbly declined much credit for playing the short pass for Jack Taylor’s gloriously savage arced long ranger, but there’ll be no asterisks when we’re totting up his “numbers” in May.
Whilst some stats get padded with mundane moments, other would-be assisters can get stuck in ruts not of their own making. Andre Dozzell’s final season in Ipswich colours featured just one assist (James Norwood heading in his free kick in the 2-1 win at Accrington) but a whopping 56 chances created. He enjoyed a punishing 1.8% conversion rate from his passes. Where Dozzell ended up with a reputation for never doing enough to affect the game, Edwards has got a reputation for having no end product. Perhaps both are slight victims of the tyranny of numbers, coming out the wrong side of a type of statistic that only really acquires solidity from a distance.
Leif Davis, of course, will be fine. So prolific is his chance creation, so perceptive his passing, he doesn’t seem to need his ghost assists to keep racking up those numbers. I might be the only one adding his four ghost assists to his two classic assists (maybe Leif is counting too), but all those Premier League scouts will surely have his “key pass” metrics memorised by January. Ultimately you keep doing the right things in football and someone will reward you. Still, I’d like to think all these phantasmic contributions will stay in all our mental account books, beyond what makes it into the official numbers.
Leif Davis v. Huddersfield Town
Minutes 90
Goals 0
Assists 0
Accurate passes 38/51 (75%)
Chances created 5
Shots 1
Expected Assists 0.28
Touches 74
Passes into final third 6
Accurate crosses 2/9 (22%)
Accurate long balls 3/4 (75%)
Dispossessed 0
Tackles 0
Clearances 2
Interceptions 1
Recoveries 2
Dribbled past 2
Ground duels won 0/4 (0%)
Aerial duels won 2/2 (100%)
Was fouled 0
Fouls committed 2
Author’s own coinage.
FIFA even went back in time to retrospectively award World Cup Finals assists and now officially list Pelé as holding the all-time tournament record - 10 in 1954.
Very good Jack.