Triples and Quads

On spotting all-round dominant attacking contributors

Back in December, Jake Entwistle, of ScoutedFtbl, drew my eye to a way of finding players who are pretty reliably an all-round threat.

He pointed out on X (The Everything Platform) that at the time, Antoine Semenyo (soon to sign for Man City) was the one of only two players in the top five leagues to break a particular group of stats - 30+ shots, 30+ take-ons completed (i.e. successful dribbles against his man), and 30+ aerial duels won.

It’s a way of encapsulating players who consistently come out as physically superior to their opponents. They’re not often beaten in the air or the ground, and they have end product. It’s building on a 4-stat filter that Scouted posted about the year before - at the time, that one picked out Bryan Mbeumo, Hugo Ekitike, Semenyo, Elliot Anderson, Morgan Gibbs-White and Charles De Ketelaere - pretty special players, all (more on this latter quad in a moment).

Basically - this isn’t going to spot you players who have gone under the scouting radar. But it’s a good validation of the eye test. Players who are all-round dominators of their league. They can get up in the air, they can beat their man, and they can find a shot.

So: which players match up well in the Championship?

I’ve plotted the top 25 players here for the ‘golden triple’ - aerials, take-ons and shots. Players don’t have to pass a threshold in all three to hit this chart, but they have to be posting big numbers overall.

McPake is miles away on his own at the top, due to the sheer number of take-ons he wins. He gets shots too, but he doesn’t get many aerial duels.

Dan O’Reilly, on the other hand, is second overall because of the volume of aerial duels he wins.

But only four players in the Champ break Jake’s Golden Triple threshold: Findlay Marshall at Arbroath, Andy Tod at Dunfermline, Jamie Gullan at St. Johnstone, and our very own Tony Watt. That’s pretty impressive to have four players in the league beat the level. Not one player in the Premier has broken it yet this season. Mikael Mandron of our cup opponents, St. Mirren, has broken the Aerial and Shot level, but is only halfway to the take-on cut-off. Closest is Amar Fatah at Dundee United, who needs two more aerial duels.

Things get a little bit more interesting, though, when you add in a fourth metric, in line with Scouted’s original set.

Remember, this quad is good at finding players who are demonstrably all-round threats. The players it finds - in the Big Five leagues at least - are exceptionally talented threats. Who wouldn’t want Semenyo or Anderson?

The final metric they include is ‘key passes’ - passes that create a shooting opportunity for team-mates (whether or not they actually get a shot away. So in the top two divisions, who hits at least 20 in all four of these numbers? Dominates in the air, can beat a man, can find a shot, and can create for a team-mate?

Tony Watt has the highest overall haul of these four combined over the season. Also on the list, coming in at number three? Harry Milne. In between the two is Braga, showing yet again how well Hearts are doing this season.

I said right at the start of the season that I hoped that Tony Watt would provide an all-round attacking input - not a replacement for BBG’s goals, but a player who would link up the play, stretch opposition, and bring team-mates in. One of Ben Taylor’s mantras in his book Thinking Basketball, which is very much worth a read, is that scoring is redistributed, not replaced. And this season, Watt has shown the truth of that in football.

Gullan is one of the best players in the Champ - he won the player of the month award for February - and the fact that he’s on the list rather than McPake shows what a rounded player he is too. Nicolas Raskin, whose heatmap is very similar to Oisin Smyth’s, is one of the deeper players still to make the grade.

I don’t really have a big point today. But I do want to draw attention to how pivotal Tony Watt has been for Thistle this season. He has brought an all-round threat to the team that we didn’t really have before, and has proven to be an excellent piece of recruitment.

Let’s hope he brings that to bear on Sunday!