One of the numbers that stuck out to me when I calculated the data in Attacking, Fast and Slow, was the slow pace of Tottenham’s attack. We know Pochettino values winning the ball back high up the pitch and launching fast-paced counter-attacks, so why isn’t that clearer from the data? In the light of Jake Meador‘s piece today which had a few commenters quite rightly puzzling over my numbers, I thought I’d look deeper and work out where the bugs were in my approach, and how better to present the data so it captures the nuances in Tottenham’s attack.

First off, there were issues with my data, and I’ve added a note and updated numbers to the the last post. Luckily, most of my conclusions remain correct (and in fact the correlation of attack duration from year to year is even stronger in the fixed data), but one of the big movers are indeed Tottenham, who now reside in the bottom half for attack duration.

Let’s look in more detail at exactly how quick each team’s attacks are. Here I’ve broken attacks down into 5 second buckets up to 30s, and sorted by the 0-5s bucket:

Team	0-5s	5-10s	10-15s	15-20s	20-25s	25-30s	30s+
Southampton	47	22	20	13	10	4	28
Tottenham Hotspur	40	20	21	15	18	11	29
Arsenal	39	21	32	25	17	12	35
Liverpool	38	27	16	9	11	7	38
Aston Villa	34	17	9	7	8	5	23
Leicester City	34	30	28	21	8	2	20
Norwich City	33	23	12	16	13	7	29
Crystal Palace	33	21	19	13	9	4	17
Manchester City	33	24	30	16	14	13	48
Bournemouth	30	22	10	10	6	7	22
Watford	30	22	21	11	11	5	25
Chelsea	28	17	23	11	10	11	29
West Bromwich Albion	25	14	14	8	5	5	20
West Ham United	25	27	15	16	8	9	26
Sunderland	24	9	14	9	11	6	18
Everton	23	16	15	18	7	10	29
Newcastle United	19	23	14	10	7	9	23
Swansea City	18	26	8	17	15	8	32
Stoke City	16	14	15	6	14	6	20
Manchester United	16	14	10	8	9		34

And here’s what that looks like stacked up together:

Well that matches our intuitions much better – the two teams we know share Pochettino’s desire for quick attacks off turnovers are right there are the top, with more shots within 5s than anyone else, and with 10s numbers that stack up pretty well too. I initially worried that these numbers might just be a side-effect of weird corner numbers, but Tottenham and Southampton sit 8th and 9th in corner count.

If you look at Tottenham’s numbers in the aggregate, they’re slowed down by patient build-up play. Despite the contrast in the chart above, they can be similar to Man Utd – moving the ball from side to side, waiting for an opportunity to open up. If you remember my passing gains chart, Tottenham’s passing on average in the centre of the field is backwards. They probe forwards on the wings, recycle backwards into the centre. Eventually this leads to shots that have taken a lot of time and space in the build-up, and I’ll certainly look for better ways to categorise this. But hopefully with the approach above, people are at least now seeing the Tottenham they know and love.