Today is the time for me to delve into a player playing in Denmark. There is a variety of talent in Denmark and I hadn’t taken a good look on my website at this league or the talents in it. I’m having a looking at this article at Nordsjællands’s Simon Adringra (19 years), focusing on his dribbles and shots.
In this analysis, I will zoom in on his attacking decisive actions during the 2021/2022 Danish Superliga in Denmark with the focus on dribbles and shooting stats from Wyscout/InStat data and then concentrating on some video fragments from Wyscout as well. In my dataset, I’ve chosen for all players playing on the striker position and have played over 600 minutes in the Superliga season. This leaves me with 26 players in my dataset to further go into the data analysis. I’m aware of the fact that often drifts to the left, but I wanted to analyse him in comparison to other strikers as he has played there a lot too.
Dribbles
In the image above you can see two metrics combined in a scatterplot. We look at the dribbles per 90 and the successful dribbles in percentages to look at two things. How many dribbles per 90 have been conducted per 90, and how high is the percentage of success at a particular player.
When we look at Adingra we can conclude that he has 9,92 dribbles per 90, which is above the average among strikers of 4,06. When we look at the percentage of dribbles that are successful we see that Adingra has a success rate of 50,91% which is just above the average of 43,94%.
I want to know where his dribbles have occurred during the season. I’m not as interested in the carries and where he finished the dribbling, but from which positions he started the dribbles. In the image below I’ve looked at the starting position of all dribbles he has attempted during the season.
As described above, you can see all the starting locations of the 98 dribbles Adingra had in the season. Of those 78 dribbles, 50,91% were successful, that’s roughly 50 dribbles that are successful. He has the most dribbles on the left side, with a fair number of dribbles starting in the middle third, but most of them in the attacking third. Further, we can assess that a lot of his dribbles start on the left of which we will give two examples below.
In the two videos above in the game against Midtjylland and Silkeborg, you see Adingra making a dribble with the starting location on the left. He then proceeds to make a 1v1 action and invert in order to find a shooting opportunity for himself or to find teammates who are having a better chance of creating something or having a go on goal themselves.
Shooting
I’ve added the metrics above to the profile to assess Adingra, because he has been instrumental in being a threat in front of goal. That’s why I’m looking at his numbers in shots per 90 and how many threat does shot pose – what is the probability of a shot being converted into a goal. This can be measured with the expected goals per 90 metric.
Adingra does quite well in these metrics as you can see in his position in the scatterplot. He has 3,34 shots per 90 and 0,29 expected goals per 90.
In the beeswarmplot above, you can see 6 metrics to assess a striker. It tells us how good Adingra is compared to his peers in each of these metrics. He performs quite well overall, but in the Non-penalty goals per 90, goal conversion and xG per 90 – he does very well.
The shootings stats in themselves show us the number of shots or type of shots or anything data related to the shots. Adingra does very well in those terms, but in the next part of the analysis, we want to look at where the shots actually came from and what that does tell about the position Adingra attempts to score a goal. Does he generate his xG from a few big chances? Or does he accumulate his xG by shooting a lot of low probable chances?
In the image below, we can see all of Adingra’s shots taken in the Superliga 2020/2021 season. There are 37 shots of which 5 have gone in goal which is a conversation rate of 13,51%. The image shows us the shot locations of the last 37 shots during the season and I will attempt to analyse which are most frequent.
Simon Adingra has scored 5 goals in the Superliga 2021-2022 season so far and had 37 shots in total. That is a goal conversion rate of 13,51%. From those 37 shots, 48,6% went on target. In the visual above you can see the shot locations of every shot attempted in the current season. In red, you see the goals and in grey the shots.
What we can conclude from this visual is that all of the goals are scored within the penalty area on the right side. We do see that he often attempts from the left side but isnt successful from that flank.
In the videos below I will have a look at the five goals scored by Adingra, showing how he preys on mistakes made by the opposition and will punish them.
In the video above you see how Nordsjælland has a counter attack but only Adingra is up top. His pace and the space to chase the last defender, gives him an advantage and he wins the ball. After he has done that he sets himself up nicely and shoots the ball calmly past the goalkeeper.
In the video above we see Nordsjælland in a smiliar situation from the first video, as we see them starting a counter attack. This time the ball isn’t directly played to Adingra, but he makes a third man run, which proves worthy in the end. He gets the ball in the central zones and has time to finish in the penalty area. He scored at the near post.
In this game from Nordsjælland we see that the opposition doesn’t deal with a high ball from Nordsjælland. Miscommunication between the central defenders and the goalkeeper, means that Adingra can profit from the error and he does this successfuly, scoring another goal after an error.
A very similar situation to the previous goal. He manages to stay close to the central defender and scan the space between the two central defenders. In doing so he manages to get to the ball quickly when the error comes and ultimately has a good finish which beats the goalkeeper: goal.
In the video above we Nordsjælland in possession of the ball when they begin their attack. The long ball from the keeper is recovered by the opposition but they are not aware of how high Nordsjælland’s attackers are. Again Adingra, makes the most of the error and has an opportunity to score – and does this brilliantly.
Final thoughts
Nordsjælland always has very interesting prospects and the talent is undeniable. In the case of Adingra I wanted to see how this attacker managed to use the space with dribbling and how his end product is. I think there is a huge talent to seen in this footballer, but he needs to work on efficiency of his actions. He often gets caught in wanting too much with his dribbles or his end product lacks the comfort of scoring goals. Yes he does score goals after errors, but he finds himself in situations where he might score more. Even though he is outperforming his xG of 3,27 and 5 goals – but this can be even better for the young attacker.
