Looking at past seasons we need around 75 points for a play-off place and 85 points for an automatic promotion place in League 2 . With 36 games left if you divide that into four quarters of nine games we need 18 points from 27 for a play off place and 21 points from 27 for an automatic spot for each of those quarters. An automatic spot may be challenging but a play off place is certainly possible and that is where most of us hoped or expected us to be pre-season. So we are not far off.
Whilst the leakage of goals is disappointing the premise has always been to score more. Whilst attempts at goal may be a questionable statistic the more perceptive measurement of a teams attacking intent and delivery is shots on target. Argyle have the second highest shots on target in League 2 and are in the top 10% of the 91 League teams. When you look at the shots on target per game around 90% of teams fail to make 5 per game. Argyle regularly exceed that.
As may have observed it is not so much the creation of chances that is the problem it is their conversion. The injuries to key forwards is a major factor in the failure to convert. Most of those injuries seem to be to players who did not have a proper pre-season. The constant changes to the striking combination up front is disruptive to the link up play in the final third. The result is a tendency to overplay as runs are not made and intuition and instinct are absent. We seem to have a lot of goal bound shots blocked as a result as we give defenders a chance to recover. Danny Mayor, as glorious as he has been in gliding past players, is particularly guilty of this.
It is not so much a plan B, although a variance in the distribution from Palmer in the first third would be welcome, but a better execution of plan A in the final third. Much work on the training round is needed. Lowe has a good pedigree in the art of forward play but our current crop of forwards still have a lot to learn to make the system effective. Do that and we have every chance of making the play-offs and if we did I'd really fancy our chances. I'm in.
