Birmingham City have had a start to the season far from what they would have expected it to be. They sit 16th in the EFL Championship currently and their unimpressive run of form has extended into having no wins in the last five matches.
Their attack has not been able to hide the flaws in their leaky defence at the back and even with some talented attacking players at their disposal, Birmingham have failed to make an impact.
They have scored a total of 10 goals till now with Scott Hogan being the highest scorer in the squad with three goals. The Irish forward has been one of the best players in the ranks.
We look at his attacking stats from the league.
The 29-year-old has played in a lot of different positions on the pitch depending upon the system used, sometimes as a lone forward in 3-4-3 or even in a pair in 3-4-1-2 both on the right and left. But quite surprisingly, the forward has spent the majority of his time exactly near the centre circle- the red area in the above image shows that as a result of the fact that Birmingham have spent most of the time defending in their own half. However, in attack, Hogan has played effectively throughout the attacking third of the pitch, drifting out to both the wings on occasions, mostly towards the right-hand side. He has been a lot dynamic in the final third of the pitch and has dropped deep quite often to help play the ball forward.
He has seen very little of the ball at his feet with a total of 75 passes completed in ten matches. However, having a passing accuracy of 72% is impressive to some extent. Hogan averages a total of 11 passes with 21 touches of the ball per 90. He has played a bunch of passes near the centre circle, all in progressive motion while the others have been in the attacking third, most of them being short passes. Hogan does possess a very high xT from the majority of the passes he has attempted, sometimes as high as 0.0460. The Irish striker has also some dangerous balls into the box for his strike partners to attack but has not registered an assist yet.
Maximum of his shots have been taken inside the box, while he has scored three goals, being the highest scorer in the team. Hogan has been averaging a goal every 207 minutes so far. The 29-year-old has been a complete forward scoring from both his right and left feet as well as his head one time each. All of his goals have come from inside the box but he has failed to be really clinical in front of the goal with just 38% of his shots on target.
His positioning has been really impressive, as he has found himself in the correct positions in the box most of the time in spite of spending most of the time deep in the midfield. His rank of 89th percentile in the league of xG per shot speaks for the same. He also ranks 85th percentile in the league for accumulated xG per 90. However, Hogan has not been a great dribbler with both metrics of dribbles attempted and successful dribbles less than the league median.
Despite having some flaws in some areas, Scott Hogan has been the most in-form striker among the ranks of Birmingham City. To stay up in the second division yet again, for another season, Hogan needs to fire him a lot more for the club.
