Maybe "misleading" isn't the most accurate word to describe it but showing that we have a higher xG than Villa makes it look like we a) were productive (quantity and quality) in attack and b) were unlucky not to win. All that isn't a good representation of the game I saw, apart from maybe being productive in quantity but you get that from the number of shots which is just as worthless because only 4 of 28 shots were on goal.
I get what you mean, and it is an interesting one. To our eyes we want to see some big chances created, restricting the opponents to none/few, dominating possession, territory and some entertainment thrown in in the form of dribbles, flicks, turns and nice skills etc. That's a classical good performance.
When it comes down to it xG doesn't really give a crap about any of that I suppose. It's just really trying to rate the likelihood of goals being scored by the teams and that's where we are today to a large degree. It's interesting how it throws up stuff like that sometimes. It could even make us think about what actually is a good performance, providing the numbers are correct of course.
I remember the Everton 3-3 game from last season where we did a lot of what you really want to see right but ended up about even on the real scoreboard and the xG as we made some really big mistakes in defence, gifting Everton some big chances when they didn't really do much all match and we played classically well for a lot of the game. That was a bit of a wild one, and I remember some saying it showed some flaws xG when to me it actually showed why it was a good result predictor based on what happened even though you couldn't but feel a bit robbed. We just made those massive errors, and they didn't really earn them through good play or endeavour of their own.
Today, I don't think we played well as a team, and I also think it's interesting when a game has penalties in them too. Michael Caley, one of the big proponents of xG on Twitter, and one of the first guys to run a model publicly lists penalties separately which I find interesting and often with merit. Think Fbref show non-penalty xG as a separate thing too if you delve into their numbers? Not all penalties are equal after all. Some are awarded when a defender handballs it on the line to prevent a certain goal following a good attacking move, some in the corner of the box when there wasn't much threat, some are controversial decisions by refs etc.
All penalties end up with the same chance of scoring from12 yards but we definitely didn't get there the same way. Who knows, one day in the future when they think they can assess things accurately we might even see teams penalised differently for the fouls they commit in the box based on the actual amount of danger at the time?
Anyway, so today we had that penalty to throw in there with the xG too, which came out of not much and if deducting it, which I'm not even sure we should do entirely we actually had lower xG than they did over the course of the match. So yes, there's that too.
Football of course is a low scoring game anyway with variance so the best way to play is to play in a way that you pummel the opponent so that even if things don't quite go your way that day then you still get a narrow win instead of maybe the comfortable or handsome win that you feel you deserved. We were absolutely nowhere near doing that today and cannot exactly feel robbed. If you narrowly "win" the xG or narrowly "lose" it you could very much win, lose or draw. At home to Villa with our resources we'd like to think we'd win both the xG and the actual scoreboard battle by some way.
