Walcott to be fair has got 8 goals and 11 assists to his name in the prem, I don't watch him week in week out but I'm fairly certain he is better than the general opinion of him on here. It's the same problem with Lennon playing for England that the team never plays to a fast wingers strengths.
I watch him week in, week out. (Unless Arsenal and Spurs play at the same time, in that case I watch Arsenal on football first and MotD anyway.)
Firstly, I'm going to do the lazy thing and show you this:
The huge issue I have with those stats is that the points part of it is heavily weighted towards those that play more minutes... Walcott got 13 points, of those 3 points were from successful dribbles per game... Now that is sort of fair because at least that is on a per game basis... That said, the Ox had no fudging chance because he comes on for 20-30 minutes because Wenger doesn't like fans booing when the Ox got taken off after 60 minutes. (His original plan was to sub him for Henry, but Henry went back to America.)
Anyway, my point is, the Ox still fudging won that section and he never plays 90 minutes. His dribbles per game should probably be doubled, but that was the fairer of Walcott's points. (I'm not sure how often Johnson plays a half, so his stats for that might be better than Walcott's, I just don't know how much that should be tweaked...)
But I'll give Walcott that one. He does generally kick the ball downfield and chase after it.
So that's 3 points for Walcott that are semi fair.. The other 10 are complete gonads.
He gets 5 points for scoring 8 goals in 2552 minutes.
Johnson scored 6 in 1122.
Young scored 5 in 1393.
Hell, Lennon scored 3 in 1188 and Lennon isn't even a goalscoring forward winger, put him at the front of a 4-3-3 with as little to do defensively as Walcott does and Lennon would get a lot more goals... Goals aren't even his game.
But the point of this is to say, ignore Walcott's 5 points there, they have goals per minute later and he doesn't get any points... The Ox comes 2nd after Johnson.
Walcott's other 5 points are for his clear cut chances created, again, he has played double the time as a bunch of other people...
Lennon created the same amount of chances, despite playing far less than half the minutes Walcott played...
Again, the next line down is clear cut chances per minute and Walcott gets no fudging points for that either.
So those stats make him look good, despite Lennon and Johnson completely tinkling all over him even though the scoring was loaded against them.
Now, let's look at the stats themselves... Out of those 7 wingers, Walcott has the lowest crossing accuracy... Half Lennon and Johnson's. The Ox has 23% to Walcott's 13%.
Walcott has the worst pass completion rate... He plays for fudging Arsenal, so him having 10% lower pass success than the Ox again shows how someone else does in the same team.
I'm done with that little stats table thing now.
Walcott's passing is fudging awful, his crossing is fudging awful too. (Then again, that might come under passing...)
So what can Walcott do? Walcott can run quickly as long as he doesn't have to control the ball and he can shoot with the inside of his foot.
Walcott is only a threat to teams that leave him space to run into... So if a team isn't playing a high line or they aren't throwing crazy numbers forward, Walcott is ineffective.
His assists? A few of them have been sidefoot passes to RVP that went about 3-4 feet and RVP shot to score. But fine, assists are assists, Barca players get assists for passing to Messi even if he dribbles around entire teams afterwards. 3 of his assists came in the 7-1 against Blackburn though. They're obviously still assists, but they were against a 10 man Blackburn side that got totally fudged.
His goals though come back to what I was saying about him only having one scenario in which he can perform.
He scored 2 goals against us, this was after his own fans spent the first half booing him... But they were late goals, we were chasing the game, he had a lot of space... He scored the last 2 goals of that game, both times he ran into space.
Walcott has some fundamental flaws, his control, passing, touch, long range shooting, etc mean he's very very limited. Now, if you're 2-0 up and the opposition is throwing a ton of people forward, then yeah, that's his zone... The problem with that is, what good is a player that's only effective when you're 2-0 up?
He can't win 1v1s with full backs unless he can boot the ball past the defender and run after it. He can't run quickly with the ball, he needs the ball passed way in front of him to be able to use his pace properly, he can't cross or pass... Oh and he doesn't like defending.
So let's look at some stats one more time:
PL Goals: 8
Shots: 76
So that's 1 goal per 9.5 shots.
Just to compare that with Lennon...
PL goals: 3
Shots: 18
That's 1 goal every 6 shots.
Walcott:
Key passes per game: 1.2
Crosses completed: 18
Crosses attempted: 134
(1 per 7.444)
Lennon:
Key passes per game: 1.7
Crosses completed: 14
Crosses attempted: 54
(1 per 3.857)
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The only way Walcott could be any better than the general opinion of people on here would be if people think he's worse than Downing...
Oh wait... Downing has a better pass completion rate, doesn't lose the ball as often, has better crossing accuracy, creates more chances per minute, has created the same amount of clear cut chances, creates more clear cut chances per minute...
Walcott doesn't even look good when compared to 0 goals, 0 assists Downing... I suppose Walcott doesn't take penalties and miss them?
Hell, let's go one step further.
Remember the stats from earlier? Let's compare them to some less prominent wingers.
Pass Completion: Every single winger has a better pass completion than Walcott. He is 11th out of 11.
Minutes per loss of possession: Every single winger has better minutes per loss of possession than Walcott... He is 11th out of 11 for the second time out of two.
Successful dribbles per game... Out of the 4 new wingers (Osman, Dyer, Sinclair and Pilkington), Walcott is right in the middle of the 5. Overall he is 4th out of 11.
Crossing accuracy... He is joint worst with Dyer.
Minutes per chance created: He is the worst out of the original list, but Sinclair is worse, he is equal to Osman, so joint second worst there.
Clear cut chances created is gonads because he has played so many minutes, but he's joint first with Lennon and Downing, just for the record.
Minutes per clear cut chance created: This is a bit fairer, he is 4th out of the original list and none of the new wingers do any better than that. (Osman has 0 clear cut chances created....)
Goals: This is gonads due to time played. But he's joint first with Pilkington and Sinclair.
Minutes per goal: This is fairer, he is 4th for this, which shows how insightful the "goals" section is without taking minutes played into consideration.
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Ok, I'm really done now. Walcott is absolute brick. I'd rather have Richards playing right midfield than Walcott. In fairness, I'd rather have Baines playing left midfield than Downing too.
