was trawling through some statistical analysis as usual and thought some would appreciate this basic look at running stats.
The table was designed to highlight Lallana primarily, and it's certainly interesting from a Liverpool perspective how similar he is to Henderson, both here and in other stats and general style. Lot of comments about how the loss of Henderson for those 3 games had a big effect on Liverpool's performances so Lallana would seem a good signing from that perspective.
But what really stood out to me was Yaya Toure. People have commented before how he can often come across as lazy in games and these stats back that up. His number of sprints is lower even than central defenders who you expect would only sprint in defensive situations, and not in both attack and defence as other positions would. On the other hand, he still manages to appear in the top 20 for distance covered; which would definitely suggest someone putting in great effort to get around. I suggest a big part of this is simply down to the physicality of Toure, he is a player who is going to among the fittest in the league, as well as one of the fastest runners (note I use runners to differentiate from sprinting). His avg speed seems low, but when we take into account how his low number of sprints dragging that down it's likely that his running speed is amongst the highest in the league.
Thus we can have a picture of Toure as someone for whom the time and speed spent simply running is great, but when it comes down to the key movements, the sprints he seems quite lazy indeed.
