Nick Pope daftness continues | OneFootball

Nick Pope signed for Newcastle United exactly 29 months ago yesterday.

One of numerous incredible Eddie Howe signings, the England international costing only £10m from Burnley, as the pressure was on them to sell star players after relegation at the end of the 2021/22 season.

In my lifetime of watching Newcastle United from the 1970s onwards, for me, Shay Given is my number one NUFC keeper, he was brilliant. Given was superb and twice his peers voted him into the PFA team of the season.

Speaking of which, when at Burnley, Nick Pope was also in 2019/20, given that accolade, his Premier League peers voting him into the PFA team of the season.

On everything I have seen these past 29 months, Nick Pope is easily my number two choice behind Shay Given, as the next best Newcastle United keeper I have ever seen.

Anyway, what sparked this article, is that I have seen the Nick Pope daftness resurface.

I have only just caught up with it but it was stuff on social media, where some Newcastle United fans were going really bizarre and over the top on Nick Pope in a negative sense, with regard to the recent three wins in a row!

You won’t be surprised to hear that it centred around his ability/inability on the ball.

Just to remind you, Nick Pope kept two clean sheets and only conceded one goal (which he had no chance with at Forest) in five hours of football, as United defeated Chelsea, Arsenal and Forest.

There were some really spurious stats used, which to me, didn’t take in at all the overall context.

This was especially so with the Arsenal game, where I’m sure you will recall, Isak scored that glorious early goal and then as the match went on, United were happy to see the win out, defend in numbers and hit on the break etc etc.

Naturally, this meant that as Arsenal pressed high and desperately sought an equaliser, Nick Pope repeatedly found himself having to kick long. Where pretty much every time Alexander Isak would be alone, or sometimes nobody at all.

So the stats that were showing how poor Nick Pope supposedly had been in terms of his distribution, were laughable. It was a match where he time after time had no choice but to kick it long, with clearly minimal chance of finding a Newcastle player.

In that game especially, the Newcastle keeper was guaranteed to have a poor ‘distribution’ stat BUT that does not mean Nick Pope was poor!

Clearly this is an instance where using that particular kind of stat against Nick Pope to ‘prove’ he isn’t good enough, is beyond ludicrous.

However, certain other stats ARE very important.

Yet with these, it is often the over the top critics of Nick Pope who want to then say that statistics don’t tell us everything/anything.

The stat I was thinking is quite important, is you know, goals conceded.

Or in the case of Nick Pope, NOT conceded.

Nick Pope has now started 63 Premier League matches for Newcastle United and conceded 59 goals, that is an average of 0.93 goals conceded per match.

To put that into perspective, since Pope arrived at St James’ Park, the 24 PL games he hasn’t started, Newcastle have conceded 46 goals. At an average of 1.91 goals per PL game.

Then if you want to take the 63 Premier League matches before Nick Pope arrived at SJP, Newcastle conceded 102 goals, at an average of 1.62 goals per PL match.

If goals conceded (not conceded!) isn’t a worthwhile stat, then I don’t know what is!