As
usual at this time of year, with no football to watch and comment on,
our footballing attentions tend to be divided between two activities:
transfer gossip and deconstructing the season just gone. It's
popularly agreed that our season was undone by a quite ridiculous
injury list which ruled out key players for much of the season,
leaving us woefully undermanned for the rigours of a 46-game season.
That's
probably quite a decent starting place to begin analysing where
things went wrong for Oxford last season, but what about those sides
who are now preparing for life in League One? Where did it all go
right for them? Each of the four promoted sides last season –
Gillingham, Rotherham, Port Vale and Bradford – are clubs of a
similar size to Oxford and all had been in League Two at least as
long as us but none seemed to be able to find that winning formula
until striking gold this last term. In this post we'll take a quick
look at what made each of these sides successful last term in the
hope it will reveal some of the secrets to League Two success.
Champions
Gillingham
are an interesting place to start our analysis, because they finished
the 2011-12 season a very similar position to ourselves. Like us,
they finished the 2011-12 season in poor
shape, dropping out of the play-off race late in the season and
finishing just two points and one place above us in eighth. Unlike
us, Gillingham then took the decision to change manager with the
incoming Martin
Allen pinpointing Gillingham's defence as the area to strengthen.
In 11-12 the Gills conceded 62 goals; this year they reduced that to
a miserly 39 – easily to best record in League Two. In addition,
Gillingham kept an impressive 18 clean sheets this season.
By
contrast, Port
Vale's
approach focused on improving their attack. Again, Vale finished the
2011-12 season in a similar position to us and would have finished
one point ahead of us if not for a points deduction. With the
prolific Marc Richards leaving before the start of the season there
was some concern about whether Vale would be able to replace his
goals, but Tom Pope unexpectedly discovered where the net is and
scored a quite incredible 31 goals as part of the 'best
strikeforce in the league' as Vale finished the season as the
league's top scorers, with 87.
This
was due in large part to the impressive wingers Ashley Vincent and
Jennison Myrie-Williams who supplied a steady stream of balls across
the face of goal for Vale's strikers to latch onto. Vale's attack was
by far the most clinical in the division, requiring less than five
shots to find the net on average (by comparison, Oxford averaged more
than seven shots per goal scored).
Rotherham,
with 74 goals scored, appeared to take a similar approach to Vale,
though their situation is probably the least relatable for Oxford.
The positive momentum created by their move to the New York Stadium
and the piles of cash handed to manager Steve Evans to assemble an
abnormally
strong squad are unlikely to be recreated here at any point in
the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, they do provide an important
example of the importance of building a head of steam and finishing
the season with momentum behind them.
Like
Rotherham, Bradford
also spent money this season – money which hadn't been made
available in previous seasons – but it was a gamble which
ultimately paid off with two Wembley appearances helping to pay off
any shortfall they may otherwise have had. However, that is a gamble
that Oxford seem unlikely to make this season after posting some big
losses in previous years, but there are still lessons to be learned
about reversing
a team's fortunes and building a winning mentality.
Bradford
had been trapped in League Two for six years without really looking
like getting out of it and after an 18th-place finish in 2012 it
needed something drastic for them to turn it around this time out.
Manager Phil Parkinson cleared out a lot of deadwood, building the
side around important senior pros such as Gary
Jones and supplementing them with young, hungry players. Like
Port Vale, Bradford uncovered a goalscoring gem in Nahki Wells this
season, whose goals have been indispensable to the Bantams' promotion
campaign. To what extent is it luck that these players performed this
season and what are Oxford's chances of replicating that?
So
have we learned anything from this exercise? Clearly each of the
sides who promotion this season have done so in their own way and
there is not one simple formula for winning promotion from League
Two. But as the club seeks to move away from its previous policy of
making big-name injury-prone signings like Michael Duberry and Peter
Leven, the above examples do at least show how it can be done. The
question now is can Oxford emulate that success?
Many
thanks to the excellent statistical website Experimental
3-6-1 for their League Two attack and defence stats, which proved
invaluable for this article.
