Long Term Left-Back at NFFC?

So after crunching a few numbers in my EFL Championship full back model this week, I was slightly surprised to come across one NFFC player who ranks very high on the rankings.

Now it’s always nice to do a little “sense check” when producing some kind of model to evaluate footballers. If one of your models is telling you Colin Kazim Richards is pushing Lionel Messi close or any NFFC forward for that matter, then you know you have a problem. Luckily the model was telling me Harry Toffolo and Max Aarons have been pretty good from full back and wing back areas this season. We know this to be true without the real need for delving into the depths of many numbers.

The man in question?

We can compare him to Yuri Ribeiro’s numbers from last season.

Now first of all it’s important to say how much of a small sample size we have for Nicholas with him playing just the 430 minutes of Championship football so far, his start has been very promising however. A fair few Forest fans can see he has the edge over Yuri going forward but maybe surprised to see by just how much. He’s already racked up more than half the xA that Yuri did during the whole of last season. xA(Expected assist) measures the likelihood that a given pass will become an actual assist. Clearly we know a great cross to a striker two yards out for an assist should be given more credit than a five yard pass to a player who scores from a 30 yard shot, this helps us do this. Nicholas ranks 1st in the whole league at full back for Key Passes/90, a pass intended to create a goal scoring opportunity and ranks very high for crosses per 90 minutes, with a cross success of 32%. Now although that cross success may sound low, it’s natural for a player who looks to cross soo much, Trent-Alexander Arnold had a 29% cross success last season and did pretty well out of that.

The most important thing that I notice from a NFFC point of view with Ioannou though is how well he does at progressing the ball up the pitch. His successful progressive passes and progressive runs outshine Yuri a fair bit, having almost twice as many in each metric. Now as I say, this is a small sample size for Nicholas and you could perhaps make the argument he wouldn’t have been this progressive under Sabri, however I get the feeling we’d have seen the same player. Being progressive as a full back is pretty vital right now at Forest, especially when we continue to play 4–2–3–1 and with the personnel in those DM positions(this is a whole other article). Allow Johan Cruyff to explain:

While Yuri Ribeiro may not have the exploits going forward that Nicholas does I do think he will be slightly more reliable in his defensive displays, especially positionally. Being positionally very good is very hard to calculate on a spread sheet but luckily we still have our eyes for that. We may also see an improvement with him going forward if a few shackles get released under new management.

The first poll makes total sense but I was a little surprised to see the long-term poll being so one sided. I do think Ioannou’s red card is still very fresh in the memory of some fans. He can come back stronger for sure and does seem to have what it takes; from a very small sample size, to be a very good attacking full back for us and maybe what we need long term. In an ever seemingly ageing squad it’s also nice to see they are both only just coming into their prime years.

Safe to say Chris Hughton has two different but solid options at his disposal moving forward.

Cheers for reading,

Forest Analytics.