The creativity of Antonio Valencia didn’t stop in 2011, although the United side experienced a blip at Newcastle they moved on pretty quickly and haven’t lost in the league since. Valencia started the first six league games of 2012 before missing out on the next three only to return against Wolves last weekend and how, creating seven chances, of which two were assists and scoring a goal.
The assists certainly aren’t as impressive as December however you cannot put that down to the player. We’ve said on many occasions that an assist is a two-way relationship – part one is for the provider to create the chance and the second is for the provided to finish the chance. It’s not the providers fault if the strikers cannot finish – a problem that has haunted United rivals; Liverpool all season and Manchester City of later.
So Valencia is doing his part – he’s created the chances which takes us to our final checkpoint:
Checkpoint 3: Antonio Valencia has created a chance every 27.4 minutes in 2012.
So to summarise:
Antonio Valencia Creativity Summary:
August to November: created a chance every 115.5 minutes
December: created a chance every 33 minutes
January-March: created a chance every 27.4 minutes
Overall 2011/12: creating a chance every 34 minutes
An improvement in each batch of matches and proving that if quality players are played in a run of games they can really produce some fantastic performances and statistics. Antonio Valencia is just one assist away from becoming the joint top goal creator in the league. I would bet that he’d finish at the top of this list come the end of the season.
N.B. The sole purpose of this article was to show Antonio Valencia’s improvement throughout the season. We will have more of a year on year and rivals comparison in the next week so please stay tuned to the site for that!
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All of the stats from this article have been taken from the Opta Stats Centre at EPLIndex.com – Subscribe Now (Includes author privileges!) See Demo’s and videos about the Stats Centre & read about new additions to the stats centre.
