The statistics of Dundee’s horrific seven-game losing streak provide a telling insight into why the club’s owners felt they had to make yesterday’s decision to sack manager Paul Hartley.
The disastrous results since he picked up the manager-of-the-month award for an unbeaten February meant, even before the axe fell on the gaffer, the big question being asked by fans as the team plummeted down the Premiership over the past month-and-a-half was where had it all gone wrong?
The worrying answer was pretty much everywhere. It’s been much simpler to say where things have gone right for the Dark Blues.
Answering that question is considerably less time consuming because, since the losses began mounting up, precious little has gone to plan.
Almost the only bright spot in that run came when Faissal El Bakhtaoui smashed home a wonder strike in the 2-1 home defeat at the hands of Celtic.
In fairness, the performance that day was encouraging. The March 19 reversal was the third in a row but at least it saw the Dark Blues perform reasonably well and, after El Bakhtaoui’s effort, gave the Hoops a few anxious moments in the game’s closing stages.
Even so, Celtic were deserving winners that day and, with the exception of Ross County when they won via fortunate late penalty in Dingwall a fortnight ago, the same can be a said of the other teams who’ve beaten Dundee during what’s been the worst sequence of results for any Premiership outfit this term.
The statistics of the past seven weeks highlight that depressing fact.
These sorry seven games have seen Dundee manage to find the back of the net just twice in all, with skipper Darren O’Dea’s penalty against the Staggies being the only counter on top of the aforementioned El Bakhtaoui effort.
At the other end of the park, a morale-sapping 17 goals have been conceded, including a woeful seven in one game when Aberdeen visited Dens for Friday night football right at the end of last month. That was a heaviest-ever home loss to the Dons.
Further examination of the stats shows why too few goals are being scored and too many conceded.
It’s not so much a case that Dundee are not converting enough chances, they just haven’t been creating them.
Over the seven games there have been just 12 dark blue shots that have worked the opposition goalkeeper, that’s to say on target, and some of them have not been much to write home about.
If the other No 1s can enjoy a virtual day off when facing Dundee, Scott Bain in their goal can expect to be working overtime. In this run he’s had 33 efforts on his goal to deal with.
Because he wants away in the summer despite having a year of his contract still to run, Bain is not the most popular player with some fans right now. Fact is, but for his shot-stopping, the figures would look much worse.
After the amazing 5-1 victory at Motherwell that saw all the goals come in the first half, not once did Hartley’s men have more shots on target than the opposition.
Against Aberdeen and at St Johnstone early in the run, they managed just one and the sixth consecutive defeat — at Hearts — saw none at all.
During that Tynecastle trip, Jambos keeper Jack Hamilton did have to push a Tom Hateley free-kick on to his post but the statisticians rightly marked that down as a wayward cross and not an intentional shot.
So even with a new manager in charge, between now and the first post-split fixture down at Motherwell on Saturday week there is plenty of work to be done on the training pitch.
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