With the Scottish Cup Final looming, a look at the key defensive metrics to help assess who should be selected for the Treble Treble bid.
Advanced Defensive Metrics
The chart maps Defensive Action Success Rate % and Possessions Won from defensive actions %. Detailed explanations are available in the Glossary.
The best central defensive pairing remains Benkovic and Boyata, neither of whom will likely start. This illustrates one of the major restructuring jobs of the Summer.
But the good news is that Ajer and Simunovic are not far behind. Ajer has not hit quite the same heights as last season but given his age remains a player of real promise.
We can see also that Lustig remains the most defensively robust full back. Another Summer “to do”.
Ralston, on admittedly limited data, is not too far behind and would be my choice if Lustig is unfit. Toljan toils way behind on defensive metrics.
So does Tierney to be fair, but his attacking output makes up for this. Having said that I wouldn’t play him if he is not fit. I am unsure as to the fitness of Izaguirre but he would be a better back up than the Toljan on the left experiment.