Amr Ebeid (Cairo)
The teams in “round 20” of the “ADNOC Professional League” scored 4 goals via vertical shots from “air games”, which represents 22.2% of the total goals this week, and this percentage may not be considered small in general, but it reflects the continued decline In the rates of “air goals” since the start of the second round in the current version of the league, compared to the harvest of the first half!
During the first 13 rounds of “our league”, 62 goals were scored by players’ heads, which indicates that the general average amounted to 4.77 goals from “air games” every week at least, while the nets were scored through those games in the seven rounds that were held until Now in the second round 23 times, with an average of 3.28 goals per week, which indicates that the percentage of decline amounted to “-1.5” goals in each round.
With the exception of “round 20”, most of the weeks of the second round came in the “bottom” of that list with declining rates, as “round 16” witnessed the scoring of only 9.5% of its goals through “air games”, followed by “week 15”, by 10.7%, compared to 14.3. % for “round 14”, as well as 15% for “round 17”, while the nets were conceded by heads in “week 18” by 17.4%, compared to 19% for “round 19”.
The current version did not witness more than 6 goals scored via heads in any round, as this number is the largest since the beginning of the season, and it was repeated in the second round, then 11 and 13, while “round 16” witnessed the scoring of only two goals from “air games”, compared to 3 goals in the 14th, 15th and 17th rounds, in addition to the sixth round, and 4 goals of this kind were scored in 7 rounds, to be the highest rate, including 3 rounds in the second round so far!
And bearing in mind that Al-Annabi is the team that scores the most for head goals, it can be considered an “ideal model” to study this phenomenon, as it scored 12 goals through air games, including 9 in the first round, at a rate of 75% compared to 25%, with a total of only 3 in the second round. Rather, those games were a clear strength for the team in the first half of the tournament, contributing to scoring 34.6% of its goals at the time, while it fell to 25% recently.
Digging deeper into the statistics of “Al Annabi” and “The Emperor”, being the most exploited of these games, it seems that the most prominent reasons for the decline in their rates for head goals is the decline in the use of fixed kicks that gave them 14 goals in that list, especially the corner, where “Excellences” scored 8 goals. Of the 12 total air games through set-pieces, including 6 corners, all of which came during the first round, and the team scored a single goal from an indirect free kick in the second round, while the “Panthers” shook the nets of its competitors with the heads of its players 11 times, including 6 by corner kicks. Surprisingly, they all came in the first round too!
