In the Manchester United disaster at home versus Fulham on Sunday, we witnessed United lobbing cross-after-crossing without success in the penalty area. The horrendous display at Old Trafford was bad enough but then Darren Bent’s 94th minute goal made the nightmare scenario complete. You’ve seen some stats on about the Manchester United crosses, and of course the numbers showing how the Red Devils dominated every stat in the match other than the scoreboard.
However, you haven’t seen the stats from this game like this.
First check out this video of the Manchester United crosses:
This is from our friends at Sports Matrix. Check them out, they do really great work. There’s a nifty bar graph in there:
The main talking point, of course, was the number of crosses that Manchester United sent in and around the Fulham penalty area. Never before in a Premier League game has one team sent in as many crosses as United did. During the course of the game, the United players sent in an incredible 84 crosses. Keeping in mind that the ball was only in play for a total of 66 minutes and 52 seconds, we can see that United were averaging 1.2 crosses every minute. This is in stark contrast with Fulham who managed only 4 crosses all game.
At first glance this statistic looks completely bizarre. This prompted us to cast a look over all crosses in the Premier League this season from all teams and the results were astounding. In the table below you can see the average number of crosses per game sent in (in blue) and the average number of crosses conceded (in red) by each team. The most astonishing fact is that this table does NOT include last night’s game! As it is United lead the way with the number of crosses whereas the team that faces the highest number of crosses per game is none other than Fulham!
Looking at the actual crosses themselves, we saw that only 11 of them came from set pieces with a mammoth 73 coming from open play.
Paul M. Banks owns The Sports Bank.net, an affiliate of Fox Sports. An MBA and Fulbright scholar, he’s also a frequent analyst on news talk radio; with regular segments on ESPN,NBC, CBS and Fox. A former NBC Chicago and Washington Times writer, he’s also been featured on the History Channel. President Obama follows him on Twitter (@paulmbanks)