Brentford vs Sunderland: 22 shots against one that counted

Brentford are sixth with four points and a goal difference of plus three. Sunderland are twelfth with three points and a goal difference of nothing at all. On Saturday afternoon at the Gtech they meet, and the interesting thing about the fixture is how differently the two clubs have arrived at broadly similar returns.

Brentford have taken twenty-five shots across two matches. Sunderland have scored twice all season and won one of those games 1-0. Both are in the top half. Only one of them looks like it is doing anything sustainable.

Brentford are creating a great deal

The opening weekend was emphatic: 3-0 at home against Tottenham, a result that has aged well given that Spurs are still bottom without a goal. Last weekend at Elland Road was less emphatic and more revealing.

Brentford had twenty-two shots to Leeds’ twelve. They put five on target. They scored once — Kevin Schade on forty-one minutes, right-footed into the top right corner from the centre of the box — and then conceded to Dominic Calvert-Lewin on seventy-nine and came away with a point.

Twenty-two shots and one goal is a rate that will correct itself over a season, and usually in the direction of the side taking the shots. It is also, in the short term, exactly how a team drops points it thinks it deserved.

Sunderland are creating very little and winning anyway

Sunderland lost their opening match 2-1 at Ipswich. Last weekend they beat Fulham 1-0 at the Stadium of Light with 41.6% of the ball and twelve shots, four of them on target.

Wilson Isidor scored the only goal on seventy-five minutes, finishing right-footed from the centre of the box after a Habib Diarra assist. Fulham, for their part, managed eleven shots and did not put a single one on target across the whole afternoon.

So Sunderland’s three points came from a match in which they had less of the ball and roughly the same volume of chances as their opponent, and were simply the only side to hit the target when it mattered. It is a perfectly legitimate way to win a football match. It is not a plan you can rely on twenty more times.

The shape of the game

The straightforward version is that Brentford will have the ball and Sunderland will not mind. Sunderland have now played two matches with under 42% possession in one and a defeat in the other, and their single win came from precisely the low-possession, one-clear-chance profile that this fixture invites.

The complication for them is that Brentford at home are a different proposition from Leeds away. Twenty-two shots is a lot of pressure to absorb for ninety minutes, and Sunderland’s clean sheet last weekend came against a Fulham side that could not find the target at all.

Schade’s goal at Elland Road and the three against Tottenham suggest Brentford are not short of finishers. What they were short of last weekend was one more accurate shot out of twenty-two.

What each side has already shown about the other’s weakness

There is a specific overlap here that makes the fixture more interesting than the table does. Sunderland’s win came against a Fulham side that had the ball, took eleven shots and hit the target none of the times. Brentford are the opposite problem: they hit the target five times out of twenty-two and scored once.

So Sunderland have beaten a team that could not finish, and Brentford are a team that has not been finishing. That is the case for the away side, and it is a real one rather than a contrarian one.

The case against it is that Brentford’s other match this season finished 3-0, against a Tottenham side that has still not scored. Whatever is wrong with the conversion rate, it was not wrong on the opening weekend.

Why the result matters more than the position

Neither club is going to learn anything decisive about its season on the first Saturday in September. But there is a practical difference between four points and seven after three matches, and a bigger one between three and six.

Sunderland are a promoted side, and the pattern for promoted sides is that the points taken in the opening six weeks are disproportionately valuable — not because they count for more, but because they are taken before the rest of the division has worked out how to play against you. Hull City are third right now on exactly that principle.

Brentford, meanwhile, have the more familiar problem of a mid-table side with good underlying numbers: if the finishing does not improve, the numbers stop mattering. Twenty-two shots is only encouraging until it happens three weeks running.

The Premier League simulator on this site plays the rest of the season out from the real table and the real remaining fixtures, if you want to see how much a Saturday like this one is actually worth by May.