By Dave Woods

20th Nov, 2019 | 10:45am

MOT Tactics: Do Leeds need to shoot more from outside the box?

This article is part of a regular series from Leeds United Twitter account All Stats Aren’t We – the team also host a brilliant podcast that goes in-depth into the tactics of Marcelo Bielsa and a deeper look at the underlying stats

We had a question about shooting from outside the box, whether Leeds need to do it more and whether it’s part of their tactics under Marcelo Bielsa not to take many of them.

As you can see below, Leeds are joint bottom of the league for goals outside the box, with Bristol City and Swansea on one. Only Millwall, with zero, have less. West Brom lead the way with seven. Leeds’ only successful effort was scored by Pablo Hernandez in the first game of the season against Bristol City.

When we first saw this we presumed that West Brom must be shooting from outside the box far more than Leeds. However, crunching the numbers led us to this.

Leeds actually take a greater percentage of shots outside the box (by virtue of the fact they also take more shots p90 than West Brom, they literally take more shots from outside the box p90 than West Brom as well). However, West Brom have scored seven times the amount Leeds have from more than 18 yards.

One thing’s for sure – West Brom’s numbers are crazy. To score the greatest amount of goals from range from a below-average amount of efforts is very impressive.

It may not last, but considering over half of those goals were scored by Matheus Pereira or Grady Diangana, it suggests they have that quality which is above the level.

It seems to be the case that every time we talk or write about anything regarding Leeds in 2019/20, it always comes back round to conversion rates. If Leeds were scoring long shots at the same rate as Fulham, they’d have scored the same amount as them, being that their total long shots are virtually the same.

If that were the case, nobody would be asking whether Leeds need to shoot more. In fact, one could argue that with such a poor conversion rate, Leeds should continue looking for the pass and create another big chance.

Whatever the answer, it can’t be denied that scoring goals is the major issue in an otherwise dominant team. It’s not all doom and gloom though, as the bright side is that Leeds have scored four goals in their last two games and will be hoping to maintain this kind of goal-scoring form to propel forward their promotion challenge.

In other Leeds news, 28y/o suffers hamstring issue on international duty, set for checks on Weds