"This team knows how to play in finals. When it comes to such matches or two-legged matches, we were worse only than Chelsea, but despite everything we said goodbye to the Conference League with dignity. This shows that this team has the right mentality," said Legia Warszawa coach Goncalo Feio after winning the Polish Cup.
Well, it's a pity that the Military did not treat the clashes with the league leaders as finals, because if they had, three rounds before the end of the season they would still be fighting for the Polish championship, and not live in hope of a miraculous chase for the lowest step of the podium...
This is of course spite, but partly true, because when you take into account only the results (not the game!), Legia showed two faces this season. The first one – the cup one. In the Polish Cup and the Conference League, the team from Warsaw was the best version of itself. The military did not break down in difficult moments, to mention only the first half of the ultimately drawn match with Bröndby 1:1 or the chase for Molde away and reducing the losses from 0:3 to 2:3.
And the second one – the league one. In Ekstraklasa, the team from Łazienkowska 3 was much more unstable, uncertain, and achieved its worst results against the top teams – in competition with teams from the top five, the Feio team won only two points out of a possible 21. A dramatic balance, because the next in such a composition, Pogoń Szczecin, won four times more.
But are these actually two faces, or is it just a matter of adding a narrative to the results?
– Apart from the match at Lech – where the number of chances was similar for both teams – there were matches where one goal decided the result, and the number of goal chances was very similar or even on our side, like today. There was a match in which we played worse, we should have lost and we lost. There were matches that we should have won and we drew. There were matches that we should have won and we lost – explained the coach in April after the defeat to Jagiellonia Białystok (0:1) at home.
Feio said more or less the same thing after other clashes with the top teams, so the coach's defense line is clear - the results did not always fairly reflect what was happening on the pitch, and sometimes his team could have won, and sometimes they should have. Where do such conclusions come from? We need to refer to the way the Portuguese player assessed the game, which he used in Motor Lublin, the first club where he was the head coach. Namely, the coach builds the so-called true image of the match primarily on the basis of good chances. True, he does this through the calculations of his own staff, but to verify his thesis about Legia's clashes with the top teams, we will use statistics collected by commercial companies.
The Sofascore portal counts big chances, which provide a more complete picture than the expected goal ratio (xG) alone, which does not take into account, for example, situations when a player misses the ball when he is alone in front of the goal. No shot, no expected goals. And according to the data from this platform, in seven matches with the Top 5, Legia only once created more such chances than the opponent - in the April rematch lost with Jagiellonia in Warsaw - and once the same number - at the end of March in a draw with Pogoń, also at Ł3. Apart from that, in the remaining five cases, the opponents finished with more big chances. Conclusion - Wojskowi suffered a defeat once, although - sticking to the number of good chances - they should have won, and drew once (in the autumn in Białystok with Jagiellonia), even though they did not deserve it. Balance - four points instead of the two ultimately won on the pitch. Not much, but better.
Legia players after the autumn match against Lech Poznań (Photo: Jakub Piasecki/Cyfrasport / newspix.pl) Let's look at another statistic - expected points (xPts) - collected by the Opta platform, which calculates how much they actually deserved based on xG created by both teams. And so, Legia's xPts for seven matches with the Top 5 is 11.18, which is much higher than what the team from Warsaw actually got. According to data from a British analytical company, Feio's team was indeed much worse once (in the autumn in Szczecin, when they lost 0:1), four times the matches were close (both with Raków, the rematch with Portowcy and Lech despite a 2:5 defeat), and in two cases they were definitely better (both matches with Jagiellonia). Conclusion - these calculations confirm Feio's thesis and the results of Wojskowi at the top of the table were much worse than the game.
So actually... how is Legia doing in competition with the Ekstraklasa Top 5?
A coincidence Although Feio likes to bend reality according to his own ideas, in this case we have to admit that he is right to some extent (that is why we wrote that the malice in the introduction was only partly true). Legia's balance with the top teams looks absolutely terrible, but it does not fully reflect the course of the matches. Whichever way you look at it, the Military deserved at least a few more points (especially since, for example, in Białystok the referee made a mistake and did not award a penalty to the Warsaw team), their number depends on the data used for the analysis.
What did Legia lack in these competitions? Probably a bit of effectiveness (e.g. the first half with Pogoń in Warsaw), a bit of luck (if Radovan Pankov had placed his foot better during the throw-in, Ilya Shkurin's goal against Jagiellonia would have been recognized), a bit of justice (the aforementioned uncalled penalty for a foul on Kacper Chodyn in Białystok). Some of these matches were indeed close and even if the opponent had more big chances, usually only slightly and it didn't take much for the results to be different, and consequently, the place in the table and the reception of the team.
Of course, the legionnaires have played a lot of weak matches in the league this season and it is no coincidence that they are not fighting for the championship, but they did not perform as badly against the Top 5 as the results indicate. The results of seven matches cannot be the result of a series of unfortunate circumstances? In a sport where, due to the small number of points that decide about winning or losing, chance plays a large role, they can. And seven is still too small a sample to draw any specific conclusions from. In such situations, it is too easy to have extreme results, as described by, among others, Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman (the so-called law of small numbers).
Does this mean that Legia will win on Sunday? No. It means that Lech will not be as easy as one might think, considering the achievements of the Military against their direct opponents for the podium.
