Striking Up a Partnership- If Sabo is Out Who Should Start?

Alvaro Saborio is one of the best strikers in the league. He has been extremely valuable to RSL when he has been in the line-up this year. The problem has been that he has not been available to be selected in the starting 11 as much as anyone would like. Whether he has been out due to injury or international duty, Saborio has only played  1081 minutes of a possible 2610 minutes.

If this were the case last year it would have been a disaster. The depth at forward was very thin. This season it has been another story. Coach Kreis has four other good forwards that he is able to select from when he has needed to replace Saborio. In my last Striking Up a Partnership article, I looked at who was the best person to start with Saborio. Since Saborio is currently injured again I thought it would be good to take a look at the remaining forwards to see who should start in place of Saborio.

First lets take a look at each forward individually to see how they are doing. I am going to keep Saborio in this table for comparison sake.

Player	Min	Team Goals	MpTG	Min not played	Team Goals	MpTG	Difference	COR
Saborio	1081	19	56.89	1529	33	46.33	-10.56	-13.85
Findley	1128	19	59.37	1482	33	44.91	-14.46	9.15
Plata	1473	29	50.79	1138	23	49.48	-1.31	5.75
Sandoval	736	15	49.07	1875	35	53.57	4.5	19.8
Garcia	876	21	41.71	1730	31	55.81	14.09	-19.94

Let me go over what we are looking at. MpTG is my minutes per team goal stat. The difference column shows the difference between the MpTG when a player is playing vs when he is off the field. And the COR score is my overall offensive rating system. For both MpTG and COR, the lower the score the better. 

As you can see Olmes Garcia has the best MpTG and COR. Does that make it a slam dunk that he should start? I am not sure. I read an interesting stat the other day about Garcia. All 5 goals that he has scored have come in matches where he has come in as a sub. All 4 assists that Garcia has have come in matches where he was the starter. 

Since we are looking at who should start, I thought it would be good to take a look at how each player has done as a starter. 

Player	Min	Team Goals	MpTG
Saborio	1053	15	70.20
Findley	972	13	74.77
Plata	1265	21	60.24
Sandoval	619	12	51.58
Garcia	539	10	53.90

You will notice that every player's MpTG is higher here than above. That is because more goals are scored later in the match. That is going to give a boost to any players coming in off the bench. I was really surprised that Sandoval does not have much of a drop in MpTG when he is a starter. Perhaps he is the best option to start.

Here is a look at how each player does when they come in as a sub.

Player	Min	Team Goals	MpTG
Saborio	28	1	28.00
Findley	156	6	26.00
Plata	203	8	25.38
Sandoval	117	3	39.00
Garcia	337	11	30.64

Plata has been a real spark coming off the bench for RSL. It also surprised me that Findley had better numbers coming off the bench than Garcia. I would have thought that would be the other way around.

Now lets look at how each pairing does when playing together. This should be one of the key things we look at in determining who we want to start. 

Player	Min	Goals	MpTG
Sabo/Plata	361	11	32.82
Plata/Garcia	365	10	36.50
Sandoval/Garcia	314	8	39.25
Findley/Garcia	42	1	42.00
Plata/Sandoval	390	7	55.71
Sabo/Garcia	335	6	55.83
Findley/Sandoval	63	1	63.00
Findley/Plata	562	8	70.25
Sabo/Sandoval	71	1	71.00
Sabo/Findley	398	5	79.60

With this information we can see that Plata/Garcia is our best non-Sabo pairing. I do find it interesting that the pairings that we have seen the most of this season (Findley/Plata and Sabo/Findley) are also two of the three worst statistical lineups that we have.

Let me throw out one more statistic before I come up with my conclusion on who should start. As I have gone through my stats, I have found that Robbie Findley has played 95 minutes in a formation where he was the lone striker. In that time the team has scored 5 times or a goal every 19 minutes. Not that I am an advocate for that, but there is a case that could be made about playing a 4-5-1 formation as well with Saborio out.

By looking at all these numbers my conclusion is that we should start Garcia and Sandoval together with Plata the first man off the bench. When you look above at the numbers for when a player starts, Garcia and Sandoval are the two best. They rank third on the pairings list with the team scoring a goal every 39.25 minutes that they play together. Plata also has the best numbers coming off the bench while Sandoval really hasn't done as well as a substitute. 

This is the lineup that makes the most sense to me for tomorrow's match if Saborio can't play. Especially when you consider the big center backs that San Jose will play, it is important that we have some size and speed on the field. 

Who do you want to see as the forward pairing if Saborio is unable to start? I did a quick poll and here are the results.

Plata/Garcia- 35%

Plata/Sandoval- 42%

Garcia/Sandoval- 14%

Findley/Sandoval- 7%