Rate the ability of the players in the Oxford United squad in the table below on a scale of 0-10, with 0 being the worst player in the squad, 5 being average and 10 being the best. All ratings should be relative to each other, e.g. it’s fine to have multiple players with the same rating. What stats or factors helped you determine these ratings? 

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This is a tough league where every point is going to be difficult to come by. It's been a tough run for the boys on the pitch but I've been thinking about this a lot and we, the fans, were absolute shit on Saturday. We were taken out of the game after about 10 minutes, loads of people left early, and those remaining only came back into when Dane scored. It wasn't quite as negative as it got at times last year but it was just such a flat atmosphere with barely any excitement and I felt it brought the team down a little (or at least didn't raise them up)

With the injuries, it feels like the players are running on fumes a little bit but that's when we need to back them the most and give them that little bit of extra energy in the critical moments. Win lose or draw I want to see the kassam become an impenetrable fortress once again!

Not even getting into how much we miss Cam, we currently are missing dembele and Edwards who are our best wingers imo (though maybe Tyler is ahead of or even with Edwards) plus placheta and Phillips who are 4th and 5th best wingers...

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Does anybody have any good ones? I'm not setting the bar very high with the below:

Shrieke Dembele Mateo Corboo

How we feeling?

Definitely a difficult few games without a win, injuries hitting us hard but still managing to keep the points ticking upwards is a positive. We are still in a decent position and a win on Saturday would be very timely but as we know, there aren't any easy games for us in this league.

Intrigued to see what happens with vaulks going forward as he's clearly not having a great time of it and the fans have turned on him mostly (myself included). Not sure it's his fault but the reliance we have on that 6 role in our play style is so huge so if he ain't good enough for it then we need to think about something else methinks (I'll email Des)

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Hello all, just to say, some of you using the official Reddit app may have seen for this sub that there is a tab for "Chat" next to "Feed". Or on web you should see it in the sidebar on the right hand side of the screen under Community Chat Channels. This is a new Reddit feature that is still in beta I believe.

It enables subreddits to create private or public chat channels within Reddit for members to discuss relevant things. We have a chat channel "Yellows Chat" that should be open to most subscribers here so if you want to join in with the whopping 5 members we currently have, please feel free!

PK didn't look great. Not sure if I was just watching him more but there were a few moments where he almost just looked lost. Didn't think he was horrible but definitely the weak point in the back line today.

Ciaron Brown seems to have found a new level in the air and on the ball. He's gotten to the point where any ball vaguely near him and I just assume he's going to win the header, even if he needs to literally jump half his body over the other player to do so. He's also clearly doing a lot more with the ball, almost pushing up next to Vaulks sometimes. And when he has the ball I'm generally not full of dread like I used to be when he's running with it or passing.

Ben Nelson looks like our strongest defender at this point. He was everywhere we needed him, made every interception and tackle we needed him to and is also our most confident CB on the ball. For me he was the player of the match today. He's got a bright future ahead of him and I desperately hope we can hang onto him long enough to enjoy some of it (ie I'll be crushed if he gets recalled in Jan).

Scarlett looked the best he's looked for us from the moment he stepped on the pitch. I was impressed with his runs and his ability to keep the pressure on them long before the goal. He absolutely earned that goal with everything he put in for the preceding half hour and I was thrilled to see it was him that got it. What a hero

They shut down our wing play really well. Consistently two defenders on Tyler whenever he had the ball. Dembele looked dangerous with the ball but never had space and they did a good job of stopping the ball before it got to him in the first place. Felt like they were trying to force to play either with full backs overlapping or through the middle more. I would have liked to see a bit more from Ruben and Idris but both were just okay imo. It looked like Des made some adjustments in the last 20 minutes or so and I hope they are something we can do effectively because otherwise I'd be a little worried about teams copying the baggies plan for containing us.

Overall I felt a draw was fair and am pretty thrilled with it. Bring on Derby!

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https://x.com/oxf_jack/status/1846548290067689664?t=dwNJLT62_1cjFO3xTNkDlA&s=19

Going on a trip to England and the possibility to go see Oxford play just opened up and I've got a question regarding the tickets and the status regarding general attendance for games. Is it possible to purchase tickets for the match at the stadium and what would the chances be that it´s sold out?

(MODS please erase this post if it's deemed irrelevant to the sub)

Best regards from Sweden.

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The PK post and the discussion in it had me thinking about defensive style under Des so I figured why not check a few stats. A big part of the discussion was on whether PK not closing people down is a weakness of his or a team style thing or a compromise to allow him to attack more.

I think it was discussed on here after the Wembley final but we played a kind of mid block against Bolton where instead of pressing them high, we'd try to block the easy passes and force them into longer, lower probability passes. My theory is we do a lot of this in general and that specifically against opposing wingers, the first defender's role appears to be to take away the easy passes and it's only if there's a second defender coming in that they try to actually close down the player with the ball. We are 4th in the Championship on interceptions per match and 1st in clearances per match, but 22nd in successful tackles per match. There could be many reasons but one could be if our priority really is to force low quality passes more than it is to make tackles.

I was also curious how PK compares to our other full backs statistically.

• PK averages 1.29 tackles per 90 minutes with 1.14 interceptions

• Joe Bennett is at 1.14 tackles and 0.57 interceptions per 90.

• Greg Leigh is at 0.61 tackles and 0.61 interceptions per 90.

• Sam Long is at 1.00 and 1.60 while Ciaron Brown sits at 0.67 and 1.89 but both have had time at CB and fullback.

So it doesn't say whether PK is more or less likely to close a player down but he is winning slightly more tackles than other fullbacks for us. Could be that we've faced more attacks down the left wing so he's had more chances to tackle or could be that the numbers are small enough where differences are basically random chance. This also doesn't really factor in who played which matches...

Personally I'm still convinced it's a team choice to emphasise forcing poor quality passes and then letting the centre backs or midfielders intercept and clear it rather than closing players down and risking them getting by and putting a high quality ball into the box. Looking at our matches this year, the number of accurate crosses the other team has in a game correlates really well to our performances. I imagine this is kind of always the case but with how extreme it is for us so far this year I'm curious if our defensive style exaggerates it.

In the 3 wins: Norwich had 3 accurate crosses (20%), Preston had 4 accurate crosses (17%), and Stoke had 0.

In the 3 losses: Coventry had 17 accurate crosses (36%), Blackburn had 6 accurate crosses (24%), and Bristol had 10 (37%)

In the 3 draws: Burnley had 3 accurate crosses (13%), Luton had 4 (20%), and Portsmouth had 10 (34%).

I feel like you could basically sort our matches by accurate crosses allowed and it would match how most of us would rank the performances. In addition to the wins, Burnley was probably one of our best performances and Luton was actually great for 88 minutes other than the two shambolic goals we gave up. The comparative number of crosses allowed in the losses and the Portsmouth game also reflect our worse performances imo.

It would make sense though if our aim when not in possession is to force low quality passes rather than to directly tackle the ball away. Then basically our performances are great when we succeed at that but worse when the other team is succeeding to get those high quality passes. It's also worth saying i think this ties in with the way we press and the angles and numbers we press from where the goal is more to force a bad pass than to make a tackle.

Ultimately I could well be wrong and will definitely be keeping a closer eye on both PK and also our general defensive shape during the next several matches to see if it changes my mind. None of the stats I found are specific enough to look at PK closing players down but I think it ended up being more of a general look at how we defend rather than anything about PK specifically even though PK was the original reason I got curious

Predictions at the start of the year weren’t that favourable to us. What do we think now?