Stats suggest that Harry Kane is poised to end August drought

Despite scoring 78 Premier League goals, Golden Boot holder Harry Kane is, incredibly, still searching for his first ever goal in the opening month of the season. Anybody who is considering captaining him this weekend might therefore need convincing that he can finally end that August hoodoo!

The Spurs’ striker will certainly count himself unfortunate not to have got on the score-sheet in the opening 2 matches. He’s registered 14 shots so far and a more detailed analysis is illustrated in the Oulala infographic below.

To say that he has been knocking on the door would be something of an understatement but how many of these squandered chances should the England striker really have converted?

Well, one metric that is proving increasingly popular and now being discussed more widely in fantasy football circles is ‘Expected Goals (xG)’. Models have been created that effectively assign a value for every scoring opportunity, factoring in where the shot is taken from, the type of shot, the number of defenders that might be in the way and so on. The higher the value, the more likely that it will end in a goal so a penalty kick, for example, might have an xG of 0.76 meaning that you could expect it to be converted 76% of the time.

After a match is completed it is possible to analyse how the game should have finished based on the scoring opportunities created, as well as determining whether certain individuals might have fared better.

‘Understat’ is one resource that provides this information on the main European leagues and their data reveals that Kane was expected to score 1.63 goals from the scoring situations he found himself in during the fixtures with Newcastle United and Chelsea.

Significantly, his xG value of 0.81 is higher than the 0.7 that he recorded throughout the course of the 2016/17 Premier League season.

Tottenham host Burnley at Wembley Stadium on Sunday, a very soft fixture on paper, so it would come as no surprise to see the Spurs’ hitman opening his account for the season.

Kane also looks like a leading contender for the GW3 Captain’s armband as highlighted below.

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The England forward is just pipped to the top spot by the in-form Romelu Lukaku and it is difficult to split the pair.

Manchester United host Leicester City in the Saturday evening kick-off and it’s worth recalling that they won the corresponding fixture last season 4-1.

The pick of he GW3 action is undoubtedly Liverpool versus Arsenal, so it will be fascinating to see whether Alexis Sánchez features for the Gunners or not . If he does, it will surely only be a matter of time before he puts himself bang in contention for that coveted gameweek armband.

However, for this week at least, we are expecting Harry Kane to deliver the goods but who will you choose as your GW3 Captain?