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After 12 games of 2019/20, Liverpool sit top of the Premier League, eight points clear of the chasing pack.

Decisive goals in several of their matches have arrived late in the day, leading rival fans and managers to declare that the Reds have been fortunate at times.

It’s possible to use statistics to refute such accusations. Expected goals – a system which assigns a value to a chance based on the historic conversion rate of similar opportunities – has become the common method of trying to determine which team deserved to win a match.

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But it overlooks one hugely pertinent fact: was the shot put on target or not? Football will always be about putting the ball between the posts and under the crossbar more than anything else.

Take Liverpool’s win at Sheffield United as an example. Jürgen Klopp’s team merited their victory as they created a trio of clear-cut chances, but they got the three points because Gini Wijnaldum’s shot tested the goalkeeper and he wasn’t equal to it .

And where expected goal data suggests Manchester City perhaps deserve to be top of the league, the shots on target figures suggest Liverpool have the edge. This isn’t a case of picking a stat to make the Reds look like worthy league leaders, rather an example of using one which is easier to understand, and widely available going far further back in time.

The best way of assessing it is using a team’s shots on target ratio (SOTR for short), which is the proportion of the total shots on target in a team’s matches which they themselves have.

So if Team A has six efforts on target while Team B has four, their ratios are 60% and 40% respectively. While it reveals little for an individual match, across a season it is of far greater interest, as teams tend to finish in the table in roughly the order of their SOTR figures.

Klopp’s sides have always been strong in this field, going back to his Dortmund days. In 2010/11, in their title winning campaign, they had 71% of the shots on target in their Bundesliga matches. It has taken time to build Liverpool up to that level, just as it did with BVB, but the Reds are finally there.

After inheriting a side which posted a shots on target ratio of 58% in 2014/15, Klopp upped Liverpool to 60% in 2015/16. It then continued to increase year-on-year, from 67% to 69%, then up to 70% in 2018/19 before hitting 72% across the first third of this campaign.

In a small sample of 12 matches, a high SOTR can be boosted depending on fixture difficulty or circumstances. For instance, Leicester logged 20 shots on target while only conceding three across the two games where their opponents had a man sent off in the first half, giving their ratio an eight percent boost.

But Liverpool have been consistently strong from week-to-week this season. In all 12 matches the Reds have had more attempts on target than their opponents, the only team in the Premier League who can boast that.

Much like as with their shots on target ratio, Liverpool’s consistency in this area has been improving throughout Klopp’s tenure. Where the Reds had fewer efforts on target than their opponents 13 times in Brendan Rodgers’ last full campaign at the helm, it only happened 13 times in total across Klopp’s first three full seasons in charge.

Manchester City , by contrast, have been outshot for on target attempts twice in 2019/20 – including by Liverpool last weekend – having only seen it happen three times in each of the last two full seasons.

The champions’ defensive issues this season have resulted in them being unable to prevent shots on target. Pep Guardiola’s team are seeing 52% of opposition shots test their goalkeeper, the worst proportion in the division, and way above the league average of 35%.

This has led to City conceding 3.8 on target attempts per game, their highest figure since 2012/13.

The Reds have only allowed more than three efforts on target in two of their league matches so far, with a 2.5 per game average and an overall total of 30.

It therefore seems odd that Liverpool have conceded one goal in 10 of their 12 games so far.

Between the start of 2008/09 and the end of last season, the Reds had 11 stretches of 12 league matches where they conceded 30 shots on target in total. Across those 11 previous runs, they conceded an average of 7.4 goals and kept 6.5 clean sheets, so this year’s figures of 10 and two respectively are a clear aberration.

Alisson should keep more shut outs before too long, and as long as Liverpool keep having more shots on target than their opponents, the Reds will keep winning. It isn’t luck that Liverpool continue to beat teams week after week at the moment, it’s the culmination of four years of progress in a vital aspect of the game.