Alan Hutton's Less Negative Play Against Newcastle - Quick Passing Analysis

If you missed it last week, I took a look at just how negative Alan Hutton's play was against Everton. Turns out, it was quite bad. Well, I'm not here to drag Alan Hutton through the mud, just present some objective analysis. With that in mind, I've decided to do the same project this week. Again, I will use a chalkboard for analysis, and I will look at the number of passes attempted, completed, and the number of each that were backwards.

If you can't click down right now, here's the short of it: Alan Hutton did not affect the game against Newcastle as negatively as he did against Everton. Progress!

Please do join me after the jump, however, for the chalkboard and a few comments.

by Guardian Chalkboards

• Last week, Alan Hutton had a 63% success rate on 44 attempts. This week, Hutton attempted 46 passes, and improved his completion rate significantly to 78%, or 36 completed passes.
  
• Nathan Delfouneso led the team with 100%. Nathan Delfouneso also only attempted 1 pass. Among players who attempted 15+ passes, Stiliyan Petrov, Richard Dunne, and Stephen Warnock all completed >80%. Hutton was fourth on the team.
  
• 9 of Hutton's pass attempts were technically backwards. I say technically because one of those was a cross (into the box!) and one went about 3 yards and was just a few degrees shy of horizontal. So let's call it 7 backwards passes, or just more than 19%. This is a huge improvement over last week's 43%, and means that Hutton sent 81% of his passes forward. Towards Newcastle's goal!
• Of his 10 passes that were not successful, zero were backwards.
  

Hutton did not play great football on Saturday. There were times when he left the team hanging and his tackling was often mist-timed. But with regards to his passing, Hutton showed massive improvement over his performance at Everton. See! He's not totally hopeless!