Fulham’s historically bad penalty record

We talked about Fulham’s woeful penalty record once before. Since that time, they’ve improved on their rate, by making two of four attempts. Yes, you heard that right making 50% of their penalties improved their rate. That just shows how bad they were.

Let’s quickly update the numbers and this time only focus on penalties that happened in league play. Fulham led the league in penalties taken with 12. In fact Fulham missed more penalties than 18 other teams in the Championship even attempted. If you assume once again that a team will score 77% of their penalties, you’d still only expect a team to miss this often .23% of the time. If we throw out the two penalties that missed the target, you would expect a team to go 4 out of 10 only .17% of the time.

There is still no answer to this. You would have expected Fulham to miss the frame just 1 time in 12 attempts, but missing it 2 out of 12 isn’t really that unusual. What is unusual is having 6 attempts saved.

When we last looked at this, all the Fulham attempts but one had gone to the shooters left side, and the keeper had dived to that side on all 9 attempts. Since then, Tim Ream had shot to the right and the keeper guessed correctly; but the shot was off frame. Tom Cairney went to the right two times in a row with the keeper going the wrong way on each one, both scored. Finally, against Brentford Cairney went right again with the keeper guessing correctly. We had suggested mixing up going right and left, but I’m not sure going right four times in a row is really mixing it up. That being said, of the four penalties taken in that time, the keeper guessed right half the time. You would expect the keeper to guess right half the time.

Does this mean Fulham’s penalty woes are fixed? Are you going to be on the edge of your seat if Fulham needs to score on a penalty to win? What about if the tie needs penalties to decide the winner? With the first leg ending in a draw, penalties are a real possibility and not something this Fulham fan is looking forward to.