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Alvaro Morata opened his account for Chelsea just 10 minutes into his debut in scoring as a substitute against Burnley on Saturday.
Tottenham’s Harry Kane, by contrast, has now failed to score a goal in his 11 Premier League appearances in the month of August, a run that totals 727 minutes.
The two rivals meet at Wembley on Sunday, when two crucial questions will be answered.
Will Chelsea boss Antonio Conte hand Morata his first Premier League start following his impressive cameo appearance last weekend?
Can Kane break his August hoodoo against a Chelsea side he tends to excel against, having scored four goals in eight appearances when facing the Blues?
With the strikers coming head-to-head, the team behind fantasy football game Oulala.com have published stats compiled by Opta dating back to the start of the 2013-14 season, when the players broke into the first teams at Tottenham and Real Madrid respectively, to analyse which has been most effective.
While Kane and Morata have each made 113 league appearances since August 2013, the numbers have been broken down to a per-minute basis due to their imbalance of starts and substitute appearances.
The stats show Kane has recorded almost double the amount of minutes – 9,073 compared to the Spaniard’s 4,774 in La Liga, Serie A and the Premier League.
Having recorded almost half of Kane’s minutes, Morata has also scored half the number of goals (78 to 39) and registered almost half the amount of shots (415 to 195). There’s a pattern emerging…
Analysing these numbers in more detail, the findings reveal Morata in fact has a slightly better conversion rate (20% to 19%) and falls just six minutes short for the average number of minutes taken to score each of their goals (116 to 124).
If Morata had been given the same amount of game time as Kane, would his goal tally also be the same?
Kane, of course, has scored 20+ league goals for three consecutive seasons and has won back-to-back Golden Boots. Not to mention his record against Chelsea is pretty impressive.
However, if Conte hands Morata a spot in Chelsea’s starting XI on Sunday, his stats suggest that, having hit the ground the running at Stamford Bridge, he could deliver again.
This post was last modified on 18/08/2017