Three goals. Less than one expected. Antonio Raimondo did not need the run of play to go his way at Frosinone on Saturday, he just needed the ball anywhere near goal.
Frosinone beat Sassuolo 4-2, and the headline act was Raimondo, who turned a combined 0.94 expected goals into a full hat-trick. That is a clinical overperformance of +2.06, the kind of gap between chance quality and end product that decides matches on its own.
The numbers behind the night
xG models exist to tell you how good a chance was, not how good the finish will be. Raimondo's three strikes came from positions and situations that, on average, would be expected to produce under one goal. He beat that math by more than two full goals in a single appearance.
It earned him a match rating of 8.8, comfortably the kind of mark reserved for a player who settled a game rather than just took part in it.
A four-goal afternoon for Frosinone
Frosinone's 4-2 win over Sassuolo needed more than one man, but Raimondo's hat-trick did the heavy lifting in the final scoreline. Sassuolo found the net twice themselves, enough to make it a contest, but not enough to survive a striker finishing at that rate.
Chances like these even out over a season, most of the time. For one afternoon in Frosinone, Antonio Raimondo made sure they did not.