Some strikers need a mountain of chances to find the net. Søren Tengstedt needed barely half of one shot's worth of quality to score twice.
Go Ahead Eagles beat SC Telstar 3-2, and the Dane was at the heart of it, converting two goals from a combined expected goals value of just 0.49. That is a clinical overperformance of +1.51, the kind of number that tells you the finishing did far more work than the chance creation did.
Taking the half-chances
Expected goals models exist to measure quality of chances, and on paper Tengstedt's night did not scream danger. Low xG shots are, by definition, the ones that should miss more often than they go in. He flipped that on its head twice in the same match.
It added up to a match rating of 8.7, the kind of mark reserved for a night where a player's output simply outstrips what the run of play suggested was coming. Go Ahead Eagles needed every bit of it, with the scoreline finishing 3-2 against a Telstar side that made them work for the points.
Why it matters
Finishing above your xG is not a fluke that repeats indefinitely, but it is also not nothing. A striker who can turn 0.49 expected goals into two actual goals is doing something that chance quality alone cannot explain: composure, technique, timing, the instinct to make the keeper wrong. For one afternoon against Telstar, Tengstedt had all of it.
Eredivisie defenses will have taken note. The underlying numbers might suggest Go Ahead Eagles created little against Telstar in terms of pure chance quality, but the result on the board reads 3-2, and Tengstedt's name is next to two of those goals.