‘Giant-killing’ in Scottish cups

[oht]

I’ve been learning some new IT skills ahead of looking for new work, so I mashed together data on cup results and league tables going back to WWII, to look at 'giant-killing' in the Scottish Cup and League Cup. Results below – long post, but hopefully of interest to any stattos out there. League Cup group games are excluded as not really ‘giant-killing’ in terms of knocking a team out. League table data is from SPFL website, results data is from soccerbase, with lots of supplementing of shite/missing data with Wikipedia (still some oddities emerging but think it’s pretty good data at this stage).

Award for most 'giant-kills' against top division teams goes to the mighty, mighty Ayr. Interestingly, the data spans over 80 years but half of Ayr’s 20 scalps came in just a six year spell from 1996 to 2002. Top 10 hall of fame:

To give the diddiest of diddy teams a shout, the next chart is for knocking out anyone from a higher league, not just the top division. This should bring in some teams that have plied their trade in League 1 and League 2. A lot of overlap with the previous chart, but Raith leap-frogs Ayr to be king of the diddiest diddies and the likes of Queen’s Park, Alloa and Stirling make an appearance.

All very good, but it’s not really reflecting how many shots at knocking out higher league opposition that each team has had. The next couple of charts compare how much the actual win count for a team exceeds what would be expected (expected is based on the probability of beating a higher league team – see table at the end). Best ten and worst ten shown – you want your team to be to the left of this chart.

Hibs and Rangers doing well from their forays into the lower leagues but Airdrie out-performing expectations the most. Morton carries away the cap-doffing ‘yes m’lud’ trophy for rolling over.

Same again in the next chart, but for beating anyone from a higher division. Rangers, again, can do one and credit goes to Raith. ICT and one of its predecessors both doing well. Interestingly, some of the most famed giant-killers don’t fare so well here – Berwick, Stenhousemuir and Albion Rovers didn’t fare well on this scoring.

Flipping it all on its head – who in the top division has been dumped the most. Here you go:

And getting pumped by anyone from a lower league:

That’ll do with the charts for now. Next up – biggest wins in terms of gaps in league position (at the end of season). I’ve split this into league teams and non-league teams as I don’t have league positions for non-league. League first:

Competition	Season	Round	Home	Score	Away	LeagueDiff
Scottish Cup	2013/14	Fourth Round	Albion Rovers	1 - 0	Motherwell	37
League Cup	2006/07	Second Round	Queen's Park	p 0 - 0	Aberdeen	32
League Cup	2012/13	Third Round	Rangers	2 - 0	Motherwell	31
League Cup	1990/91	Third Round	Dunfermline	1 - 2	Queen of the South	28
Scottish Cup	2015/16	Fourth Round	Annan Athletic	4 - 1	Hamilton	27
Scottish Cup	1974/75	Third Round	Ayr United	1 - 2	Queen's Park	27

Albion’s win spanned almost the entire length of the divisions, with Motherwell finishing 2^nd and Albion finishing 7^th out of 10. Picking off a few surprising omissions from the top 5: Berwick’s win over Rangers was a league difference of 26 places so just below this table cut-off, Stenhousemuir’s win over Aberdeen was only 15 places difference and Clyde had 16 places between them and Celtic. Not too surprisingly, two-leggers don’t feature high up (first is Forfar beating Ayr in 1977 which was way down at joint 25^th for 21 league places difference). I originally had Cowdenbeath beating Hearts over two legs in 1983 in the above - the soccerbase and Wiki results both make it look Cowdenbeath won 2-1 on aggregate but I can see references to Hearts winning on penalties and definitely Hearts went to next round – dunno, but googling told me that that was the fixture that got Craig Levein spotted so now you know.

Same for non-league (reflects how high the team up that was dumped rather than difference in their actual league positions):

Competition	Season	Round	Home	Score	Away	Away_Division	LeagueDiff
Scottish Cup	1958/59	First Round	Fraserburgh	1 - 0	Dundee	First Division / Division A (1946-75)	33
Scottish Cup	2020/21	Second Round	Brora Rangers	2 - 1	Hearts	Championship/Division 1 (1994- )	29
Scottish Cup	2018/19	Fourth Round	Auchinleck	1 - 0	Ayr United	Championship/Division 1 (1994- )	26
Scottish Cup	1989/90	Third Round Replay	Inverness Cal	p 1 - 1	Airdrie	Division 1 (1975-94)	26
Scottish Cup	1953/54	Third Round	Berwick Rangers	3 - 0	Dundee	First Division / Division A (1946-75)	25

No non-league wins over top division since they restructured the divisions in 1975. Four wins for non-league teams over top division opponents before that, all with the non-league team at home. Two of those are shown above, and the other two were Elgin over Ayr in 1967 and Montrose over QoS in 1948. Some of the team names like Montrose and Berwick don’t look like non-league – I think that the old Division C prior to 1975 was considered non-league so that’s how I’ve treated it, league table data isn’t listed on the SPFL website at least.

Hall of fame for wins over the Gruesome Twosome below. 15 wins, just 4 of them over Rangers. It’s a lot to list, but hey, FTOF. Berwick’s win in 1967 was the biggest upset based on league positions, but fair play to Morton for being shortly behind them in more recent times.

Competition	Season	Round	Home	Score	Away	LeagueDiff
Scottish Cup	2015/16	Semi Finals	Rangers	p 2 - 2	Celtic	12
League Cup	2013/14	Third Round	Celtic	0 - 1	Morton	21
League Cup	2011/12	Third Round	Falkirk	3 - 2	Rangers	13
Scottish Cup	2009/10	Semi Finals	Celtic	0 - 2	Ross County	15
League Cup	2006/07	Quarter Finals	Rangers	0 - 2	St. Johnstone	12
Scottish Cup	2005/06	Third Round	Clyde	2 - 1	Celtic	16
Scottish Cup	2002/03	Fifth Round	Inverness Caledonian Thistle	1 - 0	Celtic	14
Scottish Cup	1999/00	Third Round	Celtic	1 - 3	Inverness Caledonian Thistle	14
Scottish Cup	1996/97	Semi Finals Replay	Celtic	0 - 1	Falkirk	13
League Cup	1994/95	Final	Raith Rovers	p 2 - 2	Celtic	7
Scottish Cup	1977/78	Fourth Round Replay	Kilmarnock	1 - 0	Celtic	11
Scottish Cup	1966/67	First Round	Berwick Rangers	1 - 0	Rangers	26
League Cup	1952/53	Semi Finals	Kilmarnock	1 - 0	Rangers	19
Scottish Cup	1948/49	First Round	Dundee United	4 - 3	Celtic	18
Scottish Cup	1946/47	First Round	Dundee	2 - 1	Celtic	10

Still here? Here’s a chart to scratch your head over – not even sure if it’ll be legible. It’s got teams mapped by attempts and wins against top division teams, but also with an arrow from their expected number of wins to their actual – upward pointing arrow is good, downward is bad. I chopped off anyone with less than 10 attempts so most of the non-leaguers drop off here. Ayr’s success being above average, Morton’s boot-licking all-apparent.

Last up, what are the historic chances of an upset? This table is probably a bit confusing, but it shows the percentage of times a lower league team turfed out a higher league team since the leagues re-structured in 1994 (I can do earlier but the table gets bigger). It’s split by whether the team was home or away. Games that went to replay excluded.

Home_Division	Premiership/Premier Division	Championship/Division 1	League 1/Division 2	League 2/Division 3	Non-league
Premiership/Premier Division	NA	19%	8%	4%	0%
Championship/Division 1	33%	NA	23%	13%	4%
League 1/Division 2	10%	28%	NA	24%	12%
League 2/Division 3	15%	21%	34%	NA	22%
Non-league	0%	15%	18%	31%	NA

So the way to read this is the division of the home team is on the left, and away on the right e.g. if Championship team was at home against Premiership team, they went through on about 33% of occasions. So everything underneath the NA is lower league team being at home, and above the NA is lower league team being away. If you follow the diagonal from 33% down to 31%, it’s showing that chances of a team beating another from one division up while at home is about 30% i.e. close to 2/1 odds. The diagonal from 19% down to 22% is saying that when that same match has the lower league team away from home, it drops to about 20% i.e. close to 4/1 odds. As you move out one diagonal further from the NA, that’s the results vs two divisions above and so on. It looks pretty sensible, though there’s a strange outcome that League 2 has a higher success rate at home versus Premiership than League 1 does – maybe League 2 teams being underestimated by Premier teams? They have 7 wins in 48 attempts versus 12 wins for League 1 in 115 attempts, so it’s not like it’s just one or two freak results chucking it around.

Think that’s as much as I can think of doing with all of this so I’m off to find something more useful to do. Any questions, let me know and I might be able to answer. If anyone wants to play with the tidied data themselves, I’ll upload it.

Edited June 17, 2022 by oht