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A Bunch of Fives So when all is said and done, we analyse where, when and the quantity of times a ball has landed in the back of a net, past and present, or failed to, and somehow deduce why it was destined to be so. That’s the unenviable task of our resident expert Professor Statto, who brings us the benefit of his incisive intellect allied to half a century of football scholarship. And not least, his wry sense of humour.  He leaves the predictions to others, but he’ll provide you with the ammunition to sustain your challenge through your Score Five campaign. He’ll keep you up-to-date with what’s happening in the competition. He’ll lead you along byways exploring weird and wonderful facets of the game past and present, but always in his own inimitable style. Some comedian once suggested that “98% of all statistics are made up”, but the Prof. cordially invites you all to verify any information he presents – if only because he does most of the calculations in his head. Professor Statto and his amazing statistics. ====================================== Visit the Prof's 2008/09 season archives. Previous analysis Red Faced And In The Red Hello again pals, I trust you enjoyed the Cup weekend. You can be sure that the Purple Knight of Old Trafford didn’t, and his mood wouldn’t have been improved by shouts of “The manager must go” from callers to MUTV. With informed press speculation that the club’s debt is now in excess of a billion dollars (or 700 million pounds, if you prefer) it would be surprising if SAF flashes the cash this month to bring in reinforcements to his injury-hit squad. More likely it’s the team across the city who will be doing the big deals, and that will enrage Fergie even more. This one doesn’t quite go to 11…. For the second round of league games in succession, we have new names on the ScoreFive Great Wall Of Fame. With results following form in the last pair of Prem games of 2009, Afitzsimmons (Australia, Arsenal & Public League 16) and Pieeater (Australia, Chelsea & Public League 13) completed the full set of 10 correct results to qualify for the Tenners Club. The first of two opportunities to move up to an unequalled 11 results was lost when Stoke foiled our intrepid pair by overcoming Fulham and a blizzard at the Brittania Stadium on Tuesday night, while the second slipped away as ice and snow forced the postponement of what would surely have been a routine win for Arsenal on Wednesday night. With Fitz on 42 pts and a Gunners win as his final forecast, the certainty of a new record was also lost. For now, he joins Sarajevo at the top of the Single Week’s Score list. Well done to him and the Pieman.
Weekly highlights Pt. 1 The Cup For those of you reading this far from frozen Britain, the third round of the FA Cup is one of the favourite weekends of the year for most fans of the English game. This is when the 44 bigger clubs – from the Premier League and the Championship – join the 20 lower-league and even non-league teams who have battled through the earlier stages for the chance of a tie against a Big Name, and the big payday that accompanies it. Conference side Barrow travelled with hope and 7,000 supporters to Sunderland, while fellow-ex leaguers York City slogged over the snowy summits on the M62 motorway to Stoke, along with their army of followers. Naturally, Big usually overcomes Small, but everyone looks forward to an upset, or giant-killing as it is known. This round is your biggest predictions job of the season, with 32 ties. Among the 23 played on Saturday, all 15 Giants involved survived, apart from the two (Blackburn and Hull) who were up against other heavyweights. Sunday’s five ties saw the biggest of all the Giants toppled (at home!) by a former Giant and deadly enemy – one could hardly call the relationship between Man. Utd and Leeds Utd. a rivalry. There are still four ties remaining: all were called off due to bad weather, and will now take place next week, so we’ll have a while to wait until we know who our Round 3 prizewinner is. The essential details first: the average points score was 56.73, and with Banker included, 60.80. Correct results were 58.82%, and Perfect 5s 11.72%. With all but 19 players treading warily around the showdown at the OT Corral, the correct Banker percentage was a respectable 81.40%. In the 17 ties where Bigger met Smaller, four of the underdogs managed draws, and one won. If you did well at the weekend, you’re already halfway to a good Cup run. The number of surviving clubs halves each round, as does the number of matches. As we don’t predict replays, we’ve had 50.8% (32 of 63) of the games. It wasn’t a good week to forget your predictions. After an excellent run of late, Magic Mike dipped into the lower half of the standings. Like almost everyone else, he was undone by Fergie’s Old Trafford nightmare, all the more so since that game was his banker. In case you’re wondering, one player did predict that Leeds win: Unavi, but as he also predicted that eight other Prem clubs would lose to or draw with inferior opposition, I think we’d have to agree that this was more of a blunderbuss success than a laser-guided strike. Supergirl was another who took the romantic view, predicting a long list of unlikely embarrassments for the big boys. Alas, you’ll find these two, along with Statistical Norm, down at the bottom of the Cup rankings: upsets are upsets because they are rare. For weeks, most of our top weekly performers have been Big Four fans, but they’re hard to find this week. Everton, West Ham and Citeh fans outnumber Liverpool’s and Man. Utd’s, there are more Spurs than Chelsea and we have unusual sightings of Notts County, Millwall, Celtic and Sheff. Utd fans in the elite 70-plus group. The pair over there with the funny shaped ball are from Carlton and Central Coast Mariners! League-wise, the usual inhabitants appear to have migrated – no AMNAS, Crossmark, Meywin Posse….only one Archer, an Opticore, a solitary Dublin Jack and a rare glimpse of a FansOnLine, far from it’s usual winter habitat in Spain. The world-wide reach of ScoreFive is clear: the Cup Top 20 includes representatives of New Zealand, South Africa, Malta, the Netherlands, Spain plus the usual quotient of Brits and Aussies.
Top players of FA Cup Round 3 With 28 games played and only one shock result, it’s something of a surprise to me that 21 results (75% correct) was the best performance. Maybe I’m becoming blasé after all the records of recent weeks. Sharing that mark are Top 10ers AndrewWelsh1958, Bertie, Scruffy and Rolls Roys, together with Desjohn a little further down the list. In third place with 77 pts is Alison Wright, who is on an unbelievable run, having also surged up the League ladder into 5th place, much to the annoyance of the two male ScoreFivers in her family, who she has left trailing far behind. She couldn’t tell you the name of the Arsenal ‘keeper or which team is bottom of the Prem, but she keeps on getting the scores right…. So unfair, eh, chaps?
Weekly highlights Pt. 2 The League Round 20 spanned two years – it started on the evening of Dec. 28th, and finished on Jan. 5th. The update after the ninth and tenth games threw up some interesting forecasts: we had three correct 5-0 predictions for the Man. Utd – Wigan game (Ra1anne, Theobosma and Numba1), which is a small miracle: last season, we had 36 5-0 predictions and only one was correct. The 1-4 result of Portsmouth-Arsenal isn’t a score you see often – that’s only the third time it’s occurred this season, but we had six players (Cfcmark, Gholyoak, Ninja, Fisder, Deivid and MKlosers) who predicted it. You won’t be surprised to hear that nobody expected a goal-fest at Stoke, so there wasn’t a single Perfect 5 collected from their game with Fulham. Finally, a mention for the best left-field Banker of the week: Rolls-Roys chose Blackburn-Sunderland to draw and was rewarded with 7 pts. Talk about doing things the hard way…. Those last three games resulted in quite a few changes among the top players of Rounds 20:
A winter break – whether you want it or not With most of the UK currently blanketed with snow, comparisons are being made with the severe winter of 1962-63, which had a catastrophic effect on football. We were lucky to have only four games called off last weekend: in 1963, only three games were completed on third Round Day, Jan. 5th. Nine ties didn’t take place until the first week of March, and some of them required replays. The Lincoln C. v Coventry C. game was postponed 15 times! The last replay was completed on March the 11th, two days after the Sixth Round games should have been played! The backlog of games caused the FA to delay the Fifth and Sixth Rounds, and the League season was extended to allow the teams to make up their backlogs, which for some was eight or nine games. The Cup Final eventually took place on May 25, three weeks after the intended date. If we have that same situation this year, someone’s going to have to make a choice between playing in the Cup Final or going to the World Cup!
The dangers of promotion If you’re a Wolves or Burnley fan finding life after promotion is a bit of a let-down (and the same could equally apply at Xerez, RKC Waalwijk or Nurnberg) the following tale should convince you that things could be a lot worse. Come with me now to the North-East of England, where hundreds of thousands of people consider football to be more important than health, wealth and even life itself. While fans of Newcastle and Middlesborough were suffering the agonies of relegation last season, their neighbours in the city of Durham were applauding a second successive championship by their team, Durham City. Founded in 1918, Durham City were Football League members for seven years in the 1920s, before declining to spend the next 20 years ground and league hopping, until stability was reached in the 1950s. They developed into respected non-leaguers, with occasional forays into the FA Cup, and would probably have stayed that way, watched by 200 regulars at each home game, had it not been for the arrival of a chairman with ambition, Or rather, Ambition. Stuart Dawson brought in major sponsors to enable ground improvements, and controversially, a 1 million pound synthetic pitch for their Ferens Park ground. One of the reasons for this was that it could be used through the week by youth teams and for the community. Even more crucially, the sponsorship meant new (better!) players could be recruited, and in 2007-08, the team became champions of the Northern League, achieving promotion to the Unibond League 1st Div North. The team surprised themselves, their supporters and opponents alike with a second successive championship in the following season. They won their League Cup too! Now elevated to the Unibond League Premier Division, at the start of the current season, the club were shocked to be told that if they were promoted again, their plastic pitch would not be acceptable at the next tier of the league pyramid. Instantly, their major sponsor withdrew, plunging the club into a cash crisis. This led to the whole squad being placed on the transfer list, and within weeks, they had all departed (with the exception of goalkeeper Marc Riches) to be replaced by teenage trialists and other teams cast-offs. The penniless club were soon reduced to asking their Supporters Association if the team could travel on the supporters coach to away matches. If that was embarrassing, the results were worse. They failed to pick up a single point from the first eight league games, at which point their goal difference was For 4, Against 35. Then in Mid-September, they drew a local Cup game (Hurray!) only to lose the replay (Booo!). Match reports praised the valiant efforts of the boys (and some are boys), indicating that some were very fine prospects for the future – but clearly, not this season. In the following month, they suffered five more league defeats before the joyous occasion of Oct. 20th when they achieved their first competitive win of the season, 1-0 in a League Cup game against Washington. Had the corner been turned? Was there a light at the end of the tunnel? If there was, it was only an oncoming train… After scoring two goals for the first time (yet losing 2-3), the City began a calamitous series of league games that finished 0-7, 1-7, 0-11, 0-7, 2-4 and 1-7. This run was punctuated by a Cup game, which offered false hope before defeat came, 1-3 in extra time. (‘City battled to the end and never looked a beaten side until the final whistle’). Early December brought some good news: that 0-11 massacre (at Kings Lynn) was expunged from the records when the Norfolk team ceased to exist due to legal problems. Nothing changed on the pitch though, and following two further defeats, Durham City’s record at Christmas was: Played 20 Won 0 Drawn 0 Lost 20. Goals For 13 Goals Against 98 They stand 19 points behind the second-bottom team, and are on course for a record early relegation. They haven’t played since Dec. 12th, and local reporter and loyal fan Ken Milgate is hopeful the break will have allowed the team to regroup ahead of their trip to Ashton Utd on Saturday. According to Ken, City ‘have shown their many conquerors they know how to lose with honour’. Very creditworthy, but I don’t think that’s what the fans want to hear, Ken! Durham aren’t the first team to run into problems due to a plastic pitch. I remember Luton, Preston and I think Oldham all having them in the ’70s and being compelled to tear them up under threat of expulsion from the league. Likely chairman Dawson doesn’t know that story. What’s that saying? ‘He who fails to learn the lesson of history is condemned to repeat it’? Until next week, pals, take care. Prof. Statto |
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