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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 The 39th game, and George the first. Welcome back, pals! It’s a busy week, with League and Cup updates, and a couple of historical titbits for you. Last weekend’s game at Stamford Bridge gave us a clear answer to the question “Will Chelsea be hampered by the absence of four players at the African Cup of Nations?” “Not at all”, it appears. In fact, their 7-2 win was the Blues best result of the season. One more game like that and the question will be “Will Drogba be able to reclaim his place when he gets back from the ACN?” Chelsea are now odds-on to win the League, while Man. Utd have dropped back to 3/1, with Arsenal at 4/1. At the other end of the table, Portsmouth, Hull and Burnley are currently the favourites for the drop, with Wolves not far behind. Bolton’s odds on staying up improved after Owen Coyle was installed as manager, so the bookies have confidence in him at least! The 39th game Last year, the Premier League chiefs came up with a plan to add to the 1.6 billion pounds they already rake in each year. They wanted to add an extra round to the end of the league season, and have the games played around the globe wherever they could find hosts who would pay them a huge pot of money. Apart from the obvious drawbacks – the teams have already played each other twice, additional match congestion, interference with the Cup Final/Champions league final/players holidays etc – supporters groups (quite rightly in my opinion) universally condemned the idea, at which point the Prem graspers backed off, saying the idea ‘needed further consideration’. Most people thought at that stage it was the last anyone would hear of the crack-brained scheme. But no, the 39th Round is happening – this week in fact, but the only place it’s happening is here at ScoreFive! In case you didn’t notice the page-header when you logged on, an extra round has been cunningly inserted into this week, under the code-name Round 22A. This is because two of the matches that were postponed in Round 21 have already been re-scheduled, but too late for inclusion in the forthcoming Round 23, for which a couple of hundred entries have already been submitted. One of the Round 23 games has been brought forward, so that joins the rearranged pair in what is a high quality mini-round, involving as it does three of the top five, and three of the Big Four, of whom two are still involved in the Champions League, and clearly keen on avoiding a fixture pile-up later. Two of the games – on Weds. 20th – will probably have been played by the time you read this, but the third takes place on Saturday, while everyone else is concerned with the FA Cup. Who has no Cup game? Man. Utd, of course, and Hull. At the time of writing this (Tuesday) I can see that five of the six teams have already been nominated as bankers….curious, when the home teams are Arsenal, Man. Utd and Liverpool! Weekly highlights 1. In the League, we had a round characterised by half the teams failing to score. Nine clean sheets (from nine games played) was the highest of the season – the average is below three. Five teams from the bottom half gained points against their betters, with West Ham (at Aston Villa) and Hull (at Tottenham) the most deserving of praise. There’s clearly not much confidence in Blackburn: only 22% of you backed them to beat Fulham at home. Perhaps Man. City’s bright start to the Mancini era caused the 50% of you who sided with them to forget that Everton (with a mere 10% behind them) are recovering from their injury crisis. With the exception of Liverpool, the rest of the Big Four brought in a shipload of points for you, though the Perfectos from the Chelsea game was a fairly predictable round number. The essential details: average score was 13.34 points, and with Banker, 16.85. correct results average was 40.92%, Perfect 5s 9.14% and Bankers a rather low 70.14%, reflecting those surprises at Villa Park and White Hart Lane. Still, every cloud has a silver lining and we had a sprinkling of top predictions from players prepared to take a risk. Trotters went for the 0-0 at Villa Park, as did John.F – and he Banked on it! That’s a brave one…. DaleSB and Tito2010 knew it was going to be a blank day for the Spurs. Daberechi and Lawro nailed that Everton 2-0. Continuing our series ‘Banking The Hard Way’, Trotters decided that Blackburn were more reliable than M.U. or Chelsea, while Gazza179 reckoned Stoke would keep Rafa’s Reds at bay. It’s unusual to have a tie for Top Player of the Round, but this week we have a four-way share.
Weekly highlights 2. Tuesday night saw the last of the FA Cup Round 3 games. Accrington Stanley, Doncaster, Cardiff and Notts County should have got their breath back by the weekend, when it will be time for them to go into battle again. The delayed ties changed the round stats as follows: average points, 63.83, and with Banker 67.87. Correct results average was 57.53%, Perfectos 11.54% and Bankers 80.82%. No player achieved more than 24 results or seven Perfect 5s Most players sensibly backed big ’uns against little ’uns, and as upsets were at a minimum, we didn’t have many candidates for best Prediction. As previously mentioned, Unavi was the only player to back Leeds to win at Old Trafford, but backing most of the Prem teams to lose hasn’t done anything to help his chances in the competition. Other than that, I’ll nominate Seba77 and Filiposworku for their 5-0 Banker forecasts of the Chelsea-Watford game. Well done, chaps! Two players have muscled their way into the leading group, which now reads as follows:
The Football Strike Last week, I promised you the intriguing story of the era when footballers were paid the same as taxi drivers and similar manual workers. At the beginning of the 1960s, English players wages were controlled by FA rules that had existed since the end of the 19th century. Some of the conditions (e.g. the 10 pound ‘signing- on’ fee) hadn’t changed since the first World War! These rules restricted the wage that any club could offer; in 1960, the maximum was 20 pounds a week during the season and 17 pounds during the summer break. The pay of the England captain and a Division 3 clogger didn’t differ by much, and neither of them earned as much as, say, an engineer. The average pro didn’t have a car, and would travel by bus to the ground along with the fans. It was known that some clubs did slip their star players extra cash, illegally. The rules prevented ambitious clubs from offering more to attract better players, so it wasn’t just the players who disliked the status quo. The maximum wage would equate to less than today’s average working man’s wage of 500 pounds per week. Contrast that with the 2008-09 average Prem wage of 20,000 pounds per week! How did the change occur? The Players Union, as it used to be known, was led by a dynamic Chairman, Jimmy Hill of Fulham. Hill was an intelligent goal-scoring midfielder, who was later to have other roles including coach, manager, director, chairman, TV executive and presenter, and on one occasion, emergency linesman….a rather good one as it happens. From his appointment in 1957, Hill campaigned for several years of an increasingly bitter dispute with the FA and the clubs to have the maximum wage scrapped, and matters came to a head when the players took the extreme step of voting to strike! There’s an opportunity here for a half-decent joke about goalies and full-backs becoming strikers, but I’ll let it pass. The strike date was set for Jan. 20th 1961, and with 100% of the players backing it, the FA and the clubs were faced with their income vanishing. Desperate to avoid a stoppage, they conceded to the Players Union demands. The strike was called off on January 18th, and within weeks, clubs were announcing revised contracts for their players, with England captain Johnny Haynes becoming the first 100-pounds-a-week footballer. That was the beginning of the change of the status of footballers from workers to entertainers. Whether they are still sportsmen is a moot point. Wages began to gradually spiral from that point. With the advent of the Premier League in the ’90s and the money generated by the TV contracts that followed, wages ballooned. Even reserve players and bench-warmers are now multi-millionaires, and the sighting of a Man. City player on a bus last year was so unusual as to be reported in the papers. With the accumulated debts of the Prem clubs now past the two billion pound mark, it will be interesting to see if the present financial structure can survive. I reckon that wages have now reached a high point from which they can only fall. George the first (and Derek) Since I was a nipper, Saturday afternoons have been devoted to football. From eight or nine, I was going to league games with a couple of pals and their Dad. There was always someone in the crowd with one of those new-fangled transistor radios to their ear, bringing news to those round about of games going on elsewhere. “Rovers are losing….Utd are two up!” It added to the day’s excitement. By the time I was 14, and allowed to go off around the country on my own, following my team, I had my own transistor. Clunky by today’s standards (this was after all, the 1960s) , it kept me up to date with all the football news on my bus or train journeys home. On stuck-at-home Saturdays, the family radio was tuned to the BBC’s afternoon sports programme. It still is, 40-odd years later. The live reporting of football is thus an essential to my life, and I suspect, yours, and millions like us. How did it all begin? There was no outside-broadcasting of football matches anywhere in the world until 1927, when the BBC decided to have a go. The game chosen for their first attempt was Arsenal’s home match with Sheffield Utd. Highbury was close to the BBC’s headquarters of that era at Alexandra Palace in North London. The BBC doubted that the listening public would be able to understand where on the pitch the action was taking place, so they came up with what they thought was a cunning plan, but nowadays seems more like something that Baldrick would have devised. They published in their Radio Times magazine an article explaining about the planned football broadcast, and they included with it a diagram of the pitch, which they had divided into eight sections, four in each half. These were numbered 1-8, and the plan was for one of the commentators to describe the action, while the other told the listeners in which area the play was occurring. It didn’t take many games for the Beeb to realise that there were better ways to explain the location, and the phraseology we know today soon became embedded in the listening fan’s consciousness: on the left of his own area, near the by-line, down the right wing, in the centre circle… Eighty years after that first broadcast, for a bit of fun, the BBC broadcast the 2007 Arsenal-Sheff. Utd game with a commentator doing the ‘Areas’ stuff: it still didn’t work. When you switch on your radio or computer this Saturday and hear a familiar BBC voice saying “And we welcome you to Deepdale where Chelsea are the visitors” spare a thought for George Allison and Derek McCulloch. Their names are almost forgotten today, but it was they who led the way for all future commentators. Within a few years of their first broadcast, ‘football on the radio’ was commonplace, and before the ’30s were out, Arsenal were also the subjects when the first steps in televised football were taken – but that’s a story for another occasion. As for that first radio game, Arsenal took the lead through Charlie Buchan, the Van Persie of his day. Eh? Always injured? No, you dope, that’s not what I meant. Anyhow, after his blast (from Area 8), Sheffield equalised (probably from Area 1, but if you know for sure, please tell me) and the 16,831 spectators went home after the 1-1 draw not realising they had been present at the making of a bit of football history. This happened on 22 January 1927, 83 years ago this weekend. But you’d guessed that, hadn’t you? Until next week, pals, look after yourselves. Prof. Statto. |
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