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A Bunch of Fives So when all is said and done we translate the number of times a ball has landed in the back of a net, past and present, and somehow work out why it was so obviously going to be so and what will happen in the future!! That’s the unenviable task of our resident expert Professor Statto, Nobel Prize Winner in waiting, who’s been explaining the meaning of football life and giving comfort to his followers for years.  He’ll tell you why your predictions were bound to be wrong. He’ll tell you about the most outrageous possibilities to come. He’ll tell you…But whatever he says remember: “98% of all statistics are made up.” ~Author Unknown Professor Statto and his amazing statistics. ====================================== Previous analysis Week 30.... Week 29.... Week 28.... Week 27.... FA Cup Round 5.... Weeks 25Head to Head, Sore Head, Hot Head and Old Big 'Ead
Hello again, friends, and welcome back. I’d be happy if it was a three- or four-horse race, but Arsenal’s return to form has come a bit late: the 10 point gap between them and the Mancs is unbridgeable at this late stage. Chelsea may yet inject some Blue into the Red v Red tussle, but they chose a bad week to relax their death-grip on Spurs. In 37 matches between the pair before last Saturday, Spurs had won a single, solitary one. One! No wonder Chelsea fans talked about visits to Three Point Lane! I picked up an interesting snippet from last week’s Sunday Times in the UK: Chelsea have not won a match against another London team this season. Their record is three draws (with Fulham, West Ham and Spurs) and defeats to Arsenal and Spurs. What a difference from Mourinho’s time, when they won 21, drew seven and lost only two of 30 London derbies. Beginning April 25, they’ve got three opportunities in a row (v. West Ham, Fulham and Arsenal) to resuscitate their capital reputation.
Weekly roundup
Top Players
Top Leagues While perusing the leagues this week, I noticed we have a pair where the average score is now over 500. See below the leading contenders for the honour of Top League, assessed upon the average score of the players. Obviously the more players in your league, the more difficult to sustain a high average, so clearly, they know a thing or two at AMNAS1 – and, like the Archers, it’s not an all-male bastion. More on this as we approach the finish line, May 24.
Qualification: min. five active players. Any retiree remains within the league for the three months following their last recorded score….to prevent laggards expiring in freak gardening accidents etc.
Daze of the weak? In football, we’re less aware of such variables, particularly the calendar effect. OK, we know simple stuff like Liverpool are unbeaten at home this season, and West Brom didn’t get a point in February, but how about the days of the week? I had a feeling last week’s West Ham/West Brom 0-0 bore-draw wasn’t the only dull Monday game we’ve had, so I decided to look into it, and while I was about it, check on the other six days as well. As you’ll see from the table below, on five of the six weekdays, the average goals per game are remarkably even. Those of you who don’t remember any Friday night games are quite right – all the 10 took place on Boxing Day. My suspicion of Monday night games turned out to be well-founded, with the 11 games yielding a mere 18 goals. Why should Monday be any different?
Not for the first time, I have a theory. Those of you who keep an eye on the newspapers cannot fail to have noticed the regularity with which ‘Premier League Star in nightclub punch-up / accused of molesting woman / drunk-driving case’ feature, despite the efforts of their agents / managers / legal representatives to sweep such events under the carpet. For one thing, the carpet just isn’t big enough any more. Sometimes, the misbehaviour is a team effort: The fisticuffs at Hull City’s ‘team-bonding’ visit to a casino resulted in Marlon King being de-bonded to Middlesbrough. To be fair, it’s not only the Prem players who get out of hand. A ‘meet the fans’ evening for Oldham Athletic’s players at Belle Vue greyhound track really went to the dogs. Manager John Sheridan (or to be precise, now ex-manager John Sheridan) ended up brawling with a couple of his own players! Those last two events are unusual because they didn’t happen in the West End of London, which, according to the gossip columns, is heaving with footballers every weekend, and they’re as likely to be from distant Northern teams as the London clubs. All that travel must be wearying, not to mention the drinking, fighting, demonstrations of the horizontal tango and it’s variants. By Monday morning, folks, I reckon the majority are knackered, and in no condition to turn on the silky skills (those who have any) come 8pm. Result? 1.64 g.p.g. in those dull Monday night games. Those of you who understand graphs can see from my table that the g.p.g. appears to reach a peak between Wednesday and Friday. If you, like me, think goals = entertainment, let’s start a campaign to abandon Monday games and instead, have a few on Thursdays before players begin their strenuous weekend social lives. Hey, maybe that’s why there are no Thursday games – players don’t want to roll up at China White’s looking knackered!
Hell hath no fury….. Others, however, have more to lose than a few hot dinners. Take for example a Peruvian chap called Carlos Delgado. His separation from model (as in catwalk, rather than blameless) wife Fiorella Faré took an ugly turn at the beginning of March when he rejected her alimony demands. She responded by ‘borrowing’ 4,000 pages of documents detailing Delgado’s business activities, and began leaking them to the local media in Lima. Why should this be of interest to us? Because he’s a football agent. Those of you who are familiar with the (allegedly, folks, always allegedly) cavalier attitude to laws and regulations of this profession will know that Delgado should have sought to mollify La Fiorella before things got out of hand, but he didn’t. Oh dear…. The first casualty was respected Werder Bremen President Jurgen Born, who resigned following the revelation that he and his son had accepted $50,000 each after contracts for two of Delgado’s players at Werder were extended. Born says the payments weren’t related to the contracts – but he would say that, wouldn’t he? Another who is suffering is Delgado’s pal and business partner, Claudio Pizarro of Chelsea, currently on loan at Werder Bremen. A document from Faré’s collection reached German newspaper Bild On Sunday, revealing that Pizarro owns a percentage of the transfer rights for a fellow player, one of the two in the Born case. FIFA rules prohibit any player acting as an agent: Pizarro could be facing a two year ban as a result. As gossip columns everywhere await more titbits, you can bet that Delgado’s phone has been busy with calls from his other business colleagues urging him to pay up before more names and deals are revealed. And we can be sure that the rest of the Union of Mr. 15%s have been careful not to upset their spouses, at least until the removal of all their incriminating documents has been completed.
Most Frequent Scores
Not just a Big ’Ead At the time, Cloughie was a young up-and-coming manager, having won the 1971-2 League title with Derby and been cheated out of the following year’s European Cup in the Semifinals. I was at Wembley in August when he led out Leeds alongside the immortal Shankly and his Liverpool for 1974’s Charity Shield. I remember thinking “The king, and the one most likely to dethrone him”. Within weeks it had all gone sour and we had to wait a couple of years for Brian’s second coming with Notts. Forest. By the time this bunch of talented misfits had scraped out of Div. 2 and unaccountably set the top division and Europe alight, the success had gone to Cloughie’s head and his ego was barely controllable. He further annoyed people by habitually being right. Always ready with a clever quip, he was lionized by the media, in a similar fashion to Mourinho at Chelsea. But Brian won rather more than Jose, and at a fraction of the cost. Such was his profile that when he later went in for the England manager’s job, the FA turned him down though he was clearly the best qualified applicant. They feared being unable to control him. For years, every football writer used the same phrase: “The best manager England never had”. I agree. The joke among his detractors was “Cloughie’s the new England coach – they’ve taken his teeth out and put seats in”. In the years since he retired (1993) and died (2004) his real achievements have been obscured by regular re-showings of the wisecracking TV personality and Big Mouth aspects of his character. To redress the balance I’ll leave you with a few essential facts:
With no Prem games this weekend due to World Cup Qualifiers, I’ll be with you again in a couple of weeks. Until then, folks, take care. Regards, |
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