Haha. Amazing, isn’t it?
The Record is forever trying to find ways of making the Ibrox club out to be superior to us in some way, and although today’s latest moon-howling effort is dressed us as some kind of backhanded compliment to us, the inference is clear; when the Ibrox club starts getting its shots in the back of the net we’ll not see them for dust.
You have to love these kinds of stories; as I keep on pointing out, not one of them has ever won a football match far less a league title.
The author of today’s wonderful piece of nonsense is Mark McDougall.
Yes, this one.
Stats are equally wonderful.
You can use them to justify your point of view or to negate someone else’s.
It’s great that the media places such store in these sort of ones but refuses to acknowledge Ryan Kent’s crap goals and assists per games ratio.
Or rather, you could say that they try to paint over that stat by throwing a bunch of others are you … none of them anything to do with how teams actually win matches.
It’s pretty poor fare.
This is what the article says about their latest wonderful statistic.
“(They) have taken a mammoth 95 shots in their five games so far, which works out at 19 per game. And when you think of the lack of efforts they had in their miserable performance against Celtic, then it shows how strong they have been going forward in other matches.”
At this point it’s probably smart to ask what constitutes a shot.
Remember, this isn’t “shots on target.” This is shots.
Anything aimed in the direction of the goal, even if it ends up nowhere near the goal.
This might be my favourite line of the piece.
“With just 12 goals scored in the Premiership this season it’s a rate of 11.4 per cent although they do hit the target with 45.6 per cent of their shots, so perhaps they are just coming up against strong goalkeepers.”
Hahaha strong goalkeepers.
Priceless.
Our ratio of goals to shots is 13.14%.
Maybe we’re just coming up against bad goalkeepers, eah?
Although that would include Allan McGregor, against whom we scored twice at Ibrox.
The article then gets into the stats that will “worry Neil Lennon” … if, that is, he’s not laughing somewhere instead.
“The Hoops (hit) the target with just 19.71 per cent of their strikes, getting only 27 going where they want it to …” it reads. Oh dear. Neil will be so concerned. Funny that in those 27 shots on target we’ve put the ball in the net 18 times.
You know what that means? When we get the ball on target our success rate is very high. You’ll note that there’s no published stat for goals per shots on target … and you don’t even have to work it out because I’ve already done that. And here’s the figures.
The Ibrox club scores with 27% of its shots on target. We score with 66% of ours.
Instead of bothering to look at this critical stat the article then starts in on the three strikers, Edouard, Defoe and Morelos, putting both in front of Eddie in terms of goals per minutes on the park.
Pathetic, absolutely pathetic.
They’ll also got more shots than he has, which means in two out of two of the criteria The Record has chosen to focus on, he’s third.
Once again though, let’s look at the crucial stat they don’t want you to read. All three players have three league goals, so surely the only stat that will accurately reflect their prowess in front of goal is the percentage of chances they convert?
Will the article look at that? Of course not, instead it publishes the raw figures, trying to get you to focus on that Defoe and Morelos have taken more shots … there’s a good reason, of course, why they don’t want you focussing on what the numbers mean.
In an article which is allegedly about shots and goals you’d think this would be a vital one to report on. Since they won’t, let me have a go.
Defoe has a shot to goal ration of 33%. Morelos has a shot to goals ratio of a laughable 18%. French Eddie beats both with a shot to goal ratio of 37%.
At least he and Defoe are in the ballpark of each other on this one; in terms of the two clubs and their goals to shots on target figures they’re not even close.
We are a more clinical team with a more clinical striker.
You’ll notice that there is zero analysis of our goals from Forrest, Christie or Mikey Johnson either … their stats are probably as impressive as Eddie’s and are a big part of why we’re sitting at the top of the league.
You know, the one that matters?
The one they give out trophies for?
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