The stats on Tony Ralston’s game last night have made McCann look even stupider.

As everyone knows, I have no time for people who make selective use of statistics. You can twist those stats any way you like to support even the most absurd arguments.

One such case I highlighted earlier in the week was the claim that Connor Barron is having a better season than Callum McGregor. This is preposterous, as anyone who watched the two players at Celtic Park at the weekend knows full well.

Still, I was amused this morning to read that one of the many stats-based analysis websites had rated Tony Ralston as Scotland’s MVP last night.

This will have come as a shock to anyone who heard Neil McCann attempt to blame him for the first-half result. It was also a surprise to Matthew Elder of The Scotsman, who highlighted the story… but that’s just a case of people seeing only what they want to see.

I wrote about McCann earlier; he was awful last night.

The stats-based analysis of Tony’s game reveals it to have been excellent. He got an assist, his pass completion was 94%, and he had 100% long-ball accuracy. He made six recoveries, two interceptions, and won nine out of twelve individual duels with opposing players. These numbers gave him an overall score of 7.9, the highest of any player in the Scotland side.

I’m not going to say I’d have named him Man of the Match, but those stats don’t surprise me either because I thought he was generally very good. When you see something like that and hear negative commentary, it’s good to have your view confirmed by hard numbers. It makes it ever clearer that McCann is only interested in putting the boot in. He wasn’t doing a proper analysis of how well Ralston played; he just wanted to blame him for something.

Solid statistics make it very hard for that sort of fictitious narrative to take root. This is one reason I really rate some of these stats sites – they can poke holes in the kind of nonsense McCann was pushing last night.

We all know, of course, that you can get guys like Clément trying to twist stats every which way to suit their own personal narratives. And as I said, we had the Connor Barron story, a ludicrous attempt to portray him as the equal of the Celtic captain.

But everyone knows those stories for what they are. Just as you’d recognise, if you watched Scotland properly last night, that Ralston had a very good game aside from the alleged mistake for the penalty. And even then, I still dispute whether it was a penalty kick.

Ralston is not a world-beater, and he’s never going to be. But he’s one of a number of players who have come on leaps and bounds under our last two coaches, Ange Postecoglou and Brendan Rodgers.

You can’t work under two outstanding managers like that without improving. And whenever Ralston has been in the Celtic team over the last few years, he has never let us down. Not only has he improved as a defender, but he’s also developed as an attacking player, something he’s proved for Scotland over the last year as well. He showed that again last night, getting an assist, moving up the pitch, beating his man, and getting crosses into the box.

A superficial analysis of his performance, based on a single mistake, is all some in our media are good for. Especially when you consider the bias attached to the commentary from someone like Neil McCann.

It’s not even that these people are incapable of properly analysing a game or a player’s individual display; it’s that when it comes to certain players, they don’t even want to try. One thing they are incapable of above all else is objectivity. That’s why I’m thankful for the numbers – because the numbers don’t lie.