Same difference?




EPL Arsenal 2 Liverpool 1
FA Cup semis Arsenal 2 Manchester City 0

We must be the best team in England after beating Liverpool in the league and City in the FACup in the same week.  Heh.  Liverpool had just been crowned champions, and City (second in the league) were just a year on from their incredible defence of their title.

Our previous results against both were remarkably similar.  The first game at Anfield (below) saw us lose 3-1, and in our first game after the season restarted, we were hammered by City 3-0.  So I was definitely not hopeful going into this sequence of games and it was a minor miracle that we won not one, but both games.

But let's get real here.  While the results were a great boost for confidence and showed what the manager could do even with this bunch of players, we got lucky.  In both games we were second best but we fought hard and got some reward. My comment from almost a year ago about winning games we should have lost was prescient.

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August 2019
Liverpool 3 Arsenal 1 - good or bad #^^*?

I watched this game on my computer, no thanks to Sky - definitely bad s#*t there as the cable installation saga rumbled on. 

A simple analysis of the game is "We lost to a better team".  No one would argue with that, at least no one in his right mind.  In summary, we held out comfortably for 40 minutes, they had a corner and we suddenly lost all our composure in which no one seemed to remember that VAR had been implemented, conceded a goal and another just after half time because Salah was wearing too big a jersey, and another later because Luiz decided that his next port of call would be the Cirque du Soleil, and Nacho aged before our eyes before Torreira bless his soul, salvaged some pride.

But what made it interesting for me are the lessons you can learn about how we think about things and that came after the game when all the pundits, fans, bloggers and podcasters starting losing their minds over whether this was the same old same old of Emery being too cautious, or the first sighting of the next Invincibles.  Ok maybe no one was quite that deluded, but there were many who decided that we seem to have the makings of a good team again.  We now have hope, that thing that lives in the hearts of all football fans each season, whether it is to win it all, or just stay up with the big boys.

What that hope is founded on is important.  Modern football is analysed to death, much like other sports.  You'd think that data would be the one metric to rule them all but unlike baseball where all this "moneyball" started, football is a fluid and dynamic game.

Take for instance Xhaka, master of the passing stats.  The fallacy of football stats is that you need to know what you are looking at, and no one single statistic provides a holistic picture in order to determine who had a good game.  Ozil is probably at the other end of the spectrum.  He might do nothing for 89 minutes but produce the one killer pass which wins you the game.

Could we have won?  Is that the main parameter or does it even matter?   Over a season there will be games we should win but end up losing, and games we would be lucky to even get a point but end up winning.  Does it all even out?  So ESPN now has a luck index - not sure how it works.





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