Marchons, marchons!

Welcome all to a brand new week. Hopefully this post will provide some form of light relief following the appalling news over the weekend. Friday’s game saw yet another bumper crop of eager young (and not-so-young) things turn up for a game, with a grand total of nineteen players in the mix.

Here’s what the PASS supercomputer came up with:

Blues: Mario, Joseph, Peter, Danny, Mick, Chris, Simon Gas, Tim and Liam

Yellows: Alex, Jaime, Patrick, Antonio, Callum, Alan, Ian Baggies, me, Phil and Ross

As you can see, ten plays and nine and a real work-out for the highly complex algorithm deployed by the ones and zeros of data crunching.

It was first blood to the Blues; almost literally, when Peter stood on my index finger following a goalmouth melee, but Peter soon got on the scoresheet with a clinical finish following some Klopp-style pressing on the Yellows fullback positions. Callum soon equalised, for the first of his four goals, and then the scoring continued in a percussive, ding-dong fashion right across the hour’s play.

I think Patrick got the second Blues’ goal – whether or not it was the second or third Blues goal it was a fine finish. The LSE undergraduate controlled a lobbed pass on this left knee and swivelled to smash an explosive volley into the bottom left hand corner of the goal. Danny then scored a very good equaliser, guiding the ball high over the ‘keeper’s head with his left foot after a tigerish tackle from the left wing.

Callum, meanwhile, was gorging himself at the other end, clinically seizing on any errant pass and volleying home an array of goals with dead-eyed aplomb. At the other end, Peter and Liam were in similarly voracious mood; Peter got a hat-trick on the night with characteristically efficient shooting, while Liam performed his trademark roll manoeuvre to get on the scoresheet. On another night he could have had at least three, as a cheeky flicked header landed just the wrong side of the post, while another opportunity went begging after he managed to overcompensate by shooting wide of the goalie’s left and also the post.

Antonio was also in amongst the goals, capitalising on a blocked attempted clearance from Peter to ping home a nice volley, which made it something like five apiece.

After Callum had scored goal number four and Liam made it six for the Blues, Antonio was on the end of a fearsome looking crunching tackle from Chris and had to withdraw from proceedings. This should have left the Blues with an advantage and with a few minutes left the smart money would have been on them grabbing goal number thirteen on the night. However, following an abortive first whistle, play continued and Ross harried Danny and assorted Blue defenders to slam home a seventh goal for the Yellows just as the whistle was being peeped. To be fair, around half of the Blues’ players had stopped playing, but not those immediately in front of the goal.

If 6-6 sounds like a tennis score, think of Ross’s finish as a tie-breaker. We agreed that in the Golden Clog award, given to this season’s highest scorer, Ross’s ‘goal’ from Friday would be denoted with an asterisk.

To the Skinners, where a few of us watched the highly predictable death-by-a-thousand-passes 2-0 win for Spain over England. There were a few England players looking out of their depth, to be frank, which doesn’t augur well for next Summer’s Euro tournament. With Alan and Mick choosing to watch Ireland take on Bosnia-Hercegovina in the Irish pub around the corner, it was a relatively early finish to proceedings. On the way home I was checking the other scores when the terrible news from Paris started to roll in. Tomorrow night’s game at Wembley should be a highly emotional affair. I think the idea of England fans singing La Marseillaise is a very laudable one, but given that they struggle to keep time with the moronic theme from the Great Escape I think a dignified silence would best given the circumstances.

I’m off to Cornwall this weekend, so I’ll rejoin you in two weeks’ time.

The Last Empiricist

Another great night for empiricism this week, as the new Jarvis Player Attribute Statistics System (PASS) helped create another close game. Following last week’s debut for the PASS methodology, Simon Gas put it through its paces once again, with a grand total of nineteen players and two significant late changes, (Phil dropping out to be replaced by Alex).

Here’s what the super computer came up with:

Yellows: Simon Ink, Paul, me, Danny, Liam, David, Jaime, Tim, Mark and Alex

Blues: Mario, Nick, Simon Gas, Ross, Mick, Dan, Patrick, Ian Baggies, Tony

As the game kicked off the Blues looked slightly stronger and quickly took a stranglehold on possession, with Mario, Nick, Dan and Tony looking to set up Ross and the young legs of Patrick. However, around ten minutes in Tony pulled something or other and had to withdraw, a turn of events which saw Paul cross the Rubicon and pull on a Blue bib. Nine aside. Game on. 

As is the custom, Danny started off in goal for his team – this week, Yellows – and on conceding the first goal (Patrick the scorer), he was replaced by myself. The Yellows equalised through Liam, before two very soft goals saw the Blues take a 3-1 lead. First, a corner from the right wasn’t parried properly by either Simon Ink or myself to allow Ross to steal in, while a few minutes later the two Simons once more got into a defensive jam with a speculative pass that allowed Ross to nip in and ram the ball home into an empty net. “Ridiculous”, said Jaime. He wasn’t wrong.

The Yellows did manage to get back into the game, however. Having got one goal back to make it 3-2 (Mark doing the damage), Jaime scored a brilliant equaliser, running from the halfway line wide on the left before smashing the ball in off the crossbar and over the line. More was to follow: Liam calmly controlled an excellent pass from Alex to steer past the ‘keeper and suddenly the Yellows were 4-3 ahead.

Sadly, the comeback could not be completed, as the Blues scored two more – both were close range finishes as the Yellows’ legs began to tire and were unable to clear the ball. Patrick and Ross were the beneficiaries, the latter completing his hat-trick. (Props to Ross for details of all the goal scorers).

That was the end of the scoring, although the Yellows did have other chances and the game had assumed a real end-to-end feel by the close of eight ‘o’ clock. A rare week saw not one ball hammered out of the park and into the murky surrounds of Coram Fields, while controversial incidents were limited to a foul on Liam by Nick which went unpunished owing to the proximity of Ross, who provided the other slice in the Blue sandwich that done for the effervescent Scotsman.

Final score: Blues 5 – Yellows 4

To the Skinners again, with topics under discussion this week including Tim Sherwood’s abortive managerial career, the merits of Klopp versus Brendan Rodgers, plans for the Christmas do (vote Curry House!) and why young children don’t play football, or much of anything outside the home anymore. Simon Gas also filled us in on his Euro accumulator, which yielded the princely sum of £46 and Mark ended the evening by relaying the backstory behind Rangers’ demise in Scotland.

The mild weather continues and so does my PASS - see you on Friday.

A Victory for Stats!

Following last week’s mismatch, I came up with a new system for picking the teams this week. I assigned each player a numerical value based on their overall on-pitch effectiveness (i.e. how good they are at football) and pasted these names and values into Microsoft Excel, whereupon I tried to get the two bottom lines as near as damn it. Not necessarily the easiest manoeuvre when there are odd numbers, but who said Maths was easy? Not me, that’s for sure. I only got a ‘C’ at GCSE and that was the best I could have got, as I was in the thickie la-la set.

These values have been saved in an hermetically sealed data storage facility on an ice-bound Scandinavian outcrop in the Baltic Sea and can only be accessed using a complex entry mechanism based on unique biometric data and an advanced knowledge of the names of the pets I’ve had in my life. So don’t ask.

Once I’d locked the data centre and flown back to London after changing flights in a secret mountain top airbase the following teams came out of the supercomputer:

Yellows: me, Phil, Steve, Alan, Tony, Liam, Jaime, Peter and Mario

Blues: Ian Baggies, Andy, Tim, Simon Gas, Dan, Ross, Joseph, Danny, Antonio and Yev’s mate Vitaliy

Bizarrely, Yev arrived early with the aforementioned Ukrainian goalmonster Vitaliy, which was as Alan pointed out nothing if not perverse, but then what else would you expect?

I’ll have a go at recalling all nine goals. 

I can’t quite remember which team scored first, but I’ve a feeling it was the Yellows through Phil, who bagged a brace on the night. His first effort was a clinical finish following a centre from the left after some decent approach play from Liam, who was selflessly ploughing a lonely furrow at left half, while the second came from a fairly acute angle on the right. 

By this stage the Blues were not so much knocking on the door as pounding it with heavy ordnance. Despite a couple of saves from myself to deny first Vitality, at point blank range from a header, and then Antonio (I managed to claw out a cheeky chip from just under the crossbar) Yev’s compatriot nearly took the net away from the stanchion with a violent volley that flew in from just outside the area after some clever prompting from Antonio.  

Having got his eye in with his first goal, Vitaliy then went berserk. I can’t remember how much velocity was on goal number two, but the one to complete his hat-trick almost sang as it left his left foot and flew like an arrow into the top right hand corner of the net, leaving Tony with no chance in goal.

Although the Yellows saw plenty of the ball and created a hatful of chances, Peter and Mario were uncharacteristically profligate while Phil, Liam and Steve all had chances of varying degrees of difficulty to finish but came up against a resolute Blues’ backline that was just a little too well organised for the Yellows to get past. At the other end Antonio’s intelligent passing allied to Ross’ tireless running and Danny’s tenacity created the bullets for Vitaliy, who proved to be absolutely clinical. I believe that Ross was also amongst the goals and the Blues eventually ran in six, although at least one of those was when the Yellows were down to eight men (versus ten) when Phil had to retrieve one of the balls. The Yellows also got one more goal; Mario took a chance from distance that found its way into the bottom hand corner via Ian.

Final score: Blues 6 – Yellows 3

And with that victory for stats, we were off to the pub. Another decent turn out and another mild evening saw myself, Alan, Ross, Liam, Tim (as well as Simon Gas, the Ukrainians and Steve) stay to discuss the following – 1) the fact that the Haka is a glorified dance routine for a bunch of preening bullshit munchers 2) the quality of pundits on BBC– compliments for Chris Sutton, Jason Mohammad and Wrighty, brickbats for Darth Crooks 3) the very much unappreciated and overlooked qualities of early 90’s pop-punk bands Mega City Four and Senseless Things.

A final word for Bristol Paul, who’s been in the wars a bit with his pushbike. Get well soon, mate. I hope you enjoyed reading the card, although Simon seemingly selected the most girly one that Clintons stock.