Whitey Grandad

If he thinks they were fantastic then he's living in a fantasy.

I only like savoury toppings.

Exactly. You can't pick and choose which games you're going to turn up for. Winning is a habit, and so is losing. Once you get used to it you stop caring any more.

Why this obsession with 'open play'? A goal is a goal, however it's scored, and if a player sets up twenty goals and scores none himself isn't he worth his place?

Certainly not. Some people expect too much of him.

We spent a day in Crimea and another in Odessa on a cruise a few years ago. We visited Sevastopol and Balaclava where we went round what had been a top-secret underground nuclear submarine base. The guide, whose husband was a lieutenant in the submarine service, said that on the break up of the Soviet Union there were over 300 submarines to share out. Ukraine got one. She also said that they were very pleased that Russia wanted to continue to use Sevastopol as its naval base because of the importance to their economy.

I know that our club would always go all out to win every game that they start so any suggestions that they don't are clearly preposterous and the incoherent ramblings of a deranged old man who is not responsible for his outburst. All in my humble opinion, of course.

I found it but you may need to log in: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/sport/football/finktank/article4006516.ece What should one make of Arsenal having more possession than Liverpool in a game they lost 5-1? Is this one of those results that randomness produces? Or do the numbers mean that possession is irrelevant? Dr Henry Stott, Dr Mark Latham and Gabriella Lebrecht have been looking at possession to try to make sense of matches in which a team hold the ball but still lose badly. Swansea, as the graphic suggests, are the team with the highest possession on average in a game this season. It would seem that there is some relationship between good teams and possession, but not a consistent one. There is quite a difference between Manchester City’s possession and that of Crystal Palace, yet Southampton have more of the ball than Chelsea. Using the same data (but since 2010) with a scatter plot of possession against points and league position, it can be seen that Swansea are an outlier. The more possession you have, the more points you get. Next, possession was broken down into thirds of the pitch. Arsenal emerge as the side with the highest portion of their possession in the final third. But there isn’t a huge variation: 27 per cent of Arsenal’s possession is in the final third, 26 per cent of the Manchester clubs’ and 25 per cent of Chelsea’s. We then developed a measure that combined passing in the final third with possession there and found this was correlated with points more strongly than possession by itself. Finally, we looked at the strength of the correlation between some of these measures of possession and outcomes. The measure for combined final-third possession and passing did seem to be related to shots on target. But most measures were only weakly related. If a team increase final-third possession by 10 per cent, it is associated with just 0.87 additional shots on target. So even big changes in possession have little relationship with outcomes, and we can’t assume a causal relationship either. The Arsenal defeat was an outlier, perhaps, and randomness was clearly doing its work, but the main lesson is not to pay much attention to possession statistics. http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00523/FinkTank_523467a.pdf

Indeed, almost as though we didn't want to win.

It was obvious at 2-0 that our players didn't have the belief or desire to get back into the game. I view the substitutions as an opportunity to give some more game experience to Victor and Sam and I expect other youngsters will get more outings during the rest of the season.

I thought it was a fair tackle, no booking, no foul.

Nicholson?

Very interesting, thanks. I'm surprised at how few I've seen, and of those that I have how few I've actually enjoyed.

It was Daniel Finkenstein (I think) a couple of Saturdays ago.they do all sorts of analyses and in this case it was all teams, all matches. I'll try and search for it but the trouble with The Times is that you have to log in first and it's a bit of a palaver.

That seems to me to be the most likely outcome.

Do you always do that after a meal?

There was an article in The Times a couple of weeks ago which concluded that the amount of possession had no bearing on the outcome of the match based on an analysis of previous matches.

Clinicó

Much the same thing, really.

It always takes several games after an injury like that to get back up to speed and to go into tackles with total confidence.

Thanks, I think I'll scoff.

Meh, end-of-season kick-about with nothing to play for. Never a penalty against Adam and even less of one for Suarez but not worth arguing over at 2-0 down.

Bottom half, somewhere around 44 to 46.

I was at Anfield in 1998 when we thrashed them 3-2

2003/2004? http://www.11v11.com/teams/liverpool/tab/opposingTeams/opposition/Southampton