Despite a gloriously sunny start to the day in Manizales, situated in the heart of Colombia’s “coffee triangle”, by the time Sunday evening had rolled around the mountain city’s skyline had become decidedly overcast.
As rain began to drizzle down on the Estadio Palogrande pitch, the tournament hopes of the Young Socceroos, who were trailing 1-0 to Ecuador in their opening game of the Under-20 World Cup, were starting to look as bleak as the clouds above them.
That’s when it happened.
Standing above a prone ball 30 meters from goal, FC Utrecht winger Tommy Oar took a deep breath before striking a swirling free kick that fooled Ecuador goalkeeper John Jaramillo and flew into the back of the net.
1-1 and Australia had snatched an unlikely draw.
Later that evening, as I sat in a mostly empty press box, I remember looking at the possession statistics and thinking to myself how little it told us about the game.
Australia had only just been shaded in the possession stakes (49 percent to Ecuador’s 51) but they’d been clearly outplayed – Ecuador controlled the game even when they didn’t control the ball.
It got me thinking about how useful the possession statistics, which are routinely broadcast around the world at half time and full time of games, actually are.
24 hours after Australia’s game I was in Medellin to watch England draw 0-0 with Argentina.
At half time the stadium announcer read out that Argentina had controlled 54 percent of possession compared to England’s 46. Yet it didn’t tell you a single informative thing about what had transpired over the preceding 45 minutes.
What was interesting is that England had ended up with 46 percent possession at half time when at the 20-minute mark they’d only seen 37 percent of the ball.
In the 30th minute midfielder Reece Brown had dropped into defence to replace the injured Nathan Baker and all of a sudden the amount of long balls the English defensive line were playing seemed to decrease.
Brown’s distribution into a rather open Argentine midfield proved vital in helping his side get back into the contest.
Yet while these two possession figures together highlight how and when England wrestled back control of the game, they don’t reveal the inability of Brian Eastick’s side to create clear goal-scoring chances.
This was a trend that continued throughout a game where England was arguably the better side without being good enough to win.
Which leads me to my main point – we are often hesitant to embrace statistics in football due to the fluidity of the game but I believe this is an over-reaction.
As an example let’s consider “shots on goal” and “shots on target” figures. In truth these numbers, at least when considered alone, really don’t give us a clear indication of how well a team is shooting.
This is because there’s a great difference between hitting a target when one on one with a goalkeeper and shooting from outside the area while an on rushing opponent is closing down your shooting angle.
By tracking more specific information on shots at goal you could find something out about the game that are impossible to gauge by simply aggregating them all into one lump “shots on goal” sum.
In fact, these statistics do exist, and most astute top class teams use them, but they aren’t the ones football fans tend to be fed.
So just because the statistics we consume are irrelevant doesn’t mean there isn’t a way to use numbers to further highlight and inform us on what has transpired in a game.
The true fallacy of football statistics is not that they are pointless, but that maybe we are yet to have discovered those that are truly revealing.
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