How Jamie Carragher made fools of everyone with his gibberish statistics

 

 

• How Jamie Carragher made fools of everyone with his gibberish statistics
• With football, history don’t mean a thing. Until we point out the lunacies

By Tony Attwood

Nicolas Jover was appointed as set-piece coach for Arsenal in the summer of 2021.  Since then Arsenal have scored more goals from corners (55) and set-pieces (68) than any team in the Premier League.

But this of course is not enough for the nit-picking Sky Sports and all the people who take every word said there as gospel.   For example, Jamie Carragher said on Sky Sports: “Arsenal have conceded six per cent of their goals from corners. That, would you believe, is the most in the top half of the Premier League.”

That sounds awful.  And it gets worse.   For he added “Only Manchester United are actually worse than Arsenal set-piece-wise. When we make a big deal about the set piece coach, he’s out of this world going forward but they’ve got a big problem defensively. Should we cut his wages in half?”

Now one of the things we should always do when anyone from the media quotes a statistic about it, is to think about the issue logically.  And that means investigating what “Six percent of the goals” conceded actually means.  Especially given that Jamie Carragher is an ex-Liverpool player who in his career ratcheted up no less than 70 yellow cards himself..  That issue though of course was not mentioned in the exchange about Arsenal’s corner tactics.

So let’s take the fact that Arsenal have conceded 29 goals against them in the league this season.  And then let us consider that six percent of 29; that is two.

I’d better repeat that to.  Two.   Arsenal have conceded two goals this season from corners.   And on the basis of that, the manifestation known as Jamie Carragher has decided that Nicolas Jover should not be lauded but actually should be considered for removal from the club.

And worse, the media has then given credence to this nonsense by publicising it when what they should have been doing is hiding their heads in shame at such nonsense while also cancelling the Carragher contract on the grounds that talking tripe doesn’t actually help the credibility of the channel..

But of course what the Carragher character wants, and what much of the media wants, is to knock the credibility of Arsenal and its staff.  It is something that Carragher tries to do over and over again.  And the one good thing about it is that he is so inept at it, it is easy to pick up and see where he is, as here, talking gibberish.

Of course his media pals don’t pick up on it largely because they are usually as biased and as dense as he is.  And anyway, who actually knows, without spending time going back through the records, how many corners of different types Arsenal have faced?

While there has been a variety in the routines of Arsenal and indeed other clubs, the method at corners that Arsenal has used has largely been the same: inswinging corners. Over 70 per cent of Arsenal’s Premier League corners were inswingers in Mr Jover’s first two seasons at the club.

And there is more because on occasion (for example in the games against Brentford and Ipswich Town) Arsenal have been experimenting with a new approach for short corners, which again confuses the opposition even more.

Now this sort of variation is something journalists generally don’t call, although it is what the grown-ups call “experimentation” along with a bit of “confusing the opposition”.  For everyone knows by now how Arsenal play corners, so using matches against some minor teams to try out variations is no bad thing.  That way the defence really has no idea what is coming their way.

The problem is not that the journalists don’t quite get what is going on, it seems that on occasion they are deliberately trying to knock Arsenal with gibberish statistics.  Whoever would have thought it would come to this?