Good Old Boy #44

Using statistics to assess the performance of footballers is increasingly popular. David James has a good story about possible drawbacks to this approach:

"Peter Schmeichel best showed how numbers can be fiddled. Years ago there was a story going round that Schmeichel got the hump because of the introduction of ProZone, so decided to prove a point. The very next match, so the tale goes, every time the ball was down the other end, Schmeichel did sets of sprints across the edge of his area to raise his high-intensity running stats. Anyone watching probably thought: 'Oh look there's Schmeichel keeping himself warm'; but he ended up beating one of the forwards on stats for that game."