In Wednesday's England-Scotland match, there were 12 attempts at goal by players whose surnames ended in N, 45 throw-ins taken by players with aunties living near Troon, 112 headers by players wearing red, white and blue jockstraps, three strikers had a tattoo saying "Tracey" on their private parts, there was a total number on the pitch, including subs, of 3,456 ginger pubic hairs, possession was three parts of the Denis Law, and shots on Scholes came to 13. Cole was disallowed thrice and the Opta Carling Faffing Around Index indicated 3,214 on the Karl-Heinz Riedle scale.

I'm making all of this up, as it's Tuesday and the match hasn't taken place yet, but we're bound to have stuff like that, or similar. I have newspaper stats covering the whole living-room floor for last Saturday's Scotland-England game, giving ratings for everyone and every little thing, telling me the exact percentage of headers on target, off target, chances in the penalty area, total passes, total passes completed, shots on goal, blocked shots, goals-to-shots ratio - oh gawd, it gives me a headache just looking at them.

In ye olden days, when I was a lad, we were quite happy with saucepans instead of computer games, banging two tin head Jerries together instead of Gameboy. We cut out photos of our heroes from the Pink 'Un and stuck them in old exercise books with paste made out of flour - oh, very environmentally sound.

We made our own fun, in them days, as Hoddle would say; made our own lists of how many goals our hero had scored, and we was happy, as Hoddle would also say. You got the league tables published once a week, and that was that. No need for anything else.

Now there's an avalanche, acres and acres of statistical analysis as newspapers compete to think up new ways of dissecting games and making them more meaningful. Or, in most cases, more meaningless.

Why is this, you ask? Tell us, Hunt, as you are so clever.

First, I blame the Americans. They have done this for decades with baseball and other kiddies' games, creating new sciences, new areas of study, with their own languages, all devoted to dopey records. It's a bit like economics. Basically common sense - but if you tart it up with enough complications, new words and some fancy graphs, you feel awfully clever, awfully knowledgeable. And you've given yourself a job for life.

This passion for sporting stats has hit Britain in the past couple of years as football has exploded in mass popularity. Papers now have so much space for football, every day of the week, and are desperate to fill it, especially on days with no games, which are now pretty rare.

You'll notice that the broadsheets have most of these potty lists. The reason is that they're cheap. They can't pay Alan Shearer £2,000 for three minutes on the phone - for writing his own exclusive column - which the tabloids can easily afford.

All the broadsheets can afford is £4.95 an hour, plus a canteen lunch, for some football-mad drip with a first in computer sciences from Cambridge to sit and create some statistics. Unless they can get this for nothing from a PhD student in theology from Durham doing work experience.

Computers . . . their rise and rise has obviously been a big influence on football statistics. Shove in a mass of assorted information, twiddle them about, and you can easily pull out any variations you fancy.

Commercial influences, that's another reason. There really is a Carling Opta how's-your-father statistical service, which the London Evening Standard always seems to use.

It's like research. You have primary, secondary and tertiary sources. There is so much commercial, advertising and marketing money chasing football these days that all the primary sources have gone, been bought up, such as Dwight Yorke's left thigh, or David Beckham's right buttock.

So you throw your money at secondary sources, such as sponsoring shirts or having your company's name on the lavatory at the Kop end.

If all this has gone, and you can't actually get close to anything to do with real football players or matches, then you are forced to sponsor facts about football. Fantasy football is a good example of tertiary involvement.

The middle class, that's another reason. We've always had anoraks, but with the arrival of the middle classes into football, we have a new and growing breed of young middle-class anoraks, most of them damn clever.

They have all the Rothmans, bought by Mummy and Daddy when they were little, all the computers and a lot of time on their hands as they don't want no boring professional-type career. They work for a pittance for a football fanzine, or one of the ever-growing football monthly mags, thinking up daft football stats, surveys, questions, lists - in order to amuse other daft lads, just like themselves.

The saving grace in Britain, unlike the States, is that we are already into a postmodern, ironic stage. A lot of the stats, especially those to be found on the Internet, are larky, rude, taking the piss. Something called Sporting Index was taking spread bets for the Scotland-England match on how many times David Seaman would touch his moustache or push back his floppy hair during the game. Brilliant, don't you think? You'd have to be really clever to work out the odds on that.

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