The only important "fact" in a football game is the scoreline
That amazing, wonderful, triffic Man United 7-1 win over Roma will live long in the mind, and so it should, because all the goals were fab, not one from a corner, free-kick or throw-in. Even Roma's set piece was a proper bit of play, involving movement and invention, compared with all those scruffy set-piece 1-0 wins which Chelsea have scrambled for much of the season. What joy it brought to the jaded eyes of any neutral.
But dear God, that brill game did throw up something which has lingered equally long in my mind. Uefa's official statistics stated that Roma had 54 per cent of the possession, while Man United had only 46 per cent. Have you ever seen a more stupid stat?
Actually, loads of times. In our house, when we see a stat given big headlines and solemn presentation, proving the bleedin' obvious or something utterly potty, we say: "That's one of Pete's."
We met Pete on hols in the West Indies a few years ago, an agency journalist who'd stumbled on doing market research for a big supermarket chain. They gave him access to 1,000 customers, balanced socially and economically, so it's a kosher sample, whom he bombards with daft questions on their favourite shampoo or toothpaste, depending on what product is being pushed, but also their habits and opinions: when were they happiest, what makes them cry, do they sleep on the left or right side of the bed?
Each person gets a supermarket token for taking part, so it's worth their while to answer Pete's dopey surveys. He puts out the results, with graphs and poncey market-research loony lingo, with a subtle plug somewhere for the product, and hard-up newspaper subs clear the pages.
I estimate that on any day a quarter of the so-called "news stories", in the tabloids and poshos, are based on stats given to them for free, manufactured by the Petes of this world, PR departments of big businesses and organisations, or polls from so-called research institutes.
In football, the production of stats is now an industry in itself. The latest is the number of metres each player has run in each game - as if that proves anything! A centre-back, by definition, doesn't run all over the pitch, so what's the point in measuring his footsteps?
A goal poacher like Jimmy Greaves hardly broke into a sweat, never mind into a run, so his work rate, on paper, was laughable. He wouldn't get away with it today, but even so, someone like Cristiano Ronaldo can be out of a game for long spells, then explode. It's what you do with the ball that matters, not how long you have it.
The only important fact in football is the scoreline. All else is opinion, however much the computers and anoraks try to impress us with their stats.
"Comment is free, but facts are sacred," so wrote C P Scott in the Guardian in 1921. I remember being told this when I first started as a journalist on the Manchester Evening Chronicle in 1958 and thinking, Hmm, you what? But not saying it. It's still taken as gospel in all journalistic schools: facts are what matter most.
Me, I think facts are overrated. I've always been more interested in opinion. And if you look today at the wages of any news reporter on a national compared with the hundreds of thousands paid to comment merchants, from Simon Jenkins to Richard Littlejohn, it's clear that comment is what's valued most. Hence the cheap and potty stats that fill up the remaining space.
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