Lies, Statistics, & Gobbledegook

This is "north of the border" news, but there is great speculation that Mark Warburton is on his way out of Rangers, and moving on to Forest.

The newspapers are having a field day after he came out with a weird speech about "randomness & statistics", and the ridicule is alienating many of the club's fans.

Here is a section of the gobbledygook that has alarmed many observers. Is he being reasonable, or deluded, covering his back?


"I think randomness is a big thing.

I learned a lot from our previous owner at Brentford. He’s a mathematician and we learned a lot from him in terms of how he looks at games.

The randomness; the ball goes to the back post, Kenny heads it to Jon Toral and it could go in. Joe Garner’s header pops off the goalkeeper, it could go in. Joe in the first-half at the far post is a stud away.

There were so many random natures that didn’t go our way. Was their goal offside? I don’t know, it was tight. Not worth complaining about now.

So these are the random natures you look at and you hope over the course of a season they even themselves out.

I quote the stats and, as always, you get misquoted. The fact is we had 15 corners, 26 shots, 18 on target and nine times out of ten we win that game of football.

Look at the stats again and they will tell you that our midfield three for example ran 12km each. These are high numbers in central midfield."