CHELSEA BEAT UNITED AT EVERYTHING EXCEPT GOALS
Well what a fireworks display that was at Old Trafford today.
Manchester United fans had approached the new season warily after Ole Gunnar Solskjaer's honeymoon ended with a bump and the club missed out on the Champions League again last Spring, while Chelsea fans felt the wave of optimism generated by returning hero Frank Lampard would make up for the transfer ban clipping their wings this summer.
Oh how wrong can you be. 4-0 to United it finished and despite Chelsea dominating the first half and hitting the woodwork, that scoreline is still a thrashing in anyone's language.
Except that is the statisticians, who had convinced us that data can explain everything. A look at the basic figures from today's clash tells us something rather different:
POSSESSION - Chelsea 54% v 46% Man Utd
SHOTS ON TARGET - Chelsea 7 v 5 Man Utd
TOTAL SHOTS - Chelsea 18 v 11 Man Utd
FOULS - Chelsea 13 v 15 Man Utd
CORNERS - Chelsea 5 v 3 Man Utd
Using these blunt parameters, Chelsea win hands down, but they lost 4-0. So what really counts is the number of good chances a side creates.
On this criterion United beat Chelsea, having forged two thirds of the goalscoring chances, while less than half of the 35% of the remainder which fell to Chelsea were clear opportunities to find the net, according to sharper analytical tools.
Stats are everywhere in football as in life these days thanks to the growth of computer algorithms but today's clash in Manchester was a salient reminder that the basic ones the media feed us are often spectacularly irrelevant.
Or, as Alan Hansen put it,
"It's goals which win games."
* Arsenal duo Mesut Ozil and Sead Kolasinac missed their 1-0 win at Newcastle on police advice because of threats to their families following the failed carjacking of the pair in London last week.
This shocking state of affairs however was far from "unprededented" as some Fleet Street hacks claimed.
Arsenal's David O'Leary missed a match in 1992 following an IRA threat after he had expressed support for Britain's Conservative Party while family kidnapping threats famously caused Johan Cruyff to miss the 1978 World Cup in Argentina.
Nigeria's Jon Obi Mikel has had to deal with this father being kidnapped twice while the brother of fellow countryman and ex-Everton defender Joseph Yobo and the mother of current Nigeria winger were also taken illegally for money.
Latin American stars Jorge Campos, Diego Milito, Juan Riquelme, Romario and Carlos Tevez have all had parents or siblings kidnapped for ransom while the great Alfredo Di Stefano was taken hostage for three days in Venezuela in 1963.
In 1994 Colombian defender Andres Escobar was famously assassinated by disgruntled gangsters.
So threats to footballers are depressingly common.
* While the two Manchester teams sit pretty atop the Premier League and Chelsea are in the relegation zone for the first time in almost two decades, the most impressive weekend performance was from lowly Brighton who won 3-0 at Watford.
Gone was the negative safety first road tactics of Chris Hughton, replaced by a joyously positive attacking game which blew Javi Gracia's Hornets away.
Seagulls boss Graham Potter opened many eyes for his unconventional holistic approach to coaching with Ostersunds in Sweden. Unusually for football managers, Potter possesses a degree in social sciences and a masters in emotional intelligence and leadership.
Is he about to weave his magic in the biggest league of them all now? On this evidence, yes he is.
* As for VAR, following its Premier League debut there is still clearly work to do before the jury can approve it unanimously.
Its use at the London Stadium in the West Ham v Manchester City match seemed particularly intrusive and irritating, however accurate it was. The lag between on-field action and final refereeing decision is still too long and is damaging match atmosphere.
Its puritanical insistence on literal interpretations of offside and penalty rules is also problematic, a fact highlighted by Sergio Aguero's twice-taken spot kick.
Celebrating goals is now tinged with doubt with every strike now going to the video screen for final approval. How football accommodates this technology is an ongoing challenge.
Many of us would long for a 'grey area' to be part of the final implementation of VAR e.g. allowing a player offside by a few centimetres but without any clear advantage to play on, but how we define this in an age of binary computer analysis is still a conundrum.
We do need some video replays. We cannot regress to the 27th of June 2010 when at the World Cup in South Africa, England had a crystal clear goal disallowed and went out and later that evening Mexico were also eliminated thanks to an offside goal from Argentina.
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(c) Sean O'Conor & Soccerphile