Statistics still fail to tell the full story when it comes to GAA
As well as a few nagging questions to go along with the sense of matters being settled.
For instance, are Donegal really that good? A lucky goal against Kerry in the All-Ireland quarter-final, the width of a crossbar keeping out a potentially game-changing second Cork goal in the semi-final, and the gift of a second goal in the final.
We seem to remember the inauguration of Armagh as a whole new type of All-Ireland-dominating team a neat decade ago, but they ended up with just the one skin-of-the-teeth title. Will Donegal do better, particularly with the blizzard of rumour about Jim McGuinness going to Liverpool or Celtic? Also, are Kilkenny as dirty/rough/on-the-edge as we’re led to believe? There have been suggestions all summer that referees were somehow ‘wising up’ to the Cats’ physical approach, yet the All-Ireland champions can point to a dismal statistic — they’re the only team to have two players suffer season-ending injuries in the All-Ireland series (Michael Rice against Tipperary in the semi-final and TJ Reid in the replayed final against Galway).
That last paragraph is not an indictment of the opposing players involved in those incidents, by the way, which is kind of the point; it brings me to yet another question.
Has 2012 advanced us in the development of GAA statistics in any way? A few years ago it seemed that people were relying on statistics more and more to illustrate various teams’ strengths and weaknesses, and we pointed out at the time that a lack of standardised scoring and weighting of statistics meant you had a lack of agreement on what exactly a wide is, for instance.
No, wait. Granted, this sounds at first like the hurling and football version of two railway spotters’ argument about the number of the locomotive which just hurtled past, but consider this: if a forward falls over in the corner and drops the ball over the end-line, it’s a puck- or kick-out, which relaunches the game far away from one team’s danger zone.
If you mark that down in your sheet as a wide, you ascribe to it the same value as a shot taken from the edge of the small parallelogram which whizzes past the post, a glaring goal chance spurned.
The difficulty here is an obvious one — namely, that your statistics are either so bare and sparse as to be hardly worth examining, or so laden with detail that they amount to a reproduction, essentially, of the experience of the game.
The latter is far more of a danger than the former, of course, because there’s a general interest in analysing games statistically, and an accompanying risk of overload. Providing facts and figures can become a spiral of qualifiers and addenda — wides resulting from non-scoring chances (as in our forward up in the corner) differentiated from wides with more impact on morale than others (the spendthrift who missed the open goal) and distinguished from wides which deserve to be credited to the pressure put on by defenders and wides created by the failure of corner-forwards to stop frees dropping off to the side of the goals...
See the problem? For a lesson from literature, consider this by Jorge Luis Borges, the entire text of his story On Exactitude In Science: “In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters.
“In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.”
We’ll go to another book for a good take on the power of statistics.
In his autobiography, Eddie O’Sullivan refers to a promising player who was inclined to mix the inspiration with error early in his career: O’Sullivan pointed out that at the elite level, three positive contributions didn’t outweigh one poor contribution or mistake.
At the elite level one error can be the losing of a game — hence the importance of attributing weight in statistics. We’ve a distance to travel in that regard with GAA stats yet, though.
* michael.moynihan@examiner.ie
