I’m sure you all remember the golden rule: ‘all statistics is bollocks’. I have it tattooed on my right arm, just in case I’m ever tempted to think, “ooooh, 95% of people under 52 whose names begin with Q find tying their shoelaces difficult; that’s amazing”, it reminds me to ignore it. Someone pays for all statistical analysis, therefore it has a ‘bias’. A bit like the BBC but possibly more subtle. ‘Subtle’ here being an euphemism for ‘underhand’. That’s how we get VW car exhaust and economy statistics, that’s how new drugs, ‘trialled and proven’, manage to kill half the people taking them.

But some statistics you can’t question. They’re paid for by neutral parties. And they can’t be ‘manipulated’ in the way that industry and economists distort them for their own wicked ends. (cyinical? moi???)

In football, where you used to say: ‘ere, Portsmouth are on a good run, played really well and have won about 4 games out’a their last 6’; you now say, ‘ere (because you have to when starting any type of football mansplaining), Portsmouth have won 4 out of 6, the highest win ratio of any team in the top 12 of any league, they have an average goal difference in excess of that of PSG and Barcelona and their xG figures are over 7, whilst maintaining a consistent 62.4% possession.

Yes, it IS still all bollocks, but it is accurately and precisely quantified bollocks. No-one wants to be mansplained inaccurate rubbish.

Its now all about the “xG” figure. Stands for ‘expected goals’. Which is basically a measure how many times a player/team is in a position to score and the likelihood of him/them scoring from that position. So, basically, it is just one more method of persecuting my football team. Another rod for their back. Like we didn’t know how bad we were before they let a bunch of actuaries loose in the analysis box.

And so to the disaster which occurred at the horrible Emirates stadium yesterday afternoon. When our ‘expected goals’ dropped to an insanely low 0.07. No teams play with that. In fact, arguably, you’re not actually ‘playing’, but just turning up and standing still.

Therefore we shall now invent a new metric. uG. For unexpected goals. Like Richarlison’s. He had to score it from pretty much the half way line, as Thomas Frank had insisted that the team spend as little time in ‘their half’ as possible, so they can all stay back to defend ineptly. The expectedness of a goal from there is minimal. The expectedness of our errant Brazilian ever scoring a goal is minimal.

Thus his goal, as totally unexpected as it was, perhaps because of that, stands as a beacon of minor contentment (we were way beyond ‘joy’ by that point) in an afternoon of abject misery. A real uG.

Happy miserable Monday (how many Arsenal fans have YOU spoken to today?)

A xxxx