Try of the month or cry of the month

I would have liked to have seen some of "Sams" stats from Saturday.

Tries - none,
breaks - none
kicking game - non existant
passing game - non existant,
scoring fancy looking tries against crap teams - N/A, crap team not available
Errors - one, turning up to play
getting nowhere near bombs - lots
mard lip - even more than the one above.
tears shed at full time - bucket full.

Don't know how you made that leap from what I said above ?
Actually my observation would be, not a mention of Warrington during a season changing week, very bizarre !

I thought it was quite interesting that none of our players, none of Wigans and only 1 of Leeds made the stats board for top this-that-and-the-other. Is that because our team share the tackling duties more, off-load more, generally all get involved rather than leaving everything to one or two people?

I was disappointed they didn't talk about Warry more, esp when Eddie ended the first half with a mention of our match, but I'm guessing there's more drama to be wrung from 4 sets of fans wondering who will make the 8, than 2 sets of fans wondering who will win the LLS.

It's more because the LLS is absolutely meaningless and no one cares about it. The amount of talk they did about who is going to make the 8 was funny, simply because in the NRL that might mean they win the competition, over here it just means they lose in week 1 of the play offs.

He's done that segment every week talking about KPI's and going through each game, usually with big mentions of how Wigan won games. Suddenly he comes up with that Dream Team and Team Of The Week rubbish out of the blue.

Also how can a team dominate and not have any players in Team Of The Week, I'd like to know Opta's points weighting.

Clarke explained it last night.

Rogues, he might have explained it, but it proved that stats aren't always right. That team of the week would have been slaughtered by most sides in SL.

It’s not the issue of whether the OPTA team of the week is any good – the stats are the stats and no one’s arguing with them for this week. The amusing thing about Clarke’s segment was that he chose to look at this particular item in this particular week.

Had Wigan beaten Wire, you can bet his analysis would have focused largely on that game and taken in details of team tackles made, line speed of defence, metres made by the various packs, line breaks, attacking kicks, the parts of the field the play-the-balls took place in, blah, blah, blah.

However, Clarke must have had his minions trawling the statistical world for some kind of item which featured precisely no Wire or Wigan players so that he could pretend that their game didn’t actually happen, and instead, plausibly discuss a completely different – albeit still valid – aspect of the week’s stats. I can imagine his delight when someone reported finding the OPTA team of the week stats to him.

I do like him – he’s such a comic figure these days that it amuses me listening to his arguments and skewed logic, but I don't let him wind me up.

As it happens, I found this week’s analysis far more satisfying than any faux Wire eulogy he could have trotted out. Instead, we had a demonstration of own belief that Wigan are still the best side: achieved by completely overlooking all aspects of what many would describe as the “biggest game of the season” - a potentially pivotal (and fifth successive) Wigan league defeat at the hands of their top-two rivals.

I look forward to next week's pearls of wisdom.

is it just me or was Paul Cullen so much better when he did the match analysis