DMAA

It wouldn’t be if it was all just a load of pish. As I said in the OP, stats are just facts. It’s what you do with those facts that matters. But they are a valuable tool and our management and recruitment team realise that.

Every argument I’ve seen against the use of stats is a straw man.

Luckily Gerrard’s team don’t agree with you on that one

Will only share one more, but he was very critical of the midfield two of Brown and McGregor (both still untouchable as far the press are concerned).

A Celtic supporter, but an interesting account to follow as he is very honest and very critical of the regime. Always has loads of stats to support his case. The 4-1 scoreline seemingly flattered them a bit and was due to how poor Mortherwell are.

It is actually a pretty reliable stat to judge performance when xG conceded is taken into account. The stats guys are almost always proved right when they predict which teams are due a turnaround in form and will climb the table soon, or the opposite. St Johnstone are a good example of this, they had a terrible start to the season and we were at the foot of the table, but their net xG suggested they were wasting good chances a bit unlucky in terms of the goals they had conceded. They’ve now started to climb the table after finally getting a reward for their performance.

Oh and by the way, Kent picked up his first league assist at Ibrox since 2018 He must have known I was keeping count

Roofe reminds me a lot of a young Steven Naismith, and that is a very good thing. I have bemoaned the lack of goals from our attacking midfielders for some time. If we play Roofe in one of the number 10 positions, I am far more confident about our prospects than last season. In addition to his good overall play, he has the knack for scoring goals from a slightly deeper position just like Naismith did. And like Naismith, he can score with either foot or with his head. We just don't have that from any of our other options. Especially in the air actually, we have badly lacked any kind of aerial threat from our attacking midfielders. It is fantastic to have Aribo back too, and like Roofe, he's not even fully fit yet. I still believe Aribo is our best player and is huge to our title aspirations. We will do very well to hold onto him when this season ends. We may not have even dropped points at Livingston and Hibs if he hadn't been injured. He is always one of our best performers on plastic pitches against defensive sides because he is so good technically and has the creativity to open things up. And as I've said on here many a time, I love Defoe. I don't care if he is 38, he is still a real quality player. His link up play and his passing is second to none for a striker. I don't think we win 8-0 if he isn't on the field, and he didn't even score.

4-0 Rangers FGS - Defoe

Yeh I think so. Their manager spoke highly of us after the game, said we were a quality side and he was particularly complimentary of Tavernier and Barisic. I think they probably learned a lot more from that game than we did. What I hope we learned is not to give a quality player like Waldschmidt loads of time and space to pick a pass from outside the box, because he won’t waste that opportunity.

No it isn’t.

Right you are. £70m revenue is huge in a non Champions League season which ended in March. I don’t know how they’re doing it. I just hope we win the race to the UCL groups because that’s going to be a game-changer.

A wee reminder of how far we have come in a few years. Bench from first game of the 16/17 season, Dodoo, Forrester, Hodson, Rossiter, Holt, Gilks, O'Halloran Bench in last league game, Bassey, Hagi, Defoe, Davis, Kamara, Barker, Roofe, Balogun, McLaughlin

How the heck are they bringing in that kind of revenue? They haven't had Champions League money since 2017/18, and their revenue is still way above where it was before, even in a pandemic stricken season. Transfer fees only partially account of it.

Feels better this morning than it did last night. I've given it to Morelos because I have never been shy of criticising his overall play a bit but last night he showed what he can be like at his best. He was outstanding. After he was linked with Porto, I genuinely have to wonder if he raised his performance knowing there would be potential suitors watching him because we haven't seen a performance like that from him in so long. I thought we had big performances throughout the team though. Tavernier and Barisic a constant threat. Jack had a dodgy start, and Davis has to take a chunk of the blame for not being goal side of his man for the third goal, there should never have been a through ball in the first place, but aside from that all three were excellent. Aribo was good was he one but he did tire. Kent's pace was very useful for us because it got us in behind repeatedly and he worked hard as always, but again he isn't doing enough on the ball and he missed a great chance that would have buried the game, he needs to score those. I am Helander's biggest fan and he definitely takes his share of the blame for each of the the goals last night but I will offer a bit of a defence of him because I don't think it's fair at all to blame him solely. The first was the worst by far, two poor mistakes, but Benfica needed a lot of luck after that in that it just hit off Goldson to go in. But they shouldn’t have had the opportunity to get to our byline. The second one, he is caught ball watching really when he should have been more aware of the inevitable run Nunez behind him would make, who he surely knew is faster than him, he almost does very well to intercept it but it slips away from him. But I'm going to spread the blame a bit, Waldschmidt received the ball in way too much space before that pass, it is 5/6 against 3 and we managed to leave their big dangerman in terms of creating goals wide open. He plays an eye of the needle pass (he will do this again later in the game), and despite Helander actually doing well to recover and slow Nunez down and force him to the byline, nobody picks up the one man in the box who is the only way Benfica are going to score. If you watch the replay they were ball watching and jogging and didn't notice the Benfica player until the last second. For the third goal, for some reason all the blame has been put on Helander despite the fact this is the one goal he wasn't primarily at fault for. The move starts in their defence with our whole team in position, so there are no excuses from the midfield this time. And the midfield, Davis in particular, lets Waldschmidt, yes the same player who has sliced us open once already since being subbed on, slips by him totally untracked, allowing him to receive the ball in 'in the hole', behind our midfield, in loads of space, and allowing him to play another brilliant eye of the needle pass to Nunez who has positioned himself in between Goldson and Helander, who weren't even badly positioned. The pass and run were just so good there was very little they could do about it. For me, the way to prevent that is for Davis to track the man, and for the whole team to sit far deeper so that these spaces behind both our midfield and defence don't exist, we got the tactics wrong in the last 10 minutes when we should have just been tightening up and just wasting time.

Quite clearly a joke played by a bear on wikipedia

You are right there. I am really annoyed tonight so I’m going to distract myself with other things for the rest of the night, and tomorrow morning we will have 7 points on the board after 3 games and Celtic will be carrying out yet another post-mortem.

Well we better beat them at Ibrox now. They dangled a win against Benfica in front of us and now I want one.

Darwin Nunez changed the game when he came on. They had no threat u too he came on. As soon as he came on he looked a cut above every time he got the ball. I think he’ll go on to big things.

Yes that’s why I wanted the subs, I just mean it wasn’t like there would be much or any negative impact from subbing your most offensive players.

Yes but Roofe for Morelos was an obvious one. He was tiring. Barker for Kent would have brought in fresh legs too.

It does. We are a good team. Be we are good enough to see out a 3-1 win against 10 men. That is a huge advantage and ultimately we squandered it. Maybe I shouldn’t be but I’m annoyed that they couldn’t do a couple of basic things to see out the win after doing the hard bit so well.

They only had 2 shots on target. In a 3-3 draw. Sums it up.

Playing against 10 men and we couldn’t see out a 3-1 win.