Just tell me what's wrong with Liverpool, please

I was pretty excited to see this from Jonathan Wilson on the Twitter machine this morning:

A piece for the Guardian on Liverpool's start to the season. http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2012/sep/27/question-liverpool-bad-start?CMP=twt_gu … Note: it's not as negative as the subhead suggests.

I like reading Wilson's stuff, even though as a relative newcomer to soccer, it's sometimes doctoral-level work for someone who have never taken a class in a particular subject. (I know. I did it in grad school and lived to tell about it.)

So I clicked on the link and got ...

... statistics about passes completed, chance conversion, tackles won and save percentage. All this courtesy  of Opta, which apparently studies this stuff.

I'm not anti-statistic, certainly not at the level of my father-in-law. I may argue what statistics may hold value, particularly in baseball, but the actual use of statistics does not offend me.

What I learned from reading the Opta numbers was:

* Liverpool completes a lot of passes.

* Liverpool is not so good at turning all those completed passes into goals.

* Liverpool's tackling is somewhat sketchy.

* Pepe Reina is not quite right in goal.

All of which I could have determined not by consulting the numbers ... but by watching the game with my own two eyes. Again, I'm barely a novice soccer fan, but even I can tell that when Liverpool seemingly dominates possession every game and doesn't score goals, it's kind of a thing.

What I wanted from Wilson was something I didn't already know.

* Are Brendan Rodgers' tactics not right for this group of players? Given that Wilson literally wrote the book on soccer tactics, this one should have been pretty easy.

* Did they make the wrong moves (jettisoning Andy Carroll without replacing him, letting Dirk Kuyt and Craig Bellamy go) or non-moves (not signing Clint Dempsey) in the transfer window? Are there opportunities for January?

* Are the current players (I'm looking at a lot of you, but especially Stewart Downing and Jordan Henderson) really bad?

* Will Luis Suarez be more than a player who looks great dribbling through seven players and then misses a shot? Can Liverpool play in such a way that Suarez doesn't have to dribble through seven players all the time?

* Is Steven Gerrard slipping a bit? Is Reina?

* Are the owners spending too much time worrying about the Red Sox?

There are probably other questions, but those were the ones I came up with off the top of my head.

Instead, I got statistics, not the opinions I was hoping for.

Frankly, I was disappointed.

Ken Harrelson is the most-biased announcer ... duh!

So the folks at the Wall Street Journal decided to do themselves a little study, and determined that Chicago White Sox TV broadcasts are the most-biased in Major League Baseball, largely because of Ken "Hawk" Harrelson.

They might as well have booked me to fight both Klitschko brothers in the same day, because the result would be as much of a foregone conclusion.


But the worst part isn't even that Harrelson is biased. It's that he's terrible. Maybe because I was young and stupid and didn't know any better, but I swear he was better doing Yankees games in the late 1980s and the White Sox in the 1990s with Tom Paciorek. He probably was just as biased, but he was entertaining and actually provided knowledge about the game.

Now, however, the game is basically ways to fill time between "Stretch!" "You can put it on the board ... YES!" "He gone" and other set pieces.






The chart isn't the easiest to read (copying off a webpage isn't the easiest), but tied there in the seventh spot are Nationals announcers Bob Carpenter and F.P. Santangelo. I saw some games between the Phillies and Nationals earlier this year, plus the interleague series with the Yankees, and I didn't really detect much bias ... although that may have been because I was wondering how anyone so incompetent could be allowed in a broadcast booth.

And there at the bottom are the Yankees broadcast team of Michael Kay and his cast of thousands and the Red Sox team of Jerry Remy and Don Orsillo. In spite of my own personal Yankees bias, it's a fair ranking. Orsillo and Remy usually give a straightforward, honest call (Dennis Eckersley in the studio is a bonus), and the Yankees crew does the same. I actually find them a bit bland at times. Maybe they have to be to make up for John Sterling, who is biased, horrible and anything but bland in the radio booth.