Are We Near the End for Roger?

Late into the Australian night Andy Murray battled past Roger Federer in five sets to reach his third Australian Open and sixth Grand Slam final. In doing so he beat Federer for the 11th time out of 20 encounters but crucially the first time in a Grand Slam Match.  It means that Murray has won the right to face Novak Djokovic in the Final and will want to have some revenge for the 2011 Australian Open Final where Murray was beaten in straight sets by Djokovic.  But for the me the question is how much longer will Roger be able to compete at the top level of tennis?

How much more do you pay to go English?

There have been plenty articles over the last two days talking about the prospect of Manchester United buying Crystal Palace winger Wilfried Zaha, the reports range in the value of the transfer for the 20 year old English International (a substitute appearance to watch Zlatan) but most saying somewhere between £12 million and £15 million.  Like most people I knew he was a good prospect but it was his performances in the League Cup last year which brought him to my attention, he tore Manchester United apart in Palace's shock 2-1 win.  The question for me is, will United be paying over the top for Zaha because he English?

He Doesn't Make It Easy To Like Him

I love maths almost as much as I love sport.  We are living in an age where we have access to the most information in sport ever, Sports like Baseball have embraced statistics with Sabermetrics being used by nearly every team now and it even spinning off an Hollywood film 'Moneyball'.  Other Sports have been slower to adopt stats mainly due to the ignorant miss use of stats when they haven't been put in context.

My "Favourite" Premier League Manager Rafa Benitez made a comment after Chelsea's 2-1 win against Arsenal, he said "These people who like to quote stats and stats, they don't have any clue about what is going on,".  That is like a stab in the back to me, he was saying that in regards to Fernando Torres, he followed that up with  "When you have one striker for a month and a half and cannot change, it's more difficult for the striker. When you have now two strikers, you can manage."   I am one of those people who uses statistics to analysis football because once it is put into context it can give an accurate reflection of a player's or a team's performance and now I am going to do what Rafa hates and show that Torres has been under performing by a career standards but by his Chelsea's standard's this is nothing to fret over.