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.

Russell v Lawro - Week 2

Last week I challenged myself to see if I could compete with Mark Lawrenson in predicting the results of the weekend games of the Premiership.  After a poor performance in week one, with myself only getting 2 results right and no correct scores, getting nothing right on Saturday, compared to Lawro's 7 results right with two of them being correct scores,  I need do much better this week. Also here are the scores from last week.

The Ability Gulf

This morning, like many a tennis fan, I was sat in my office doing work but with half an eye on the live feed that the BBC provide for the Australian Open.  I watched and read Roger Federer ease into the third round with the anticipation of a good match between Laura Robson and Petra Kvitova, although I expected Robson to do well I thought she wouldn't have enough to beat the former Wimbledon champion.  Unexpectedly in the early hours of Friday morning the British number two beat the Czech eighth seed 2-6 6-3 11-9 in an error-strewn match with 92 errors and 30 double faults between them.  I have managed to see some highlights and to me Laura Robson should be very happy she met Kvitova when her serving was on holiday,

Kvitova served 18 aces which is impressive but not when you show that she also had 18 double faults.  Neither of those two stats are records for Grand Slams thou with Serena Williams hit 24 aces in one match at Wimbledon last year and pin up/tennis player, Anna Kournikova, hit 31 double faults in a match at Australian Open in 1999.  In searching for those statistics I came across two others which show the gulf in playing levels in the sport of Tennis.

1. In the last 9 years there have been only 7 different male winners of a grand slam, 4 of whom have only won one title.

2. In the first two rounds of the Australian Open Maria Sharapova hasn't lost a single game winning both matches 6-0, 6-0

And it made me wonder which gender has the biggest gap.The only fair comparison would be to look at those to stats but for the opposite gender and look at the differences and similarities

The Corner Conumdrum

First of apologies for no post since last Friday, a pub orientated weekend followed by a football orientated start to the the week meant I have hardly spent any time near my laptop in the last four days.  Last night I went to The Hawthorns for the chilling excitement of an FA Cup Third Round Replay match with high flying West Bromwich Albion playing host to bottom of the table Queens Park Rangers.  I was chilled to the bone but I wasn't excited at all and like most of the fans around me I was disappointed with both teams not wanting to be there, whose poor performances were only separated by a late headed goal from a corner.

This corner and others during the match made me quite angry for two reasons, firstly when the goal was scored there was not a man on one of the posts and the header went right where he would of stood and secondly nearly half of the corners taken where short, none of which came off. These are two of my greatest peeves.

Russell V Lawro - The Return

With the return of the blog I will reincarnate my favourite part of doing the blog last time. This will be the first of many Friday afternoon posts where once again I will be going one on one against the BBC legend Mark Lawrenson. As most of you know Lawro does predictions for every Barclay's Premier League each weekend, for his thoughts click here.  So I thought why not put my ideas into the fishing pot and see if I am can best the pro.