Quote ="tvoc"One of my main objectives here is to encourage people to question the validity of the OPTA figures rather than just accepting them at face value without the means to qualify them.'"
I think that most thinking RL supporters recognise that even if the stats were perfectly compiled, they'd only give a suggestion of what happens during a game. As it is there's usually some glaring errors, so you always have to remember that the stats are liable to error.
Try assists in RL are often impossible to quantify IMO. It usually seems to be given to the guy who put the last pass in before the touchdown, but often in RL the most important moment in a move could have been 5 or 6 passes back.
Sometimes awful play just isn't reflected in the stats. In the Saints game I don't think Flannery's try would have showed up in our stats at all. There was no missed tackle and no line break. I think the Leeds coaching staff however would've put a couple of black marks next to Ryan Bailey's name because he cost a try because he was having a kip instead of covering the attack.
The fact that Keith and Leon Pryce's sin-binning's weren't recorded just shows how lax the stat keepers are sometimes. It wasn't like they were hidden incidents that someone could miss. There were probably the two clearest incidents in the 80 minutes. How they missed those is baffling.
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