dohadeer

I watched some painful interview on the BBC website with him, (I mean the interview was painful, not Gilmour), where they ended up discussing ‘haggis, neeps and tatties.’ Gilmour didn’t know what ‘neeps’ were. Let’s hope that Scott Brown left his colouring books behind when he retired from international duty.

??? Why would we be the same person having a conversation with ourselves? What basis do you have for that claim? That would be odd behaviour in the extreme. I agree, I wouldn’t put it past some internet trolls to resort to that, but that wasn’t what was going on here. Why would you jump to that assumption?

I assume that the game will no longer go ahead, but, yeah, I’d choose McBurnie as our striker.

I’m sure that the scientists and statisticians know what they’re doing. Seems to be a common theme on this forum - people thinking that they know better than the experts. Usually with regards to football managers and team selection, but good to see it applies to other areas of expertise as well!

The three mistakes that I pointed out in your calculations were just basic common sense/logic though. I’d have hoped you could have worked them out for yourself. It was the fact that you criticised the ‘UK Science Chief’ and suggested that they might be out by a factor of hundreds/thousands that led me to criticise you. I think that in this case it was important to emphasise how inaccurate your calculations were!

We shouldn’t be writing McBurnie off because of that though. Players can have bad games. He’s proving in the English Premier League that he’s a good player - certainly by our recent standard of strikers. We can’t judge him solely on a few Scotland games, games during which we’ve been pretty rotten on the whole as a team.

Sorry, I didn’t mean to be confrontational. I think that it’s important to call out nonsense and blatant mistakes, but yeah, ideally without being aggressive or abusive. I didn’t think that I’d overstepped the mark.

I’m definitely not. This is the only account that I’ve ever had on here. I spent hours and hours arguing with/being trolled by The Dark Knight. I am certainly not that poster reincarnated. (I was here long before that poster, and am still here long after their multiple accounts have been removed.)

Maybe just stick with the government’s statistics, instead of making a terrible job of doing your own statistics, and then using those to claim that the government are way out?

Does what really matter?

Permission to use your post as a practice question for statistics students? ’Explain three errors that mrniaboc has made in their calculations.’ 1. They are using someone else’s data - a mixture of media reports and estimates - rather than data they have gathered themselves. 2. They haven’t used a random sample of the population - they have chosen 150 people in the same industry, who have been in close contact with each other and had similar travel movements to each other over the past month. 3. They have started from a known result (2 people who work for Premier League football clubs in London, with the virus) and worked backwards, then used that to extrapolate the result to the whole population. That would be like knowing that Tom Hanks has the virus and then deciding to do an analysis of virus contraction amongst 1990s Best Male Oscar winners, and extrapolating that result to the whole population. You shouldn’t start from a known result and work backwards, a random sample would be a far better approach.

Tierney isn’t even a first-choice in the Arsenal team, is he?

Number of actors who won an Oscar for playing Forrest Gump - one. Of those, one has the Coronavirus. Estimate of current percentage of world population with Coronavirus - 100% Doesn’t work like that I’m afraid. Leave the statistics to the experts.

Yeah, that’s a major misunderstanding of statistics you’re showing there. What are you playing at?

Yes. Most of the planet.

Tiny sample size and also far too simplistic to be judging them solely on goals scored.

Sorry, I wasn’t very clear on that one. I meant how competitive the league is outside the ‘big six’ - usually from positions 7 to 20. (Off-topic, but that 20-odd point gap between Liverpool and Man City is mostly a statistical anomaly, rather than a true reflection of the difference in standard between those two teams. There is very little between them - certainly not as much as the point gap suggests - Liverpool have just had a statistically historical season in terms of single-goal victories.)

Exactly the example that I was about to use. Look how many goals Liverpool have scored this season, and yet their striker, Firmino hasn’t scored a single league goal at Anfield. A striker’s game in most cases is about so much more than how many goals they score.

No, what I didn’t like was you stating it as a fact. That’s fair enough as an opinion, but it isn’t a fact. I certainly wouldn’t be judging McBurnie’s season on how many goals he’s scored, and neither are Sheffield United, as he keeps getting selected. There’s far, far more to his role than that. Look how much money is riding on the English Premier League and how competitive it is from top to bottom. You have to be doing something very right to finish in the top half of that league. Teams that you mention like Burnley and Sheffield United are far better than you give them credit for.

I don’t think that you can state as a fact that McBurnie is definitely not better than Griffiths. What is that based on? It’s pretty difficult to make a straight comparison between what McBurnie does for Sheffield United and what Griffiths does for Celtic, as they are two completely different roles that they are performing (even though both strikers.) Football is a hierarchy system, and someone playing regularly at the business end of the English Premiership has a very good claim to being a better player than someone playing for Celtic. Please be fair in your assessments of players.

It will be interesting if the Coronavirus has peaked and died down a bit by the summer, whether UEFA give priority to catching up with European competitions and domestic leagues, or to the European Championships. The main losers in this will be Finland, competing at their first major finals. I hope that any cancellations don’t adversely affect them, and that they get their chance at a major tournament somehow.

Strange that he keeps his place in a team that are competing at such a high level, isn’t it? It’s almost like he’s performing well in the games that you’re not watching.

He’s only got 9 caps, and several of those were for a matter of minutes. Have a bit of patience. He’s shown in his club performances that he’s a good player. Don’t write him off after a few games and move on to a Livingston striker. That’s crazy talk.

NBA off. ATP and WTA off. La Liga off. Serie A off. McLaren have pulled out of the Australian Grand Prix. Europa League and English Premier League matches postponed. There’s no way these playoffs (and possibly Euro 2020 as well) are going ahead.

Sheffield United didn’t get to where they are by carrying any passengers. Every one of their regular players are performing to a very high level.