Lots of people in football - fans, pundits and managers - are obsessed with other elements than this. It's a really, really simple game and at the end of the game only one statistic counts - who scored the most goals? Serious question - how many times have you heard "the best team lost" or "we played the better football" when what they actually mean is we did some nice passing and failed to score more than the opposition.
It's obviously not so black and white. The bits in between, such as covering distance/more possession etc are the way to achieve the ultimate goal. Yes, these aren't more important than the score but they give you a good idea of the approach the team made to score more than their opponent.
Not necessarily at all. A team can have 1% possession and do little running whatsoever and win the game. Of all the pointless stats, possession is THE most pointless. You will often see in a heavily one sided game, such as a 4 or 5-0 win, that the losing team has equal if not more possession. This is because once 3-0 up they start coasting and the let the other team have the ball, hitting them on the break as they push forwards.
No I don't. I just don't give two ****s about pretty passing, shots on goal or possession as they achieve nothing whatsoever towards the aim of the game. For me a good performance is one that achieves the aims of the game.
So we play the opposition off the pitch for 89 minutes, have 3 legitimate goals disallowed, opposition wins 1-0 by virtue of a dodgy penalty in the last minute. We have not put in a good performance but the opposition have?
As I've stated previously, the only exception is referee mismanagement. If somebody disallows perfectly legitimate goals or give illegitimate ones then that's different. However, if we 'play the opposition off the pitch', to use your terms, hit the woodwork 17 times and their keeper has an absolute blinder pulling off save after word-class save and then they hit us on the counter and win 1-0 with their only foray into our half all match, then the opposition has performed better than us. Clearly.
Not clearly to me. It's semantics really, the opposition has won, they have achieved their objective but they've played ****e. How often do you hear the expression 'we won ugly', especially round Chelsea way...
We have beaten them twice in the league and once in the cup already. I'd love to play them in the run-in but sadly it is not allowed.
In the end, the only thing which matters is the final score. I have followed baseball, hockey, and American football all my life, and English football (soccer) for almost a decade. I find the latter no different than the others, that sometimes the team which plays the best still loses the contest. Such is the way of sport; chance plays a significant role in the outcome. But chance, or luck by another name, is a byproduct of hard work and preparation, such that over the course of an entire season the luck (chance) will favor the better team more often than not. Then there is the point of lousy officiating/refereeing . . .
