@Bath-Canary A well-warranted and excellently delivered rant. Couldn't agree more about the BBC; they bend over backwards to avoid appearing judgemental while operating policies which are judgemental in the extreme.
I've been meaning to say precisely what Bath has said in his two last main posts. I even made a graph of goals for and against to visually highlight the extreme games for those who think number of clean sheets is trumped by goal difference (no point in posting it because Bath has done a good job trying to explain this). To those still not convinced, here is my take: Goals conceded is a mean statistic where extreme outliers affect the average, whereas number of clean sheets can be considered more of a median statistic immune to outliers and considers each game with equal weight (with boolean qualities: true or false). One hammering (7-0 man city) will have the same weight as conceding only one (say villa at home) or more importantly not conceding any (any of our 9 clean sheets). i.e. its not sensitive to extreme outliers and therefore a better representation of our general defence over the season... That's my attempt of trying to explain it... As I said on another thread, we need to score! I agree that stats are being used more now in the media, but perhaps very naively by some and by those who should know better. As to the topic of opinions, I think I'll contribute one more quote from Douglas Adams: “All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others.”
Just as a footnote to the posts by Bath and Astro in defence of our defensive record, it is one of the reasons why I don't view our possible relegation this season with the same despair as some others seem to do. I'm confident that if we do find ourselves in the Championship next season, we are well-equipped to bounce back. We will continue to be defensively sound, and we'll start scoring hatfuls of goals.
