Duncan Barkes

I mean, it's a huge amount of numbers and information.

915 teams.

I have to tell you that one of the charts shows the list of all the teams in the world that they subjected to this analysis, and Pompey are on page 8.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

I think you have to take these figures with a pinch of salt, of course.

It's no great surprise to discover that top German, Spanish and French sides top the league.

You could almost start out by saying, who do we expect to be top of the league?

Who would it reflect best on our analysis for them to be top of the league?

It's the likes of Barcelona, obviously.

So any vagaries about the quality of the data, because we can't work out how it would have been collected.

We do know that interns often sit all through Saturday night, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, right up to the next game with a stopwatch and a laptop.

making records of each pass that is made.

There are people who have to do that for a living, only it's not a living because they're expected to do it for nothing because they think they're going to be offered a job in sports journalism when they've kind of passed the test and shown their commitment.

So you have to take this sort of data with a slight pinch of salt.

But if anything, I would go so far as to say that if this data had been collected a year ago when Pompey were playing out from the back, I suspect we'd have done an awful lot better than we are at the minute because we do need and play quite well, particularly with Schmidt, whose long clearances are absolutely pinpoint accurate, but they don't count.

towards us being a ball-playing team.

Do we want to be a ball-playing team?

Kind of.

Do we want to be a winning team?

Yes, with knobs on.