Lists and the Power of Numbers

Despite spending the past 9 months telling ourselves we're not as bad as the Premiership table tells us we now know otherwise. Nevertheless the final Table has a fascination, a finality, about it. All the efforts of the last year shown in black and white or blue, black and white in this case. And if you look at some of the reports we're received this season compared to a simple listing of anything, give me numbers anyday. They may twist the truth a little but many reports this season have frustratingly dwelt on a facile aspect of the opposition with a good example being the last day draw at Liverpool being more about Robbie Fowlers last game than the surprising Charlton performance. So give me numbers every time.

So what numbers are around today? To start with there's the listing of Tier 1 clubs on the telegraph that gives readers a chance to "air their views" and 112 of us, have cared to give an opinion on the burning question "Will Darren Bent stay at Charlton?. Reading and Portsmouth are bottom with 82 and 94 comments to their question and clearly can't be bothered while Fulham, Bolton and Man. City fans are also more bored and miserable with themselves than we are. Perhaps it shows how important we feel little Bent is to us or maybe everyone else depressingly reads the murdoch press.

Meanwhile over there in our own cafcpicks there's another list, this is where you can vote on which Out of Contract players you want to keep at the club. Not surprisingly Matt Holland comes out clear favorite with nearly 50% of the votes showing that endless committment and his two yellow cards were appreciated by many, well 477 anyway. The Elk comes second while oddly enough there's a three-way tie between Kish, Lisbie and Sankofa. A strange trio and I would never have chanced a guess that the same number of people would vote to keep the apparent opposites runabout-Kish and lazy-old-Lisbie. But then my cynicism is answered by the last vote of 29 votes - keep none of them.

Back at our telegraph Charlton page, where we're still in the Premiership, there's some more strange numbers to grab you attention for a couple of minutes. If you ever wondered on the power of numbers to tell us almost anything cast your eyes over those gems. Here we can see how the boys performed during the season as far as the categories of Shots, Passing and Tackling are concerned.

Apparently Sorondo (!), Sam, Lisbie (!!!) and Hasselbaink were our most accurate passers of a ball - now I know why we went down - while Sankofa, Rommedahl and Lisbie again were our best tacklers????? Hasselbaink has the most assists with 3 and the Elf and Young made the most passes. The Shooting Accuracy prize goes to both Thatcher and Young with 100% !!! although you realise that at last the numbers do add up when you see that the Elk gets 35%.