analysis

Last updated: 5th April 2011 Another update to this article for you all as it's received such good feedback. A week makes a massive difference in football and as you can see, from the stats below. Darren Bent has been the main beneficiary thanks to his two goals, against the bitter blues of Merseyside, this weekend. He further improved his stats because the two goals were his only shots in the game therefore improving his accuracy as well as minutes per goal ratio.

Jamie Carragher is a player who needs no introduction. In his lengthy career there is only one trophy that has eluded him; he has racked up over 650 appearances for the club often playing more than 50 games a season. He has made 137 European appearances for Liverpool (as of 24/02/2011) which is a British record. Never one to shy away from a challenge or quietly go about his business, in fact there is barely a match that goes by when you can’t hear him barking out orders to his team mates even when playing to an audience of tens of thousands, he has come in for criticism, been labelled not good enough an overlooked for England but has still remained a first choice defender for Liverpool for over a decade. But now in his 33rd year as he approaches the final stages of his 15th campaign he is finding himself under the microscope more and more often. So what do the stats actually say about Jamie? Is he overrated or underrated, wrongly or rightly overlooked?

A brief introduction: I’m Conor Dowley, and while I’m a Yank through and through, I’m also a huge Liverpool supporter. My best friend grew up just blocks from Anfield, so when I started getting more and more in to the sport and it came time to choose a team to support (five years or so ago), Liverpool was the natural choice. It helped that I loved watching them play; Steven Gerrard was then and is still now one of my favorite individual players to watch.

A statistical analysis of Kuyt’s contribution to the Liverpool team in the first half of the 2010/11 Premier League season. Dirk Kuyt played 16 games for Liverpool in the worst start to a season in living memory. This article will look in detail at how he performed during those 16 games in relation to the...