People who know me will be unsurprised that I have an interest in statistics and analytics. For the last 25 years or so (less for calcio / football / soccer), so have sports managers.

Analytics goes back to the pre-computer era, but of course it was much harder to do then. It really gained traction in the 1990s, when personal computers became ubiquitous. This reached the popular mind (more or less) through "Moneyball", the story of the Oakland A's in the late 1990s and early 2000's. Initially a book by Michael Lewis, it achieved a much wider audience through the Brad Pitt film of the same name.

It involved using analysis of the statistics of players and games, and provided a great advantage to managers who were prepared to use numbers rather than gut instinct to implement strategies. Calcio was much slower to adopt this. Why?

For one thing, the game is much more complex with many more moving parts. In baseball you have a pitcher, a batter, and the basemen and outfield. But essentially, the bulk of the game is a duel between the first 2 of these. As long as you have good data (which was hard to come by before the computer age), you can project outcomes. Of course, this makes it sound simpler than it is because once the ball goes into play you have to factor in the possibilities and options of dealing with the ball. Do you throw it to 1st base? You might, depending on how fast the batter runs. It might be better to throw to 2nd base if there is a slower runner already on first.

But football amps that up by orders of magnitude since there are anything up to 11 players on each side involved in single sequence of play. The data needed, and the computing power needed did not come along until later than was the case with baseball.

There is one truism that has been long known, however, and that is that the game tilts massively in favour of the first scoring team. Remember that calcio is a relatively low scoring game; the victorious team will typically score only between one and 3 goals. If you score first, then the other team has to not only equalise, but score a relatively rare goal to pull ahead. Generally speaking, once a goal has been scored there is about a 60 to 70% chance (depending on a range of other conditions) that the team that scored will go on to win the match because it gives them a huge advantage.

We scored first in the 27th minute. I was feeling pretty good about that; until AC Milan equalised a mere 10 minutes later at which time the Milanese supporters that I was surrounded by (despite sitting in a nominal AS Roma section) cheered wildly while I sat there looking somewhat dejected. So it looked like we were going to go into the half-time break tied 1 all. But from the sequence of play that could be seen in the previous couple of photographs, which didn't seem to be going anywhere, our striker Tammy Abraham (and I still don't know how he did this) turned it around and managed to score a 2nd goal in the 47th minute. That is the goal that is being celebrated on the board here.

So we went into the break with the score 2-1, and again the odds were in our favour.

So far, so good!