I wasn't justifying anything. I was simply explaining why you had to anaylse the statistics properly.



One winner? They're not in competition with each other. They should compliment each other. They're in the same team.

Looking at the stats, in terms of number of carries, Friday was second only to Harlequins at home.



Surprising but true apparently.

Second only in terms of what? Second lowest or second highest? I'd expect the latter but you never know.

It was the second highest. 240 compared to 249 in the Quins game.

analyze them in conjunction with the match itself - exactly



because of our awful ball control and HKRs great kicking game, our forwards spent far too much time tackiling



hence, we had a few exit sets where every drive was taken by the backs to try and give the forwards a breather



this was deliberate and clearly shows up in the number of drives across the backs and the forwards



the root cause was not lazy forwards but a deliberate plan to attempt to manage the effect of our overall horrible display



stats only help in conjunction what you can see during the game

I'd agree with that, although it was more by accident than design on occasions. We even had McGuire taking the first hit-up from a 20 metre restart at one point. Total mess.

Throughout the 17 or in the forwards?



I noted McGuire driving in that tap 20 and screamed at the TV at that point.



What a mess.

If McShane is only being "credited" with two misses then I'd take that whole set of stats with a large pinch of sodium chloride...

Fair point. I counted 4 in the first half alone.

Throughout the team, but there does look to be a disproportionate amount of the work done by the backs.

I don't think we needed any stats, inaccurate or otherwise, to conclude that last Friday was a bag of s[ihi[/it.

oh i don't know. the fish and chips were top class