1.7 - Revelations

7.

Manchester United have won England's top league 20 times. Liverpool have won it 19 times. They are two of the biggest, most famous teams in the world. The rivalry between the clubs and fans is white hot.

I hadn’t been to a match, concert, or even a movie for years, since before the pandemic. Approaching Old Trafford (I parked in a secret spot I knew in Stretford and walked the rest of the way) was like heading towards the biggest petri dish in the north of England. 76,000 people in one space. What would I catch? I had to push such thoughts away.

The closer you get to the stadium, the more people you see, and the more you hear.

In Firswood, a handful of United fans were hanging around a car checking their phones for the team news. Another clutch outside The Quadrant pub. Drinking. A few laughs. On Warwick Road, a trickle of people unhurriedly walking towards the giant stadium, then a stream, then a river. And outside one corner of the ground, the Liverpool lot. Singing, chanting, taking selfies and Tiktoks. Enemies. Just a hint of menace. Things were calm now, but they might not stay that way. It's called an undercurrent because you can't see it.

Inside, I found my seat and heard some familiar chants and many, many new ones. New players, new songs. New times, new anthems. The away end was noisy, as it always was. Mocking us. Gloating.

As the match kicked off, an enormous roar made the hairs on my neck stand up.

Old Trafford is an all-seater stadium, which means you're supposed to sit down the whole game. The club sometimes gets into trouble with the local authorities because fans stand up too much. I wasn't helping - I was up and down like a pogo stick.

First, there was the speed and quality of the match. The intensity was typified by Lisandro Martinez, the short defender who had been bullied in the last game. Today he was a different beast - thundering around the pitch like a Spartan warrior, making challenges, winning headers, celebrating routine blocks and clearances like they were pivotal moments. The home fans loved it; the stadium was rocking. He was voted man of the match. What a turnaround!

Lisandro Martinez

Born 18.1.1998 (Age 23) - Argentinian   

• Acceleration 11
• Bravery 15 
• Dribbling 12
• Heading 14
• Jumping 13
• Pace 10
• Passing 15
• Stamina 14     
• Strength 14       
• Tackling 14     
• Technique 15             
• CA 173 PA 182
• preferred foot L
• Defender (Centre, Left); Defensive Mid

As well as the rough and tumble, ebb and flow of a high-stakes, high-intensity Premier League game, one made even more vitriolic by the United fans protesting against their clueless owners, I was constantly being bombarded with revelations. Sometimes I'd stand up, amazed at a new discovery, only to realise I was the only guy in the whole block on my feet at that moment. People must have thought I was a total nutjob. But I didn't care.

Revelations

1. Attributes were out of 20. I saw this in the warm-up. Ronaldo had heading 20 and jumping 20. End of discussion.
2. Attributes almost certainly went up and down during a career. Young Ronaldo had been lightning fast, but now he had one of the lowest Pace/Acceleration scores on either team. Fair enough - the guy was nearly 40. But he could still leap like he was on a trampoline.
3. Some of the attributes were surprising, but most weren't. As an example, Fred (United's preposterously-named Brazilian midfielder) had higher pace than Marcus Rashford, who I would have bet was the fastest player in the whole league. Not so, it seemed. Fred came on for the last 20 minutes and he did seem fast. Faster than he looked on TV, certainly. As an example of not surprising, Rashford's dribbling was 11. Not even in the same league as the best dribblers on the pitch: Liverpool's Mo Salah (20) and Luis Diaz (18).
4. Attributes weren't everything. Virgil van Dijk, who had been flawless for about 4 years, had a shocking game despite having sky-high numbers. Ditto Salah, who was muted, though he scored a goal, like he always does against United.
5. This one blew my mind. During one brief break in play, I checked my XP and had so many I thought I'd misremembered what I'd started with. But no, I was just earning XP at a staggering rate. I did a test and found I was getting 7 XP per minute. What! I'd made another false assumption - a game is not a game. This game was worth seven Sunday League ones. I mean, it made sense - I was watching elite players with elite coaches in a top stadium - but it really came out of the blue. As a bonus, there were two minutes of injury time in the first half and six in the second half! Sunday League refs never played injury time. They wanted to get home! So I went from 365 XP to 1051. Hitting 2,000 by the end of the month suddenly seemed possible. One more Premier League match plus a few evenings at Platt Lane. Easy!
6. CA and PA probably had an upper limit of 200.
7. CA and PA definitely didn't mean counter-attacking and pressing. I was dead wrong about those. It was obvious pretty quickly - players I knew to be shit at pressing had high PA and players who didn't seem especially good at counter attacks had high CA. So what, then? Well, I'm no statistician but one thing jumped out at me - nobody had a CA higher than their PA. Or to put it another way, everyone's CA was lower than their PA.

A few examples:

Player - CA - PA

Ronaldo - 182 - 200

Salah - 189 - 193

Alexander-Arnold - 187 - 192

Sancho - 173 - 186

Heaton - 130 - 150

Garnacho - 90 - 173

A very quick discussion of these players. Apologies if you've worked it all out already. Feel free to skip a couple of paragraphs.

Ronaldo is considered, along with Messi, to be one of the two best players of all time. Personally, I don't see how you can ignore Maradona. Or Pele, or Cruyff. But anyway, Ronaldo is right up there. That's why I thought 200 would be the boundary for this score, whatever it meant.

Salah played for Liverpool, which meant I couldn't actually like him. But he was certainly one of the best in the world. Ditto Alexander-Arnold, a frightening attacking right-back whose weakness was defending. Any thoughts I had that the left column might have meant defensive skill while the right meant attacking was quickly dispelled when I saw his numbers.

Sancho was a weird one. He was a slight, frail-looking technician. He often had games where he didn't do anything substantial, but here he dribbled through the Liverpool defence and calmly took his time to slot the ball into the corner. He was obviously great, but was he good?

Heaton was United's reserve goalkeeper. That his numbers were so much lower than the others made a lot of sense. He was a perfectly good Championship player. The Championship is the level below the Premier League. He'd been brought in to be the backup to the backup, but today he was on United’s bench because their actual second-choice keeper had thrown his toys out of the pram and would surely leave the club soon.

Then there was Alejandro Garnacho, an 18-year-old substitute. I'd seen him in a couple of pre-season games and he was lightning fast and seemed unfazed by being on the same pitch as world famous players. Good prospect.

I felt like I was close to understanding these numbers. It didn't seem that hard. But for the last 20 minutes of the match the tension was so unbearable - United's brittle defence clinging on to a lead against a brilliant attack - that I couldn't do anything other than focus on the game before me, and when the final whistle blew and United had the 3 points in the bag, I literally sagged with relief while strangers all around hugged each other and spread the world's happiest germs and chanted against the ownership and for the players. It was barely-contained mayhem.

***

During the walk to my car I decided to go all-out to buy Fantasy Football. That meant using the leftovers from my Scottish money plus blowing up my meagre savings. But it made sense. It felt right. I didn’t have much of a clue what CA was, but I had a strong suspicion PA was the key to everything.

At home, I checked the upcoming Premier League fixtures with a growing sense of dread. United didn't have a home match for the rest of the month. It seemed pretty clear that I would have to go and watch Man City if I wanted to buy the perk.

I shuddered as I typed, for the first time in my life, 'manchester city' into a search bar, and nearly gagged when I clicked through and saw that awful, awful light blue banner on my screen.

There was one thing I didn't need to worry about, at least. I knew there would be plenty of tickets available.