There’s a 50.3 per cent chance Spurs win the Europa League final. Or a 50.7 per cent chance Man United win it. Not even supercomputers can cope with these teams and their absolute nonsense.
Euro vision
It’s the banter final tonight, isn’t it? El Crapico. Hell Clasico. The Donkey Derby. Bilbao Bobbins. A match that Mike Walters in the Mirror – never knowingly afraid of taking a reasonable if obvious point and stretching it way beyond its elastic limit – declares is between ‘the two worst teams in the Premier League’.
Not quite, Mike, but we will concede they are indeed both very bad.
So who will win this contest between resistible force and movable object? Profoundly difficult to say with any certainty, so it is to the supercomputers we must yield.
From The Sun we get this:
Ahead of the game, boffins and brainiacs over at AceOdds have built a supercomputer to crunch the numbers and determine the most likely outcome. The egghead formula has simulated the outcome 1,000 times. And it has worked out that Spurs are most likely to run out 2-1 winners.
You know this is serious, because it involves boffins, brainiacs and egghead formulas crunching the numbers. That settles it, frankly. But wait, the Mail says this.
For the Europa League final showpiece at San Mames, AceOdds backed Tottenham to win 3-2 and lift a trophy for the first time since 2008.
Come on, AceOdds. Come on, boffins. Brainiacs, eggheads; what’s going on here? What’s the crunch of these numbers? Is it 2-1 or 3-2?
We don’t want to have to watch the actual match to find out the answer. What a rigmarole. Mind you the Mail also say this about the magic predicting machine:
The results were then converted into percentages, showing the probability of each team finishing in each position in the league.
Which does rather suggest someone has got slightly muddled up along the way, or failed to update some old copy accurately. Sports Illustrated, meanwhile, bring us this supercomputer news:
Opta currently rates Tottenham as minor favourites, with Spurs prevailing in 50.3% of the 10,000 simulations run by the supercomputer forming the basis of their prediction. United, thus, have a 49.7% chance of lifting the trophy.
We would contend that a supercomputer saying there’s a 50.3 per cent chance of one of two things happening doesn’t really count as ‘Supercomputer Predicts Europa League Final Winner’ any more than it would ‘Supercomputer Predicts Outcome Of Coin Toss’ but that might just be us.
But then there’s the Daily Express, with this water-muddier.
After 10,000 current simulations, United lifted the trophy 50.7 per cent of the time, while Spurs ruled supreme in 49.3 per cent.
There really is no shame in just shrugging your shoulders and going ‘They’re both stupid, it’s too tough to call’. Even if you are a supercomputer. Or a boffin.
Express delivery
Meanwhile, the Daily Express are busy pretending Manchester United have already named their team for the final, including a ‘new striker’.
Man Utd starting XI to face Tottenham decided as new striker named
Gutting that there simply wasn’t room to add the fairly significant caveat ‘by Express Sport writers’ after the word ‘decided’ there. And it was Mason Mount, if you’re interested, which you shouldn’t be.
Utter Woke Nonsense
Textbook Daily Mailing from the Daily Mail here.
Here’s my plea to the BBC – don’t change Match of the Day with box-ticking or wokery, writes JONATHAN McEVOY
Were Mediawatch in a snarkier mood it might note that the only ‘box-ticking’ going on here is the Mail crowbarring ‘wokery’ into a headline for the eight millionth time, while for the eight millionth time failing to define what ‘wokery’ actually is.
The true nonsense here is that McEvoy’s article is broadly fine, hoping that Gary Lineker’s departure doesn’t signal an unnecessary and damaging broader shift in Match of the Day’s overall style and focus.
And unlike other Daily Mail fears, this one is not entirely unfounded. There has been talk from BBC suits of the need for the show to feature ‘more chat’ and Mediawatch finds itself in broad agreement with McEvoy’s central thrust that this would be a bad idea, that people want to watch the highlights and a bit of analysis and not just the analysis. But also not just the action. There are plenty of other options for those who want those things. As McEvoy puts it, Match of the Day should be…
… the amalgam of both, the action dominating with the reassuring-as-old-slippers insight of the pundits as an accompaniment. This diet is distinct from both the protracted analysis of Sky’s ‘main event’ and the unvarnished 10-second video clip trotting across personal smartphones.
But after several hundred words of reasonableness, McEvoy makes his fatal error – or Machiavellian click-generating move, choose your fighter – that presumably made a sub-editor punch the air in delight.
Nobody, even among the small ‘c’ conservative Saturday night audience, is opposed to innovation and judicious tinkering. But the great hope is that change for its own sake, such as box ticking and wokery, or indeed a bellyful of laddishness, is left at the studio door.
Please, can someone explain to us what on earth ‘wokery’ even means in this context?
And also how, precisely, the end of Gary Lineker – a bog-standard centrist dad routinely portrayed by the right-wing press as profoundly dangerous Britain-hating commie firebrand – means the Mail fear there will be suddenly be more of it?
