Wait until next year

Charles Reep has a lot to answer for. Excuse me a brief and rather shaky history of the long ball game. Retired RAF Wing Commander Reep was an amateur statistician, who from studying football in the 1950s came up with a number of concepts. There was the “3-pass optimisation rule” – that a higher percentage of goals come from three passes in the build-up, as opposed to more passes prior to a shot taking place. He also came up with the concept of “9 shots per goal”, that on average there is goal for every nine shots on goal. Read the rest of this entry »