Maybe the critics are right

People have been griping lately about the lack of scoring in the Premiership making it less interesting overall. And maybe they're right. I don't think you have to have goals for a particular game to be exciting or interesting, but it's usually better if there are. Wednesday's Chelsea-Liverpool game - the latest in a string of CL games between the two that has seen virtually no scoring - was one example of a game that was still reasonably exciting: plenty of good end-to-end football found its way onto the pitch, even if the goals didn't. But despite that, there weren't many good chances. When the best team in England doesn't even look in real danger of finding the net - or of having it found against them - that isn't the most exciting stuff. The EPL needs some more goals.

Man U at least got some scoring in the 2-1 win over Benfica, but aside from the goals it was kind of a dull game, though maybe that's just because I don't really care for Man U.

The question is, what would you do about this problem? Arsene Wenger suggests an extra point for wins by three goals or more, but this seems like a "rich get richer" situation that isn't going to help many teams. I mean, how many three-goal blowouts do you see a year in the entire EPL? A few dozen. Last year there were 50 all year, 2.5 per team. Not a very high number. Some teams, naturally, didn't have any (a couple finished on neither end of such a blowout), but even a Manchester United only had four. Plus, proving my rich get richer point, with ten and eight respectively, Arsenal and Chelsea combined for more than a third of the total. And of course they were the top two teams.

Of course, what you don't want is "more blowouts," and obviously that's not what Wenger is suggesting - he's suggesting that the extra points would produce more attacking football as teams try for the blowout. What you really want, I guess, are high-scoring games. In how many games last season did the clubs combine for five goals or more and it wasn't a three-goal blowout? The answer is twenty-five. Barely more than one per team. And certainly some teams never had any, especially when you note that Norwich City was responsible for seven of them.

Yes, 1-0 and 2-1 games, if not 0-0 and 1-1 games, are far more likely than, say, a game like Norwich-Boro on January 22, in which Norwich went up 1-0 in the 18th, gave up four goals in the next hour, scored one in the 80th to pull within 4-2, and then somehow scored two in stoppage time to steal a point. Even without a winner that's dramatic as hell. Not that a 1-1 game in which the tying goal is scored late isn't, but it's far more likely. 84 games last year finished either 0-0 or 1-1, meaning that every team in the league had an average of four games that were probably fairly boring. There were 30 0-0 draws total, which is five more than the number of games that finished 3-2, 4-3, 4-2, 5-3, or 5-4, though at least both are relative outliers. In perhaps the worst example of a team being rather boring on the whole, West Brom had 11 1-1 draws and three more that finished 0-0, meaning that more than a third of their season was taken up with generally bland football, though at least they made up for it by staying up on the last day in dramatic fashion.

But 30 out of 380 0-0 draws is a fairly small percentage. (Less than a twelfth, in fact; about .08, which won't even get you arrested.) On the other hand, that was last year - the bigger problem is this year, which has already seen nine games finish 0-0 out of just 66 played, a percentage of .14, creeping up on twice last year's number. Seven more games have finished 1-1; only three so far have seen four goals scored by one team. (One each for Chelsea and Arsenal.)

Maybe an even bigger problem is the number of shutouts, though. In 66 matches, the losing team was blanked in fully 32 of them! Adding the 0-0 draws on to that gives you a horrifying total of 41 games out of 66 - 62% of the games played - in which at least one team did not score. Last year, that figure was 188 out of 380 - plenty, but still less than half. In 2002/2003, though, it was 185 out of 380. Not much less. And this year's figure does have a small sample size.

In other words, the stats suggest that it's probably just alarmist stuff. I'm guessing some teams haven't hit their strides yet, but in the end I think we'll be about where we've been, goal-wise. Let's not hit the panic button just yet over one-sixth of a season. But by all means, let's root for the English teams to be involved in some more exciting CL games, because so far the ones I've gotten to watch haven't been great.