Okay so yesterday folks kept asking who’s better between Ben W and Rai W based on stats. Thought, hey, that sounds like a fun little project! Fire up the ol’ spreadsheet, right? Let me tell you exactly how that went down.
The Plan (That Instantly Went Wrong)
Started simple enough. Idea was:
- Step 1: Find match history stats. Easy peasy? Not even close.
- Step 2: Stick numbers for stuff like win rate, goals, assists into columns. Ben in one, Rai in the other.
- Step 3: Do some basic adding up, maybe an average. See who comes out on top.
- Step 4: Write a neat little summary. Done.
That was the dream. Reality hit hard.
The Search Debacle
Went online hunting. First site, stats looked good… until I realized it was only showing Ben’s stats against teams from Norway. Useless. Next site, had Rai, but the “assists” column seemed to include corner kicks that went nowhere. Scrap that. Third site? Pop-up city. Annoying stuff flashing everywhere. Gave up and closed the tab real quick.
Spent like a solid hour just hopping between sites. Felt like going down rabbit holes. Knew most sites weren’t giving me the full picture, just cherry-picked data. Super frustrating.
Spreadsheet Nightmare
Finally found two semi-decent sources. Copied a bunch of numbers over. Ben’s stuff looked messy – some games with only minutes played listed, no scores. Rai’s data had assists missing in like half the rows. Trying to compare this mess was pointless.
Tried sorting by date to line them up. Epic fail. Different seasons, different opponents, different leagues sometimes. It was a total mismatch.
Started typing out a formula to average Ben’s goals per match. Spreadsheet completely crashed. Frozen. Lost like 10 minutes of work. Rage quit for a coffee.
The Realization (Or Giving Up)
Sipping that coffee, staring at this disaster zone of a spreadsheet. Columns everywhere, messy numbers, formulas erroring out.
It hit me: This comparison is junk. Numbers without context? Meaningless. Different teams, different leagues, different roles on the team? Who scores the goals Rai passes to? What defenses was Ben facing? Way too many unknowns.
Felt like trying to compare apples to… angry orange roadcones. Just doesn’t work. My neat little stat box dream was dead.
So Who Won?
Honestly? I lost. Lost time, lost sanity, lost a spreadsheet to the crash gods.
Clicked ‘Close’ without saving. Felt weirdly freeing.
Point is, next time someone tries to tell you “Player X wins easily based on stats!”… Ask them where the stats came from. Chances are, it’s just numbers picked to win an argument. Real life comparisons need way more than a spreadsheet. Way more hassle than it’s worth. Learned that the hard way yesterday!
