KUMB Writers Awards 2004/05

It all started a few seasons ago when an insomniac Gnome sat at his PC at 3am and looked back over the season's match reports.

Looking back over the season, which had but a few weeks left to run, I wondered which players had scored consistently well over the season.

So as an academic exercise borne from lack of sleep and boredom I input the player marks into a spreadsheet and worked out a simple average. Just so I wasn't the only one to suffer from this bout of nerdish behaviour, I posted the results up on the forum.

Back at KUMB Towers, the esteemed Mr Howlett saw this development and hit on an idea for an addition to the annual KUMB Awards – The KUMB Writers Award to be given to the player with the highest average mark.

Fast forward to today and, after several years of number crunching and numerous complaints from the lovely girlfriend about the length of time spent poring over “those &%£$** match reports” it was clear that it was time for the player mark analysis to become slightly more sophisticated.

The main reason for this stemmed from my dissatisfaction with the system from a statistical point of view. It was becoming increasingly obvious that players who had played a couple of games with relatively good marks before being dropped or picking up an injury were at an advantage to players who played week in week out.

So I spent the summer playing about with the spreadsheet to introduce a more formal structure to the whole thing, as opposed to the previous policy technically known as “In-season technical adjustment” or “Making it up as you go along” to give it its less formal name.

So here, as we unveil the first of our monthly updates, are all those things you probably didn't want to know about the player marks and probably wouldn't have asked even if you did:

Where do these marks come from?

After every match Mr Howlett's hard working and scandalously unpaid legion of writers rush home and, ignoring pleas from loved ones, switch on their computers and prepare match reports once described by the BBC no less as “Top Notch”. Once these are up on the fixtures section of the site, yours truly inputs the marks into the steam-driven spreadsheet.

How does the sheet work?

All the player marks are added up and, when there is more than one mark for a match, an average is calculated for each match. These averages are then fed into the spreadsheet to give an average for the season to date.

Are there any qualification criteria – like there are for Cricket averages for example?

Yes. To qualify for an average a player must play in a minimum of 10 matches – though for the first month I've reduced this to 8.

It seems unfair that Player A has a better average than player B when he hasn't played in as many matches?

This is a problem we have tried to address by introducing the concept of weighting the averages. Without wishing to get too technical about it, the way the weighting works is that a player who has played in over half the matches will score 100% of his average whilst those who have played in less than half will only score 95% of their average. This will hopefully reward consistency over a period of time.

What happens when players are transferred out?

They get removed from the sheet – only serving Hammers are eligible for the award.

How about loan players?

They are eligible for as long as they remain in the squad.

I disagree with the marks that the writers are giving out each week.

Then why not write a report and include your own marks? Every match report published on the fixtures section of the site is included in the spreadsheet so if you want to influence things why not get involved by sending your thoughts to editor@kumb.com

Aren't you a bit sad playing about with these figures rather than getting out and doing something interesting?

Yes.

So, without further ado, here are the stats for August/September 2004:

Position Player Average
1 Nigel Reo-Coker 7.04
2 Edward Sheringham 6.64
3 Tomas Repka 6.32
4 Marlon Harewood 6.24
5 Stephen Bywater 6.18
6 Luke Chadwick 6.15
7 Matthew Etherington 6.14
8 Rufus Brevett 5.88
9 Sergei Rebrov 5.78
10 Hayden Mullins 5.77

NB - any players who visit the site – I am open to bribery!

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* Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the highlighted author/s and do not necessarily represent or reflect the official policy or position of KUMB.com.


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