From "The Independent"
Warnock is certainly no better than Konchesky and was so poor for Aston Villa against Manchester City that Gérard Houllier left him out of his next squad. He is not the only player being pursued by a club whom we were told when their new owners arrived would seek value in the transfer market – using the science known as sabermetrics.
"Murder" was the word Birmingham manager Alex McLeish chose on Saturday to describe shopping for strikers in January. "Madness" was Sir Alex Ferguson's description of the value attached to Villa spending £24m on Darren Bent. Yet Liverpool looked at Bent too, according to the new director of football strategy, Damien Comolli, and they also seem ready to pay £15m for Ajax's Luis Suarez, whose record against good Dutch defences is incomparably poorer than against bad ones and whose prime proof of quality came at the last World Cup.
Overpaying for players who have just shone at a tournament is what Moneyball, the bible of sabermetrics, describes as "a tendency to be over influenced by a guy's most recent performance: what he did last was not necessarily what he would do next". And then there is Charlie Adam of Blackpool – a good midfielder with pace who has been attracting Aston Villa, Blackburn and Sunderland; the kind of clubs Liverpool have no ambition to emulate. A Liverpool player? No.
LinkAs a former member of the "Society of American Baseball Research", I look forward to "VoRP", "PECOTA" "ERA+" and other Sabermetric terms entering the football vocabulary.
Maybe Theo Epstein or Bill James will be on hand at Liverpool's press conference if they do sign Warnock.
