My boys, Silas, Sam and Linus, play a lot of FIFA (other football-related computer games are available) and as a result our house is full of weird stats. We know the pace of Werder Bremen’s 20-year-old Gambian striker, Ousman Manneh. We know that Erhun Oztumer of Walsall has the best balance of just about any footballer in the world.
It’s the cup final today and there will be a lot more stats to digest. Everyone will say that Mesut Ozil looked a bit disengaged and then the stats will tell us that he ran further than anyone except N’Golo Kante who covered literally 40 kilometres, completed 211 passes and made 745 tackles, interceptions and recoveries.
There is almost nothing about football that cannot be quantified and known, and it sometimes seems that our lives are the same. But I read in Thursday’s Guardian that one of the ways we measure ourselves, using those wristbands that track our daily exercise, might not be as accurate as previously thought: we may not be expending as many calories as the machine says we are.
I guess that in one way it’s really only an issue if you’re always trying to balance another piece of bread and butter (the greatest of all foods) against another flight of stairs climbed, but it made me wonder, in our stat-obsessed world, about how much we really need to know.
The bible is clear that knowledge and wisdom are not the same things and I reckon that’s an important distinction to make. ‘Never rely on what you think you know’, advises the writer of the book of Proverbs, whilst pointing out that if you find wisdom, then ‘when you lie down you will not be afraid and your sleep will be sweet’.
And St Paul talks about ‘love that surpasses knowledge’ – the unconditional love of God, the love that roots and establishes us and binds us together in community.
In the end, knowing we are loved is more important than knowing whether we walked 10,000 steps and burned 2000 calories today. Knowing we are loved is more important than knowing that Mesut Ozil has a 45% shot accuracy rating. Knowing we are loved is even more important than the only stat that really matters today: 1-0 to the Arsenal.
I’m not a Gooner, but the Boy Silas is, so I will back them against any opposition other than Leeds United (childhood team) and Dulwich Hamlet. The image is of Per Mertesacker, whose FA Cup final this was.
This was my first Pause with Dermot OLeary and we talked about Ernest Shackleton.