​The numbers game​

A third defeat in a row, still no goals at home and a drop into the bottom three. While nobody wants to be in this position, Oliver Glasner’s Nottingham Forest are doing the right things — so surely the results will follow?

There are times when the statistics obsessives can almost make you doubt what you've seen with your own eyes. The data can often sound compelling, but football — unlike American sports, where everyone pores over the numbers — feels largely like a sport about instinct and feelings rather than some kind of analytics experiment.

You can point to xG and possession stats and passing accuracy but when you've just lost 3-0 and you know, with your own eyes, that it was an abject performance, these abstract concepts are a long way from the reality of putting the hard yards in and actually getting the ball between the goalposts and into the net.

The thing is, Nottingham Forest haven't been abject. They have put the hard yards in. The statistics prove many things. We just haven't actually been able to put the ball in the net.

In gambling, the term negative variance explains precisely this: a poor run at odds with the underlying performance. In other words, a good process yielding bad outcomes.

Famously, Brighton and Brentford are owned by successful gamblers who have placed Moneyball-style recruitment at the heart of their success. You can read too much into the numbers game — and there are many more factors to performance, tactics and coaching — but both clubs have a consistent philosophy that they have great faith in.

Forest, after many years of less boom and more bust, are on a path they have faith in. Supporters might be questioning that faith after a Premier League start that sees us in the bottom three after seven games.

Three losses in a row and no goals at home, let alone wins, is not the start anybody wanted. But this is just the start of a project that — hopefully — changes the club's trajectory. Recruitment is now settled and considered, rather than the scattergun approach we've known for years, and replacing Vitor Pereira with Oliver Glasner was part of a plan to establish the Reds in the Premier League — rather than continually looking over our shoulder...