Goals-to-games ratio: Cork lead surge in hitting the net

SEPTEMBER ROAD:WHICH team scored the greatest number of goals in a championship game this season?

While most, we reckon, will go for Tipperary, the answer, of course, is Cork – putting 10 past Laois in the first round of the qualifiers last month (whereas Tipperary could only manage seven against Waterford).

What’s the odds now on a Tipperary versus Waterford final?

Thinking it was just our imagination that there have been an incredible number of goals scored this summer, we looked at the past four seasons for a comparison. (We didn’t count relegation games, or the Ulster championship due to differing formats.)

The goals-to-games ratio from 2008-2010 is remarkably similar – 2.9 in 2008, falling to 2.68 in 2009 before recovering to 2.9 last season. However, so far this season, the ratio is 4.1 – there have been 91 goals scored in just 22 matches. With three games left, there’s a strong possibility more than 100 goals will be scored for the first time in a senior hurling championship season.

Compare 2011 to 10 years ago – 48 goals in 15 matches, or 1991, 45 goals in 14 games. All averaging around three goals per game.

However, another decade earlier, the summer of 1981 (which was claimed by Offaly for the first time), had an impressive 67 goals in 14 matches: 4.8 goals per game.

Go figure: Goals win games but points add up

GOALS win games. At least, this is what we are being told by every pundit in the country of late.

Actually, as the unappreciated points have been telling us for years, goals are over-rated. Of the 53 games played to date in the 2011 senior football championship, only around half a dozen would have produced a different result if you disregarded the goals.

What’s interesting is the games which would have been affected – Tyrone, rather than Donegal, would have made the Ulster final (the score was 0-9 to 2-6). Louth would have drawn with Meath (2-8 to 5-8) in their round-one qualifier, while Offaly would have progressed farther than Limerick in round two (0-15 to 3-13). Armagh wouldn’t have needed a replay to beat Wicklow (0-19 to 2-13), though Wicklow would have won that replay (0-10 to 2-9). And in round three, Meath would have taken Kildare in Navan (0-14 to 2-11), and Tyrone and Armagh would have drawn in Omagh (2-13 to 0-13).

Perhaps it is the psychology impact of a goal – a boost for the team that scores it and a blow for the side that concedes it – that matters just as much as its impact on the scoreboard.

Since the start of this century only one All-Ireland final would have gone the other way if goals were disregarded – the 1-12 to 0-14 win by Armagh over Kerry in 2002.