ITV have been looking into who are the Premier Leagues greatest free kick takers ever (for no real reason) and have come to their decision based on nothing but stats. How original. To be precise, how many shots you have had to how many times it went in the net, then summed up into a nice percentage conversion rate.Using this data they have come to a Top 10 and, of course, Newcastle Utd are represented in the list. By TWO men in fact, in the shape of Nobby Solano and Laurent Robert. Solano is actually 5th in the list and Robert scrapes into tenth place.
Now this poll, list or whatever it is has one unique failure in the fact it only considers data collected from the past 14 years. So all of those Beckham beauties, Shearer thunderbolts and everybody else from the 90's are not taken into consideration. Which is obviously a little bit ridiculous to call the winner of this list as 'the greatest' because he isn't. If Beckham came out on top then maybe it could be forgiven, but given the fact Juan Mata is number one....I suggest this list is somewhat a non event.
However that doesn't prevent me happily bigging up the fact two of our famous free kick specialists make the list, so here it is in all its glory complete with the 'data':
Top 10
1: Juan Mata: Shots 28, Goals 5, Conversion 17.9 (per cent)
2: Sebastian Larsson: 90, 11, 12.2.
3: Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink: 62, 6, 9.7.
4: David Beckham: 54, 5, 9.3.
5: Nolberto Solano: 78, 7, 9.0.
6: Thierry Henry: 144, 12, 8.3.
7: Danny Murphy: 67, 5, 7.5.
8: Ryan Giggs: 73, 5, 6.8.
9: Leighton Baines: 76, 5, 6.6.
10: Laurent Robert: 154, 10, 6.5.
Some big absentees are Cristiano Ronaldo, Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard.
We all knew Nobby could peel an onion with his right boot and Robert could smash one to pieces from 35 yards so it's nice to see someone, somewhere at least recognise it also.
Stats don't lie....sometimes
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