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This week we invited our community to participate in the process of rating players on the traditional scale of 1-10 following their performances in the 0-4 loss to Manchester City on Monday. The votes are in, and it's time to make some statements about public perception about the quality of play during this most recent match.
| # of Responses | Min Rating | Max Rating | Mean | Median | Standard Deviation |
| 39 | 5 | 10 | 8.08 | 8 | 1.20 |
| 39 | 1 | 7 | 3.82 | 4 | 1.73 |
| 39 | 1 | 8 | 2.69 | 2 | 1.67 |
| 39 | 1 | 9 | 5.21 | 5 | 1.73 |
| 39 | 1 | 7 | 4.46 | 5 | 1.48 |
| 39 | 1 | 8 | 4.41 | 5 | 1.50 |
| 39 | 1 | 7 | 4.18 | 4 | 1.65 |
| 39 | 2 | 10 | 6.36 | 6 | 1.48 |
| 39 | 2 | 7 | 5.23 | 5 | 1.25 |
| 39 | 1 | 7 | 4.72 | 5 | 1.38 |
| 39 | 1 | 7 | 3.82 | 4 | 1.57 |
| 38 | 1 | 7 | 4.74 | 5 | 1.25 |
| 38 | 4 | 10 | 6.29 | 6 | 1.33 |
| 38 | 1 | 8 | 4.87 | 5 | 1.26 |
- As expected, most of the mean averages are quite low. The lowest mean and median belonged to Steven Taylor, who received a straight red card in the first half. He received 1 vote of 7 and 1 vote of 8, which explains the wide variance, but we can pretty safely call those votes outliers:
- On the flip side, Tim Krul had the highest mean and median by a wide margin, with the least amount of variance. He was undoubtedly CHN's Man of the Match, having made several high-flying saves that earned a healthy amount of respect from observers. It's not often that a goalkeeper will be so far and away named as the best player on the pitch while giving up 4 goals, which speaks to the level of disgust supporters had for the outfield players, especially the defenders.
- The next tier belongs to Hatem Ben Arfa and Paul Dummett, the only other two players to receive votes of 10 (Dummett received two of them). They each had medians of 6 and means above 6, something no other player could boast.
- Opinions were split the most when it came to Fabricio Coloccini and Mathieu Debuchy. Coloccini's graph actually looks somewhat like a bell curve, except that the tails don't taper quite as much:
I imagine that more responses may have smoothed the noise out a bit. More on this later. Debuchy's graph, by contrast, is a right mess:
Opinions on Debuchy were decidedly mixed, with the majority giving him a middling rating while a sizeable contingent was much less impressed. It is unlikely that more poll respondents would have resulted in more consensus, and in fact the difference between the two camps may have become more pronounced. It will be interesting to take note of public opinion on Debuchy moving forward. - The number of respondents was quite low, which is probably a result of posting the poll several hours after the match and burying it in a post that also contained tweets and other ephemera from the match. Going forward, we will try to post the ratings form more quickly after the match is finished and in its own post to help guarantee better participation and therefore a more accurate gauge of the community's collective opinion. The number of respondents differs for a small amount of players because substituted players were not made a required part of the form, since some people prefer not to rate them based on the small amount of time they spend on the pitch. The survey was conducted using a form created on Google Drive.
- If you'd like more information about voting on any certain player, let me know in the comments section.
