MISSED CHANCES ARE ENOUGH TO GET A £6M MOVE

WHAT will Burnley get for an initial £6m outlay on Andre Gray? In short, a striker who misses a load of chances.

But don’t worry Clarets fans – it turns out that’s actually a good thing. As everybody knows, Brentford chairman Matthew Benham loves to crunch his numbers, digging for the stats that indicate hidden value.

Which is why, this summer, he put the kibosh on manager Marinus Dijkhuizen’s efforts to sign Dutch striker Michiel Kramer.

Kramer had scored a lot of goals for ADO Den Haag and boasted an excellent chance conversion rate. So why did the computers say no?

Intuition tells you that strikers who score lots of goals from few opportunities, like Kramer or Patrick Bamford at Boro, are ‘better’ players.

In fact, Benham’s statistical models told him that the most effective players were those who took the most shots, irrespective of whether they hit the target.

Kramer, he said, didn’t get into scoring positions frequently enough.

Gray, on the other hand, did, even though plenty of his efforts missed the target completely.

That is why Brentford drove such a hard bargain for Gray. Now Sean Dyche and Burnley must hope there wasn’t a glitch in the data.