Jon Walter's 2012/13 season journey

Yesterday, I asked how many kilometres did Jon Walters travel to away games in 2012/13, taking Britannia Stadium as the origin point, and the away stadium in each game as the destination (taking his home address as the origin point would be a little weird!)
Using Google Maps, you can get the distance in the route between two points on a map, so using the away team's stadium as the destination in each case, you can read off the value and then total it up for the season.

Date	Competition	Home Team	Result	Away Team	Location	Distance(km)
18-Aug-12	Premier League	Reading	1-1	Stoke City	Madejski Stadium	252
01-Sep-12	Premier League	Wigan	2-2	Stoke City	DW Stadium	83.2
22-Sep-12	Premier League	Chelsea	1-0	Stoke City	Stamford Bridge	268
07-Oct-12	Premier League	Liverpool	0-0	Stoke City	Anfield	95.8
20-Oct-12	Premier League	Manchester United	4-2	Stoke City	Old Trafford	81
03-Nov-12	Premier League	Norwich	1-0	Stoke City	Carrow Road	320
19-Nov-12	Premier League	West Ham United	1-1	Stoke City	Upton Park	269
01-Dec-12	Premier League	West Bromwich Albion	0-1	Stoke City	The Hawthorns	63.5
08-Dec-12	Premier League	Aston Villa	0-0	Stoke City	Villa Park	70.3
22-Dec-12	Premier League	Tottenham	0-0	Stoke City	White Hart Lane	253
01-Jan-13	Premier League	Manchester City	3-0	Stoke City	Etihad Stadium	80.7
05-Jan-13	FA Cup	Crystal Palace	0-0	Stoke City	Selhurst Park	281
19-Jan-13	Premier League	Swansea	3-1	Stoke City	Liberty Stadium	307
02-Feb-13	Premier League	Arsenal	1-0	Stoke City	Emirates Stadium	249
23-Feb-13	Premier League	Fulham	1-0	Stoke City	Craven Cottage	267
10-Mar-13	Premier League	Newcastle Utd	2-1	Stoke City	St James' Park	316
30-Mar-13	Premier League	Everton	1-0	Stoke City	Goodison Park	97.1
20-Apr-13	Premier League	QPR	0-2	Stoke City	Loftus Road	260
06-May-13	Premier League	Sunderland	1-1	Stoke City	Stadium of Light	312
19-May-13	Premier League	Southampton	1-1	Stoke City	St Mary's Stadium	297
Total						4222.6

To put 4,200 km into context, the distance between Dublin and Praia, capital of Cape Verde Islands off the west coast of Africa is 4500km!

Click the links for each stadium to see the journey taken from the Britannia for that game

Summer Trivia Question 1

With the close season upon us and nothing of note happening in the transfer market, I've been examining the data collected over the past season to see what, if any, interesting stats I could come up with. I'll be blogging the results over the next few weeks, but I'll pose each one as a question to my readers before revealing all.

First question is this: Taking the Britannia stadium as your starting point, how many km did Jon Walters travel in total to away games in 2012/13?
To makes things easier, here's the list of all Jon Walters' games: http://irish-abroad.appspot.com/PlayerDetails?playerID=32939
Google can be used to get the distance between two addresses, e.g. from https://maps.google.com/maps?saddr=Britannia+Stadium,Stoke&daddr=Anfield+Stadium,+liverpool you can see that Britannia Stadium to Anfield is 95.3km

Send me the answer on twitter @irish_abroad on facebook at facebook.com/irishfootballstatistics or email me chatsoccer@gmail.com Tag your posts with #SummerTrivia and I'll post the answer tomorrow

Have fun!

The history of Ireland competitive victories over higher ranked opposition

In order to qualify for the World Cup in 2014, the Boys in Green will more than likely need to accomplish something not yet achieved under the current regime - defeat a higher ranked opposition in a competitive international*. At the time of writing, Trapattoni's men have fallen two places to 41st in FIFA's rankings, while opponents Sweden are ranked 27th in the world, a drop of three places from their previous ranking, and Austria are 76th after falling five places.

Looking at the history of internationals since the rankings system was first introduced in 1993, there are only six occasions when a superior ranked opposition fell to the Green Army

Date	Level			Rank			Rank
18 June 1994	World Cup Finals	Italy	0	4	Republic of Ireland	1	14
10 September 1997	World Cup Qualifier	Lithuania	1	42	Republic of Ireland	2	55
5 September 1998	European Cup Qualifier	Republic of Ireland	2	48	Croatia	0	4
1 September 1999	European Cup Qualifier	Republic of Ireland	2	38	Yugoslavia	1	22
1 September 2001	World Cup Qualifier	Republic of Ireland	1	25	Holland	0	10
28 March 2007	European Cup Qualifier	Republic of Ireland	1	51	Slovakia	0	37

Previous managers Jack Charlton, Mick McCarthy and Steve Staunton all claimed the scalp of higher ranked opposition. Charlton's solitary win was arguably the most high profile, the 1-0 win over Italy in Giants Stadium during the group stages of World Cup '94. Although it has to be remembered that rankings were introduced towards the end of his tenure. McCarthy has four of the six wins, including the only away win in Lithuania (Charlton's win over Italy was at a neutral ground), with the memorable 1-0 victory over Holland with ten men the outstanding result. Steve Staunton's win in Croke Park over Slovakia, who were ranked 15 places ahead of the Dundalk man's side, completes the short history. Brian Kerr failed to defeat an opponent ranked higher than his own side during his three year tenure.


An interesting statistic of the wins is that four of the six wins all came in September, and three of those in odd-numbered years which hopefully be a positive omen for the coming game against Sweden.

* Giovanni Trapattoni's side did manage to beat France in 90 minutes in the infamous World Cup Play Off in 2009. At the time, Ireland were ranked 34 to France's 9th ranked side. The result is recorded as a draw after extra time on fifa.com, so is not included in the list.