The Madness of Digging Up Maurice Ross Stats
I swear, this whole stats project started because I had nothing better to do. Seriously. I was sitting here, trying to sort through two years of terrible personal finance records, and I just needed a rabbit hole to jump down. My mate Gary, he’s always banging on about the “golden era” of Scottish defenders, and last week, he threw Maurice Ross’s name into the mix, talking him up like he was some kind of rock-solid, impenetrable wall. I just snorted. I needed facts to shut him up. You can’t argue with data, right?
So, I decided to prove him wrong. Or maybe prove him right. Whatever. I committed. This wasn’t going to be a quick Google search. Getting reliable stats for a player whose peak was two decades ago is pure, unadulterated hell. You don’t just pull up an API and get perfect per-90 metrics. You gotta dig in the dirt.
The Scramble for Data
The first thing I did was try to pin down his career trajectory. Rangers, Wolves, Aberdeen, even the Viking FK stint—I listed every single club. Then came the actual, miserable work.
I started hunting for raw match reports. I’m talking about archived sports pages from online newspaper libraries. Some of these sites look like they were designed in 1997 and barely load. I spent the better part of two nights just scrolling through brittle digital text, manually logging things like:
- Total appearances per season.
- Goals conceded in games he played 90 minutes.
- The truly nasty bit: Tracking his disciplinary record, game by game.
The databases I found were inconsistent. One site would credit him with a clean sheet if he played the full match and the team didn’t concede. Another site wouldn’t track clean sheets for fullbacks, only for center-backs and goalies. I had to cross-reference three different sources for about 80% of his Rangers career just to make sure the numbers weren’t wildly out of whack.
Let me tell you, if you want a perfect picture, you have to be ready to do the manual input. I built a monster spreadsheet. It wasn’t clean or beautiful. It had columns for “Source A Match Count,” “Source B Conceded Goals,” and then my final, verified number. It was a mess, but it was my mess, and it was getting the job done.
Analyzing the “Best Defender” Claim
Once I had the raw material, I had to figure out what Gary even meant by “best.” Forget fancy expected goals models. That stuff is for the pros. I stick to the rough stuff:
Strongest Metric: Consistency.
I crunched the numbers for his peak years at Ibrox. His appearance count was solid, but when you look at the goals conceded when he was on the pitch versus contemporaries in the same position in other SPL teams—the data gets complicated. He was often part of a title-winning side, which automatically skews the defensive record up. You have to subtract the team success factor. When you compare his individual metrics (like successful tackles per 90, which I had to estimate based on old fan forum comments, because no official source tracked that consistently), he wasn’t top tier. He was good. Solid. Reliable. But ‘best’? Nah.
The Wolves Blip.
That short, weird spell at Wolves really messed with his averages. I spent a whole afternoon trying to justify those truly lousy stats, looking for context—was he injured? Was the team generally collapsing? The numbers just showed a significant dip in defensive reliability, which hurts the overall “best ever” narrative Gary was peddling.
The final conclusion, based on my hastily assembled data set, was clear: Ross was a solid, dependable defender who had high peaks because he played for strong teams. But when you isolate his performance from the team infrastructure, the stats don’t scream “Best Scottish Defender” of his generation. Maybe top five? Sure. But ‘the best’? That’s a stretch. The data just doesn’t back up the bar talk.
Why I Wasted My Time Doing This
You’re probably asking yourself why a grown man spent three and a half days performing manual statistical archaeology on Maurice Ross instead of, say, fixing the leaking tap in the kitchen or finally getting around to those dreadful tax forms I mentioned earlier. I’ll tell you why.
I had a shocker of a week at my actual, pay-the-bills job. Everything I touched turned to absolute garbage. I was failing at the stuff that matters, the stuff that makes money. I needed a win, any win, even if it was a completely pointless, non-monetary win based on obscure Scottish football history. I needed to start a project, follow a process, and achieve a defined goal, no matter how stupid that goal was.
This whole stats deep dive was my way of proving to myself I could still finish something. That I could still take a complex, messy problem—like scattered, inconsistent football data—and whip it into a shape that delivers an answer. I got the answer, and now I have a giant, ugly spreadsheet full of Maurice Ross data ready to throw at Gary next time he opens his mouth. Mission accomplished. Now, back to those taxes. Maybe next week.