At Home with John and Debbie

Remember when I asked you to vote for Leamington’s Alex Rodman as FA Cup player of the round? I joked at the time that it was subverting democracy, but let’s face it, none of us really thought that asking friends, acquaintances and readers to vote was really cheating, did we?

It turns out that there was some proper cheating going on. Prompted by some outraged emails from Cambridge City supporters, the FA discarded some 100,000 votes which they deemed to be duplicate votes made by scripts. It seems these fraudulent votes were prompted by an arms race between Cambridge fans and Leamington fans.

When the poll closed this morning at 9am, Rodman was a few percent up, with Cambridge’s Booth in close second place, and the other nominees barely represented with fractional percentages.

However, once the FA had discarded what it deemed to be duplicates (I don’t know how they would have done this, but I’m sure they did their best), Rodman was still the clear winner. Hooray! The main thing is that the trailing players got more respectable percentages.

So, a good result all round, spoiled only by what can only be described as sour grapes from Cambridge fans.

On a Cambridge City forum, fans find the 30,000 “real” vote count absurdly high, and one fan writes:

And the winner polled 37% of those 30000. How many were at the game? And how many were at the game that saw Booth poll 30% of the 30000 votes?

31,000 actually. I do know the answer to those questions. 1,027 attended the Leamington match, while 461 attended the Cambridge match. Both were home games, so we can assume around the same ratio of home to away supporters. Let’s work out ratios of votes to attendees:

37% × 31,000 = 11,470 votes for Leamington
11,470 ÷ 1,027 = 11.16 votes per Leamington spectator

30% × 31,000 = 9,300 votes for Cambridge
9,300 ÷ 461 = 20.17 votes per Cambridge spectator

Bearing in mind that people were encouraged to vote for Rodman in local papers, on BBC Coventry and Warwickshire radio, on this very blog, in workplaces and schoolyards, I find the Leamington ratio more than realistic. The Cambridge ratio is realistic too — they did well considering their smaller fanbase.

Anyway, well done Alex Rodman, and well done you for voting as I asked you.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 17th, 2005 at 20:46 and is filed under Brakes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.