This is the short edition of More or Less, first broadcast on the BBC World Service.

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Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service. We are your weekly guide to the

numbers in the news and in life, and I'm Tim Harford. Let's talk about a game of two halves,

where managers and players are either over the moon or sick as a parrot, but always give 110%. Yes,

football. It's all about the cliches, but are the cliches true?

I'm confident that it is indeed a game of two halves and just as confident that footballers are

not, in fact, in lunar orbit. But what about this one? We've seen it often. It's very difficult

sometimes to play against 10 men. It's always difficult to play 11 against 10 away from home.

It's not an easy task when you play against 10 men and we have won and we should all be

very grateful for that.

When a player has been given a red card and therefore sent off, his or her team is then

outnumbered, 10 against 11. Surely that's a disadvantage, but managers and pundits love to say otherwise.

We asked the man who's crunched the figures.

Adam Greenberg, recent graduate, statistical hobbyist,

and Watford fan?

I'm sorry, Adam, I've no idea what my producer has against Watford Football Club.

Adam started by telling us about his source of data.

So we're looking at 2009 to 2013, so that's four seasons of the Premier League.

And in that time there were 1,520 games, and that was a total of 238 red cards in that time.

Those red cards refer to either a straightforward sending off for serious foul play

...