A 10.0 match rating is not something handed out lightly. Lucas Boyé earned his on Monday, scoring a hat-trick as Deportivo Alavés put five past Osasuna in a 5-2 win that turned into the striker's personal showcase.
Boyé's involvement in the game was not defined by volume. He managed just 51 touches across the match, with no assists and no key passes logged next to his name. What he did instead was finish. Three goals from that modest touch count tells its own story: when the ball found him in the right areas, he did not waste the chance.
Efficiency over everything
There is a lesson in the numbers for anyone judging strikers purely on how often they are on the ball. Boyé was not the game's most active outfield player by touches, but he was its most decisive. Three goals, zero assists, zero key passes and a rating that topped out at 10.0 is about as clean a definition of a natural finisher's afternoon as exists.
Osasuna, for their part, were on the wrong end of a five-goal concession, with two of their own goals not enough to keep pace with an Alavés side that had Boyé in this kind of form.
What the scoreline says
A 5-2 result already tells you goals were flying in from both ends, but the hat-trick concentrates the story on one man. Alavés scored five, Boyé scored three of them. That ratio, more than anything else in the data, explains why his name is the one being talked about after this round of La Liga fixtures.
For Osasuna, conceding five at any point is a result that will sting regardless of the two they managed to get back. For Alavés and Boyé, it was as good as an individual afternoon gets.