Eighteen duels won. Sixteen of those in the air. Six lost all afternoon. By any measure of the physical contest, Cameron McJannett had the better of Newport County's forwards. And yet his side, Grimsby Town, walked away with nothing.
Newport won 2-1 in a League Two fixture that offered little reward for McJannett's individual effort. The centre back finished with a match rating of 7.6, the kind of number that usually accompanies a clean sheet or a match-winning goal. Here it simply reflected a player who refused to be moved.
A one-man aerial fortress
Sixteen aerial wins is a heavy workload for any defender, and it points to a Newport side that leaned on crosses and long balls to test Grimsby's back line. McJannett kept meeting them. Across the full 90 minutes he won 18 of his 24 total duels, a win rate that dwarfed almost anything else on the pitch.
Numbers like that usually shift a scoreline. This time they did not. Newport found their goals elsewhere, and Grimsby could not turn defensive control into anything at the other end.
The bigger picture
Performances like McJannett's are the kind that tend to get buried under a final score. A 2-1 loss reads as a 2-1 loss on the table regardless of who won the individual battles inside it. But for a defender, few stat lines say more about effort and physical presence than 18 duels won with only 6 lost.
Grimsby's problem on the day was not their centre back. It was finding a way to make his dominance count for something.