A parable

Recently, I have read a paper in a prestigious journal in physics, whose logic was a bit stretched. Let me paraphrase it for you.

Italians are known to be good soccer players. Recently, some authors have noticed that Singaporeans may also be pretty decent soccer players. In this paper, we prove that Singaporeans can even be better than Italians.
For the test, the Singaporeans were chosen from one of the many soccer schools in the island; the Italians were chosen among the finalists of the certamen ciceronianum, the most famous competition of Latin prose writing. The age and bodily weight distributions were the same for both samples.
Each player was asked to try and score a penalty kick with the heel. Remarkably, the Singaporeans fared far better than the Italians. This conclusively proves that Singaporeans can be better soccer players than Italians in some tasks.

Reference: Xxxxx et al, Nature Physics Y, yyyy (20zz)

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