I got reminded of this saying when reading about media stories related to the world cup. If you are not too much into football, you may be inclined to think players like Messi, Kaka have been flop shows so far in the world cup as they haven't scored any goals. And you may think that players like Argentina's Gonzalo Higuan & Brazil's Luis Fabiano are the stars. The truth is that Messi and Kaka are playing well and they are creating opportunities for the other players to score goals. Being big name players, they are usually the focus of the opposing team's defense and this in turn opens up space for the other team members, which Messi & Kaka exploit by passing on to them resulting in goals and victories for their teams. This is not to diminish the importance of finishers like Higuan and Fabiano, but the fact is that players like Higuan and Fabiano are dependent on players like Messi and Kaka to score goals, but Messi and Kaka are creative players who can create and score goals. Their value is not in number of goals scored by them, but in number of goal scoring opportunities created by them. For example, in Basketball, one of the parameters used to asses the player's contribution in a game is assists, which is how many points were scored with his assistance.
The worse part about the whole thing is these media stories only put unnecessary pressure on the players and may cause them to go for individual glory than for the team's good, which is detrimental to the game. I am not too surprised at this state of affairs, as I think generally people neither have the time or inclination to go to the depth of things and content with skimming the surface and this is applicable to those writing news articles as well as those reading them.
