numbers game

"In Lloyds, it will simply become a numbers game and staff will be hounded out of the business. We've seen it before," it said.

“It’s just a numbers game there,” O’Brien said.

You start to understand that it’s systemic, and it is a numbers game.

It’s a numbers game, meticulously filling notebooks in handwriting Silverman describes as “tiny letters all perfectly the same size,” then revisiting and sharpening material until the joke emerges, like a vision.

Instead, groups like Sumner’s, such as the Smiths and Echo & the Bunnymen, ignored what was going on in the mainstream altogether, leaving the numbers game to pop music.