November 2010
1 post
The Traitor of the Zazalcara
Tonight by sheer chance I heard a nice little play on Radio 4 called The Traitor of the Zazalcara - about a fictional match at the 1978 World Cup between Italy and Uruguay which the two teams attempted to rig so they could both qualify. Although fictional, it is almost certainly based on the Austria-West Germany game at the 1982 World Cup; it’s a comedy at heart, and the odd cheap stereotype...
October 2010
3 posts
Winning ugly is still winning
Yesterday Arsenal huffed and puffed a bit to pull of a 1-0 win over a spirited West Ham United. Arsenal’s midfield were all over the place - Cesc was erratic, Denilson his usual ineffective self, and even Song was caught out of place a few times (but the goal forgives all sin). Arshavin had another match of losing the ball in good positions, and for once Chamakh found a Premier League...
I am on this week’s Two Footed Tackle...
The two sides of the coin
Two of the biggest topics being discussed in the UK football press (apart from the Liverpool takeover) over the past week have been England’s miserable performance against Montenegro, and the plague of bad tackles and serious injuries (Bobby Zamora, Hatem Ben Arfa, Anotnio Valencia) in the game recently. What they turn out to be is two sides of the same coin; both are inevitable consequences...
September 2010
3 posts
The important bit about Arsenal's finances
Arsenal today announced record pre-tax profits of £56m and said that the property built as part of the move to the Emirates stadium, the Highbury Square development, is now debt free and making money for the club.
The important part is the second bit - not the profit, the debt. Relying on property sales in the credit crunch was risky stuff, but Highbury Square is now no longer in debt, at all,...
Fake national sides
Togo’s assistant coach has been suspended for three years after taking a group of impostors masquerading as the national side to play a match in Bahrain.
*insert Roy Hodgson joke here*
July 2010
3 posts
Penalties, cognitive biases and coin tosses
The ever-excellent Simon Kuper on penalties. Perhaps unsurprisingly for anyone who has read about cognitive biases, but penalty takers are rarely random in their behaviour, and neither are goalkeepers in which way they dive. But that said, it may not be that necessary…
But these individual patterns are secondary. The key moment in any shoot-out is the coin toss. The captain who calls...
The myth of the individual in football
As I’ve banged on a lot already, so much so you’re probably bored of it, virtually every single player in the Nike “Write The Future” advert was dumped out of the cup before the quarter-finals. It’s easy to say in retrospect “They got the wrong players! If only they’d put Thomas Mueller or David Villa or Diego Forlan in”. But this would be missing...
June 2010
53 posts
Substance over Style
Part 2 of my reflections on why England did so badly at this World Cup
Another accusation laid at England’s feet is that the players are not technically good enough. As the BBC lays out in an article contrasting the English and Continental games:
[Chris Waddle] believes the helter-skelter pace of the Premier League does not equip players sufficiently for international football and thinks...
The Audacity of Hype
The curse of Nike continues - even Roger Federer is out. With Portugal knocked out of the World Cup yesterday, only the Spanish players - Iniesta, Fabregas & Pique - are still playing; and curiously, they are the only footballers not on the pitch in the advert (almost certainly because of Cesc’s broken leg at the time of filming). So much for hype. If I were Gael Garcia Bernal,...
Blaming the players
Part 1 of my reflections on why England did so badly at this World Cup
Especially after England’s second-half performance, knives are out for the players. Unprofessional Foul highlights the England captain as chief culprit:
Germany played like a team while England’s glory-hounding main offender, Steven Gerrard, continued with his ‘one man band’ World Cup.
Gerrard was a disgrace...
A move to collective sanity
England are out. Not that I was around to blog on it (I was away at Glasto) but having watched the game, I thought that by the time I got back England fans would be cursing the Uruguayan linesman, the goal that never was, and using it as yet another example of England’s much-bemoaned bad luck (like penalties, or cheating Argentines, or Sol Campbell getting goals mysteriously disallowed).
...
Post-mortem
Oops, maybe I shouldn’t have said England would roll over Algeria. I did at least think, up until the game went into injury time, England would pinch a goal and get three points to help numb what was a dire performance. But in the end, they didn’t. Some random ports in no particular order…
1. Rooney is out of sorts. He has played a lot of matches this season, and has not been...
The dire state of punditry
Absolutely, definitely, bang on condemnation of the sorry state of TV punditry:
Before the Algeria versus Slovenia game in Group C on Sunday, Shearer seemed to be speaking for the entire BBC panel when he said, “Our knowledge of these two teams is limited.” Limited! What the former England striker was saying was that he hadn’t done his homework, that he hadn’t spoken to...
Well, it's definitely getting better
Apologies - work’s caught up with me and I’ve barely seen a live game since Monday, but after catching up on the PVR, here’s some thoughts…
After my last post where I bemoaned the lack of goals and action, now finally things are getting interesting as we enter the second match of the group stages. Perhaps because some of the reasons I’ve outlined - teams are now more...
Why has it been so dull so far?
I didn’t see much of the daytime action, save for the second half of Netherlands-Denmark, which showed how the Dutch were capable if not dazzling; not until the introduction of Eljero Elia did they have pace and guile to really take a hold, although equally the Danes started to tire. Saw nothing of Japan-Cameroon and I’m glad I didn’t - by all accounts, it was dire.
I’ve...
"Unforgettable"
Wonderful photo, this:
Sometimes it’s easy to forget that it wasn’t just England and West Germany at the 1966 World Cup. Here, Brazil’s goalkeeper, Gilmar, leaping to block a shot during practice in Liverpool. First off, isn’t it amazing how low-key and open the training session is - totally like the shut-off camps in Rustenberg and the like today. The keeper’s...
What that "USA wins 1-1" headline really meant
So this headline has been doing the rounds:
Cure lots of jokes about how the Yanks don’t get football. So, let’s set the record straight. It is of course, a fully-intended joke, and more than that, an in-joke: it’s mimicing a famous headline from the past.
It stems from the Harvard-Yale American football game in 1968 (varsity games being taken very seriously over there)....
Vuvuzelas: Bad for team communication?
Does the vuzuzela make it harder for teams to co-ordinate?
However, it is possible that the noise will only serve to strengthen the sides with the best coaches. Coaching 101 teaches us that a tactician should get his message across before the game, rather than shouting from the sidelines while players are concentrating on the action. By the time his team take to the field at the World Cup, a coach...
Mini match report: Germany 4-0 Australia
Germany are the first team we’ve seen this World Cup that look like they could win it; Argentina and England have been unconvincing in different ways, but Germany strolled this match with a combination of ruthless efficiency and attractive, flowing football. Very easy on the eye. Australia were a pale shadow of the team that impressed so much and were a dodgy dive away from taking Italy to...
How the 1966 World Cup Final looked on ITV →
Mini Match Report: Ghana 1-0 Serbia
How did this game not have more goals? The same scoreline and indeed plot to the first game of the day (Late goal, a sending off and stupid mistake) but God is in the details. This was an entertaining and pulsating performance by Ghana, who put pay to the lie that sub-Saharan African teams are naturally disorganised with a coherent, committed team effort that threatened the opposition throughout....
England-USA analysis on Zonal Marking
Excellent tactical analysis of England-USA - in particular, how Dempsey and Donovan playing central took England’s full-backs out of the game so much, while Clark and Bradley’s defensive mindedness rendered the Gerrard-Lampard question null and void.
But praise particularly goes to Landon Donovan, who I thought was excellent all night, and how by occupying Cole & the England...
Mini match report: Algeria 0-1 Slovenia
Awful game, two sides reasonably well-organised in defence but severely lacking in creative quality. Fitting that the winning goal was a goalkeeping mistake - Koren’s daisycutter inspiring more than just a touch of Robert Green in the Algerian goalkeeper. England will have little to fear from either - that said, Slovenia’s defensive organisation might prove frustrating enough for...
“England apologises for fielding a goalkeeper who quite clearly took rather a lot...”
– Warren Ellis commentates on England vs USA on Twitter
Mini match report: Argentina 1-0 Nigeria
An odd game this - lots of chances but never exciting. Nigeria looked out of sorts, especially with a poor final touch and isolated forwards. Argentina for the most part looked like a collection of individuals - lovely runs from Messi and Higuain, and Nigerian goalkeeper Enyeama did well to keep them out. But on the rare times they were threatened at the back they looked disorganised (especially...
Mini-match report: South Korea 2-0 Greece
The first victory of the tournament and a tidy, efficient victory for a well-drilled South Korean side. The Greeks however were mostly awful, lacking any sort of creativity, and a few potshots from Gekas apart, no threat up front. The first goal was from a set piece, poor marking and a dodgy Greek flick-on allowing Lee Jung-Soo to tap in from close range; the second was a clever bit of pressing by...
Pizza Hut offers Irish free pizza for every goal... →
Clever, but if France get hammered in once match they could go broke ;)
Ranking the World Cup 2010 teams based on social... →
Sometime it can be overstated that football is a matter of life and death - it’s not - and this great blog from WDM sheds lights on the countries behind the teams at the World Cup
“Pele Predicts Brazil and Spain for possible World Cup Glory. I guess...”
– Reddit
The worst thing on our screens this World Cup
And no, it’s not James Corden - he’s being kept in just the comedy slots and away from the grown ups. No, the real menace to the World Cup is this man: Jim Beglin.
Jim Beglin, and his faithful cohort Clive Tyldesley, are ITV’s first-choice pairing for football commentaries; Tyldesley’s shortcomings are well known (“that night in Barcelona”, etc.), but his...
Twitter's special page for the 2010 World Cup →
Not very impressive - full of spam, no filtering for overuse of hashtags
Target Anxiety
A long-winded, but worth it, article on misery, the penalty shoot-out and unfairness in football. Best quote here:
The fact that the better team sometimes appears to stand a lesser chance of winning than the worse is something that most fans love. Most coaches and players too, I’d bet. It’s just so much more interesting in its many dimensions than the purely efficient conversion of...
Why I don't support England
Mark Marqusee in today’s Guardian on being English but neutral:
It’s not that we neutrals are aloof and non-partisan. Far from it. We tend to pick a selection of favourites, based on any number of criteria, ranging from the whimsical and arbitrary to the philosophical and political. How many Arsenal players do they have? Have I been there on holiday? Do I like their strip? Do I like...