Journal Space cowboy's Journal: The beautiful game 2
(Interestingly enough, there isn't a 'sport' topic in this geek forum. Ho hum
England have just won against Croatia to set themselves up for a quarter-final showdown against the host nation Portugal. Now Croatia number some 4 million people, which is about 1/8 the number of people living in greater London... Just as well we beat them really....
Except that football doesn't work that way - it's described as 'the beautiful game' not just for the enormous levels of skill and athleticism it demands at these levels, but for the egalitarian nature of the game. It's all about skill, team play, perseverance and strength, in that order. You see midget striker (5') players arranged against giant (7') defender players, and the size isn't that important, it's the skill that matters. When size is brought to bear, it's usually adjudged foul play and a penalty/free kick is awarded, but strength on the ball plays a part too, and of course size helps on set-plays such as corners and free kicks...
Out of those 4 million people, I would say that Croatia have about 5 good players, and yet we beat them 4-2. This is the distribution effect, imagine a bell-curve of football excellence - when you increase the number of potential players, the vast majority are within a few standard deviations from 'average'. Getting more than 10 truly-world-class players is pretty well unheard of (perhaps Brazil). Getting 1-5 is fairly common. Odd, but true. England have some 60 million population, yet we fielded maybe 7 excellent players, with maybe 5 world-class ones. The difference in the sides is that our 'less-than-world-class' players were better than theirs... Perhaps it's not so cut-and-dried as intuition might expect.
It's the same in the English Premiership. In any given game, the chances of the favourite team winning are never more than 70:30. You see truly world-beating teams (eg: Arsenal, Chelsea, Manchester United, Liverpool) who have genuine hopes of being crowned the best team in Europe in the Champions League being beaten by teams who are relegated to the next-lower division at the end of the season. What makes winning the league such an event is that the time-averaged 70% chance will beat the time-averaged 65% over 38 games. Probably. It's the 'probably', (ie: the chance of *losing*) that makes the game such a joy to behold. And I think that's odd.
Simon
I was listening... (Score:2)
to the BBC radio feed over the internet. It's a shame that the cross-Atlantic feed cut out like every 2 minutes for about 2 minutes at a time. I missed two of the goals that way. :(
Well... (Score:2)