Nice article by King Kaufman over on Salon about scoring (in the World Cup, that is). As he points out, the statistic that the ESPN guys insist on throwing into our faces at every possible opportunity (i.e., "the team that scores first is 21-2-3 in this tournament so far!") is basically meaningless; in a low-scoring sport like soccer, scoring any goal is crucial, so the fact that the team that scores first wins much of the time is obvious and uninteresting. The interesting statistic is the one they never mention: as Kaufman puts it:
If a goal is scored and ESPN flashes a graphic saying, "Teams that have scored first are 22-3-3," I, the typical American sports fan who doesn't care about soccer, will think, "Well, there's about a four-in-five chance that this baby's over. I believe I will turn off the TV, kick my dog, curse some foreigners and play with my assault rifle."
But if that graphic said, "Teams that have scored second are 17-2-3," I'm going to want to stick around to see which team can come up with that all-important tally. Better for me, better for ESPN and way better for the dog.
Yesterday, for instance, Ecuador controlled possession, but not only was this not reflected in the scoreline, it was not even reflected in the run of play - Germany was in control more or less the whole time, and most of Ecuador's possession was in the back 1/3rd of the field.
It's a cliche that statistics don't tell the whole story, but it's especially true in soccer. A 2:0 game can mean, for instance, that one team dominated and sat back on an early lead, or that play was even until a collapse by one side in the 85th minute, or 100 other things.
I'm not a (huge) geek, honestly, but a "Matrix" analogy would be apt here. You have to see the dynamic and flow of a game to get a sense of it, sort of beyond what Dave o'Brien can spew forth, and definitely beyond what a stat-shot can (usually) tell you.
Your analogies as regards what happens in other sports when one man down are fallacious, because they don't take into consideration how many people play on each team: being up a single man in soccer is not so much of an advantage because it represents only a 10% difference between the teams. In basket it is already 20% - that would be the equivalent of a soccer team being two men down, and so on.
Baseball has 9 men on the field at a time, and relies on generally 2 relievers (relief and closer) meaning that likely Baseball uses the same number. If you restricted a man in a baseball, they'd hurt, quite a bit.
As insults go, it is of the type that most of us ignorant slobs will forget about in 10 minutes (and some will view the assault rifle aspect as a compliment, despite its clear intent) but here's a hint for the soccer-friendly. Talking and writing like this (or repeating it without apology) is not likely to make us want to join your club.
In football, where I think the effect is most noticeable, an offense that is lacking one man must always contend with two defenders who they can't block (at full strength, there's always at least one who can't be blocked) and a defense that's lacking a man can have everyone blocked.
In basketball, a 5 man defense can always double team the ball handler of a 4 man offense, while the best a 4 man defense can do is play zone (making offense more problematic than defense when playing a man down).
Really, I think the effect of losing a man will be most noticeable in sports where it is possible to exploit matchup problems (as being down a man is the ultimate match up problem). Basketball and football are noted for their match up problems. Soccer and baseball much less so and therefore are impacted less by the loss of a man.
I believe it was Joe Paterno that said
"When you score a touchdown, act like you've done it before."
Meanwhile, Netherlands-Argentina starts in a little while...I am sure someone is tracking the winning percentage of countries that begin with vowels versus those that begin with consonants.
Just to be difficult, you are completely forgetting about individual "team" sports. Fencing, running etc.
Alan P. I think the quote is "When you get to the endzone, act like you've been there before."
As to being a man down, I was reffing a intramural league basketball game for the undergraduate we were afffiliated with when I was in law school. A team from the law school had to play four players to the other teams six or seven (obviously only five at once). Not only did they beat them (playing zone with a lot of switches), the other ref didn't notice that there were only four until I pointed it out. I don't think the other team ever noticed, or at least they didnt' make much effort to capitalize. Granted it's not world class or even close. But it was an impressive demonstration of hustle.
You're right about the U.S. broadcasters (especially ABC via TVUplayer) filling the air with ridiculous fluff. It's also generally agreed, here in Madrid at least, that the TV announcers are much worse than those of the radio. For that reason, we turn on the TV, yet with the volume turned off, and turn on our radios. At the same time, even the Spanish (not going to comment on Univision, as I have no knowledge of spanish language--but not Spanish--stations) TV broadcasters are much much better than those in the U.S.
With one child, play tag team.
with two children, play man to man coverage.
with three or more, play zone coverage.
And yes, if the American team is losing, we may turn off the tv, yell at the dog, and polish the rifle, but other countries' fans have tendencies to riot.
Or imagine being short an infielder. That creates a massive hole that turns easy grounders into singles. While I agree that it's not easy to hit the ball where you want in high level baseball, it's very much doable.
In a major league baseball game, a team down a player on defense would get smacked around something awful, unless they got a 20 strikeout performance by the pitcher. maybe even then.
Bah. I don't care for any televised sports. I'd much rather be participating in sports, such as competitive assault rifle shooting (where the guy who hits the x-ring first tends to beat the guy who doesn't hit it).
Flip one coin, first to score always wins.
Flip two coins, first to score wins 2/4, ties 2/4.
Flip three coins, first to score wins 6/8, loses 2/8.
Also, some teams are better than others - they are biased coins. Ergo, it has not been demonstrated that scoring first gives a tactical advantage.
And since anyone who has a team is naturally going to think their team is better than it is, people often think matches are more well-balanced than they really are. Which means the suspense is still there most of the time.
Plus, you can't discount the value of waiting for it, waiting for it, and then finally getting it. Or the huge unexpected upset.
The idea that it's unbalanced, though, strikes me as weird. If handing out a red card completely threw the game, then we wouldn't have red cards in the first place.
Personally, I enjoy soccer for the athleticism, the beauty, and for what a simple and natural sport it is, not just for the goals. I like American sports too, but the idea that they are somehow superior to soccer is absurd. Basketball, where you basically have to be 7 feet tall; Football, where the game stops over and over so the 350 pound giants can get up and start over; baseball, where you stand around for 5 minutes for every minute that you play; all of them with all their intricate rules, specialties, equipment, such that there's nothing even resembling an equal playing field around the world.
Hey, they're good for what they are, but there's a reason soccer is the world's game. The idea that it needs a bunch of new rules to create more offense strikes me as totally missing the point. If you want that, you can watch arena football.
If you didn't, the strikers would just stand in front of the opponent's goal all game long, which would necessitate keeping all the defenders crowded in there too, which would result in two big clumps of players in front of the goals.
Don't worry, Chico. It's soccer; there isn't any action on the field.
Nothing's happening?
Perhaps the rest of the world just doesn't need to over-medicate themselves with amphetamine salts (adderrall) or other related drugs prescribed by overzealous doctors in order to "amp" up their "xxxxx-treeeeeeme" sports?
Doctor "Someone please get me a mountain dew, a canyon, and a BMX bike, this ritalin buzz is going to wear off in less than an hour" Dopamine, M.D.
In general you put one man in "left center" and the other in "right center" and leave the infield alone. It damages your ability to cover the lines in the outfield a little, but it's real hard to aim for the lines.
The key differentiator in my mind in defending a man down is whether or not the offense can choose its point in a way that exploits the weakness. And you just can't pick the spot where you're hitting the ball in baseball with much success. Specifically, I figure being down a man will certainly make an average team a bad team, but it won't be catastrophic.
Putting some numbers behind it. Last year the Orioles hit 980 singles (the hit most likely to be affected by being a man down in the outfield - HR still leave the park, doubles and triples still make it to the wall though triples may also become more likely instead of doubles). That's for 162 games or 6 per game. Assume half turn into doubles and that we get three more bases from extra hits and doubles extended into triples. That's six extra bases for an extra 1.5 runs per game (and that's being a little bit generous). If we apply the Baseball Pythagorean theorem to this and assume an average runs per game of 4.82, then we get P = [4.82^2/(4.82^2 + (4.82 + 1.5)^2)] = 0.367. In other words, if all else is equal, being down a man in baseball should cause you to go from being a 500 team to a .367 team. While that's a bad team, that's still better than the Royals or the Pirates. And as a quick note - giving up 6.3 runs a game is about 0.55 runs/game more than the White Sox are scoring per game this year (tops in runs/game). So this is not an insignificant effect, but I think only winning 37% of the time instead of 50% is not catastrophic as compared to the likely effects in basketball and football (where I would place odds of winning at less than 10%).
In football any advantage would depend on the specific rule. If I lost a lineman, and could pull a widereceiver off and replace the lineman, I would be okay. Still a disadvantage, but not as pronounced. If I could not switch players around, then it might be more of a problem.
The thing in soccer is that all players on the field of play are required to have some skill in all phases of the game. So, a forward can drop back to help defend, which helps negate any advantage. The sports that specialize, like football, would suffer the most, but not necessarily an insurmountable one.
I do not enjoy hockey, and do not understand lacross, so I don't watch them. However, I am smart enough to know that there are many people who do enjoy to play and to watch those games, and that after well over a hundred years of play, games have probably evolved to the point where they are played in a manner satisfactory to the players and fans.
Same goes for soccer.
As for the comparison to basket ball (multiply by 200), your off by a factor of 2. Soccer games are twice as long, so there really should be more scoring to be interesting.
Why not do what they do in hockey and just make the goal bigger. (or weigh him down with pads... he he he.)
Too bad we can't ever try this as an experiment. I'd love to test it with the 9-man Royals going against the 8-man Yankees and see what we'd get.
Well, I'm saying it. Troll, troll, trollity troll. Come on a post about soccer, and then make inane and argumentative comments about soccer being an inferior sport to ... baseball? It is to laugh. Ha. Ha. Ha ha.
Tierce: Amazing that nobody did. Threads are for error-correction at least as much as for venting (see above). Why is the VC and VC Community so bad at correctly identifying sources? I refer here to the recent post about the USA Today contribution by Feige, which was (inevitably) misidentified as a NYT op-ed. Why? Because someone commented without having read it, probably.
It's a little weird that the person I aimed my little joke at took it well, while someone else felt the need to respond with vitriol. I confess that your Adderal remark has rendered me speechless, at least insofar as I cannot respond because I have no idea what in the world you're talking about. What exactly did I do to you, Mr. Dopamine? (And if it's going to be mailce, and if we really must snobbishly insist on titles, well, I'm "doctor", too.)
As for "why don't we just not watch", well, that's an entirely reasonable solution. However, sports fans are not well known for our reasonableness. We have these arguments like Soccer vs. Baseball for the same reason we have arguments like Williams vs. Musial: because we like to. These arguments, like the sports themselves, are fun and distract us from our real problems. So, hey, what the heck: if you don't like these discussions, just don't read them.
What all this man-down/who-scores-first stuff goes to is soccer's overarching problem with signal-to-noise ratio. In sports where it's way too hard (soccer, hockey, baseball) or way too easy (basketball) to score, there is a problem with signal to noise. (In low scoring games, this is because the signal is very weak; in high scoring games, it's because the noise is very strong.) Which is to say, in these sports "fluke" outcomes are very common. Even the soccer fanatics here have griped about that, mentioning various contests in which the better team didn't win. This doesn't appeal to the American (by which of course I actually mean "my", and then generalize wildly from there) sense of justice. So hockey, baseball, and basketball have all come up with a solution to the signal to noise problem: extremely long seasons followed by playoffs in series format. Soccer doesn't use this format, and so seems to continue crowning undeserving winners.
The idea of borrowing from field lacrosse to prevent teams from "packing the box" is an intriguing one. Would the existing offside rule still be in effect? I fail to see the attraction of the defence being able to put the offence offside, but then I'm not a manic soccer purist. I wouldn't want to see soccer games where the teams scored a dozen goals; if a typical close game ended maybe 4-3, that would be great. If there were more goals, there might be less of the penalty hunting dives that appall North American sports fans. Pro hockey did itself a major favor this year by making rule changes that ended the stifling of the offense by clutch-and-grab, neutral zone trap defences.
Since I'm observing this World Cup from Canada, here's the most bizarre thing about soccer USA. Many American soccer enthusiasts regard the sport as the world's game, a sort of United Nations-approved exercise in planetary citizenship. Meanwhile, every other nation goes into a chauvinistic frenzy. American exceptionalism indeed.
Yeah, so fascinating.
The quoted text is ridiculous - the team that scored the first almost always scores the second goal as well. He uses his own calculations to distract himself from the fact that if the viewer DOES turn off the television with the assumption that the team that he saw score will win over 80% of the time will be absolutely correct in his assumption.
Also ridiculous is the fact that I just wasted 2 hours calculating stats about who wins when which team scores goals in which order to confirm my point.
If those gratuitous insults were meant to be humorous, well, all I can say is that columnists like this must actually prefer ignorance to experience. Gun folk love their dogs.
I'll continue to be amused at how hard some people try to sell Soccer as if it's perhaps a sign of maturity and civilization or fine taste. Really.