Posts Tagged ‘football’

If you’ve been watching the World Cup, you may well have seen inside FIFA’s VAR (video assistance referee) control centre. Here a team of officials sit watching computer monitors so that they can double-check the on-pitch referee’s decisions in case they have missed something obvious.

You may have also noticed they are wearing full referee’s kit.

Why? You could argue that as they are set in a control centre in Moscow, sometimes 1,000 kilometres away from where the game is happening, there is little need for a dress code. Or, at least, little need for one that stipulates the traditional outfit of a referee.

But here are two reasons why it is better to wear the kit.

First, it puts them in the right frame of mind. Refereeing is a difficult job. You have to be impartial and fair. You have to make decisions that are difficult: did he use his arm to his advantage or was it a genuine accident that the ball struck him there? Is that fair wrestling for the ball or a foul? These are grey areas that often have no obvious correct answer.

In sport psychology, we talk about getting in the right mindset. When you are doing mental imagery/visualisation exercises, for example, the best thing to do is get the athlete to put their kit on and go to the field where they will play. It makes it more real.

If you want to make a VAR feel like they are on the pitch, making real game decisions, which they are, stipulating that they wear their usual refereeing kit is a great place to start.

Second, it gives them legitimacy. Systems like VAR are always going to get criticised for the mistakes they make and ignored for the many times they get things correct. It is easy for fans to look at them as bureaucrats tucked away in a tiny box, thousands of miles away from the action, and vilify them for any decisions they don’t like.

This concern is why they replay the footage that the VAR officials are watching and the superimposed lines showing how they make decisions about whether someone is offside or not.

Similarly, by putting the officials in full kit, it shows the fans that these are real referees doing a legitimate refereeing job. Thus, it makes it easier for fans to accept adverse decisions.

When you make it to the finals of Euro 2016, you are allocated to one of six groups. The top two teams from each group, after three matches, get a pass into the round of 16. An additional four teams also make it through.

But should we expect to see there? One way to calculate it is to work out how tough each group is. By taking each team’s world rankings and averaging them, we can see how tough each group is.

A lower number represents a tough group and a higher number represents an easier group. This suggests England is in one of the easiest groups: only group A has a lower average world ranking, and this does not factor in the home-field advantage that France has.

We can then compare the team ranking to the average group ranking to see who should find it easiest to quality.

I have shown the top and bottom four here. The other home nations do not find themselves at the bottom of the table, which is positive news too. Having said this, the difficultly of the group makes little difference: all of these teams are in the same order as if you had just taken the world rankings. So how tough your group is, is probably not a factor.

I really enjoy international women’s football because it punishes countries with high gender inequality more than anything the UN could ever do.

The Ivory Coast’s 10-0 drubbing at the hands of Germany is a classic example.

It is interesting though that whenever I asked anyone whether they had “seen the world cup?” the response was usually “oh the women’s football?”. In fairness, most of them had seen it. And why not? England did brilliantly! We should really look at this as our best opportunity to win a trophy.

We were (as an Englishman, and a supporter, I’m part of the team of course) unlucky to have lost to Japan and could easily have been in the final. That showed with our first ever victory over Germany – 21st time lucky!

Like many football fans, I have an incredibly complex system of national prejustices to work out what football team to support. Take Iran v Argentina for example. Which team am I supposed to support in this match? Iran has a terrible human rights record. However, Argentina was the last country to invade British soil, and worse cheated their way to a World Cup win in 1986.

How is one supposed to decide?

Ideally, someone would come up with a formula for working it all out. Geographic proximity, ancestry in a certain country, what you think of their politics, and how cool you think their flags and shirts are are all potentially important factors in deciding.

Once England are out, Germany are usually my B team (it is an unfortunate reality that being English you have to have a B team for when England get knocked out, but that is also true of all but a handful of countries) as having a Germanic name, it is the closest thing I can trace my ancestry to.

After that it is a question of geographic proximity. I hope France do well for example. Of course, I am supposed to hate the French, but it is very difficult to maintain such levels of casual racism against them in the 21st century. This then expands out in a circle in a “kilometres from me” fashion working out who to support.

It’s not quite that simple however. There are exclusions. I would not support Saudi Arabia for example, at least until they de-classify atheism as terrorism. Nor will I be supporting Qatar until they stop executing gay people.

Then you have to factor in the underdog level as well. We have been conditioned by decades of Hollywood films to support the underdog. In many ways it just glory supporting as if these films have taught me anything, it is that the underdogs always win. Plus it is just nicer when they do. Of course this runs in direct contradiction to the geographic rules as most of the best football teams are in Europe whereas the underdogs are on the “edge of the world” – Australia, Japan, South Korea, USA, Costa Rica, etc.

How do you balance it all? These first world problems just seem to go on and on…

If you watched the Uruguay Italy game this week, you probably saw Luis Suarez take a bite out of one of the Italian players Giorgio Chiellini.

So far, Suarez has not come out and admitted it, but the video evidence and bite marks that can be seen on Chiellini are pretty damning.

I am not in favour of lifetime bans because I think there should always be some element of rehabilitation in a sentence. Indeed, this is probably the most important part. To ban someone permanently removes any opportunity for this to be achieved. I don’t think FIFA have this power anyway, but if they did, they must be left wondering what to do.

This is not the first time Suarez has bitten someone. He received a seven match ban in 2007 for biting Otman Bakkal and a ten match ban last year for biting Branislav Ivanovic. He also received a ban and a fine in 2011 for racially abusing Patrice Evra.

He is also a cheat. In 2010 Ghana were about to score the winning goal to become the first ever African nation to reach a World Cup semi-final. That is until Suarez punched the ball off the line. Ghana earned a penalty for what would have been a certain goal but unfortunately missed. You could argue that if Uruguay had any sportsmanship, they wouldn’t have attempted to save it.

Given all of this then, it is hard to make a case that Suarez should receive anything other than a lengthy ban, and possibly criminal prosecution.

I could write about this, but John Oliver can do a much better job of it:

It’s shocking. I knew about a lot of the crap that FIFA do, such as exclusion zones to make sure that no local businesses can earn a living while the international sponsors rake it in. I had heard about issues with workers being mistreated in Qatar. However, the video really puts it all in perspective. And it is not a good perspective. Tax exemptions, enforced drinking, World Cup courts, a coffin a day going back to India, the list goes on.

Everyone knows that FIFA is rife with bribery and corruption. Every year there is a new story, usually several times a year.

As Oliver points out, it is too hot to play football in Qatar! It’s actually impossible to do the World Cup there! When the Daily Mash ran the headline “Qatar to host Winter Olympics“, it was only marginally more ridiculous. Who would rationally vote for that? Even FIFA know it, which is why they are talking about moving the whole tournament to the winter.

It’s all very well Greg Dyke telling him he probably should step down, but surely it is time to take some actual action. If UEFA told them they wouldn’t stand for Blatter continuing as FIFA’s head, what would they do? They would be fucked. Most of the top teams in the world are from Europe, FIFA would have to listen.

I am going to watch the World Cup. Because as an individual there is basically nothing I can do about these state of affairs. However, surely given the latest round of allegations, supported by a mountain of evidence, it is time for those with the power to act.

Last month, Leeds United announced a partnership with the San Francisco 49ers. It was a strategic alliance to discuss plans across the operations of both clubs including marketing, technology, merchandise, and more.

The 49ers will bring their experience as a market leader in the NFL. Meanwhile Leeds will bring all the things they are good at. Not sure what that is exactly. Perhaps given the rising tension between the 49ers and the Seahawks, San Fran want to know how to do football hooliganism properly.

Luckily, I’m already ahead of the game…

It was always going to be an interesting train to London as we went down to attend GRAM. It was a 7:30am train and by 8:30am, the speaker had announced that they had sold out of all beers and ciders!

Who is drinking at that time in the morning? A quick bit of research told me that Leeds were playing away at Millwall today. Leeds and Millwall have a long time rivalry with whose fans can be the biggest hooligans, so it turns out they were going to stop serving all alcohol on trains from 10am anyway.

Not fancying returning in the middle of a large crowd of angry football fans, and given it was only a mere £15 extra (of which I did not expense, of course), we decided to upgrade to first class.

Overall, I’m not sure it’s worth the upgrade cost. The seat is very nice and big, and the complementary food is good, but being on a weekend, isn’t hot, nor is alcohol included. It was also very quiet though, and you do get unlimited wifi included, so maybe it wasn’t too bad.

As some of you know, I’ve been a huge fan of American football for days now. After deciding to really get on board with Norm’s annual Super Bowl party, I decided to support the 49ers, only to see them knocked out in the championship round by the New York Giants.

Since then, with the new NFL season having arrived, I’ve picked myself up an NFL GamePass to allow me to watch the games over here, and have decided to blog about my experiences on my new NFL football blog, entitled A Brit Talks Football.

You can also follow my updates on Twitter.

Most of us reading this will live in 2011, in the Western World. We’re used to living in a civilised society, summer riots aside. But thanks to globalisation, we’re increasingly finding a clash of cultures on many issues.

A good example of this is the World Cup hosting duties being awarded to Qatar.

The problem with this is that being an Islamic nation, homosexuality (well, homosexual acts, but it amounts to the same thing) is actually illegal there. These are enforced, including against people just on holiday there^[1].

Yet, in 2022, thousands of footballers, and several hundred thousand fans will travel to the country. And many of them will be gay. Even if you take a conservative estimate that 1% of people are gay, that puts at least 1,000 gay people in a country where just being themselves – is illegal.

That’s mental. I really don’t think we should be OK with this situation.

Luckily, everyone’s favourite football character Sepp Blatter stepped in to offer some advice. He explained “I’d say they [gay fans] should refrain from any sexual activities.”^[2]. Problem solved, I guess. Of course, this is from the same man who doesn’t seem to have a problem with racism^[3] and is constantly dogged by allegations of corruption^[4].

So what do we do about it? Well, we could get all the major countries to boycott it. Or at least Western countries, who knows how much control His Holiness commands over South America’s attitudes, and the answer is probably quite a lot. We could certainly give it a try though, and it would be a worthy cause. As Bryan Goldberg points out, Qatar also has a terrible human rights record, and that’s just the start of it.

Of course, we probably won’t do that, not because missing the World Cup would be mega rubbish (which it would be, that would be the biggest drawback of not taking part), but because it would be politically insensitive for us to call a nation out on the fact that their state religion is the most intolerant faiths currently practiced in the modern world (then again, maybe I’m just being over critical – it’s easy to take 534 verses out of context⁵).

Instead, our fearless leader David Cameron hopes that bringing the World Cup to Qatar will show them that homosexuality is actually fine^[6]. Apparently, “football can be a great engine for social change and a change of attitudes” and, when it comes down to it, at least there is such a thing as an Islamic soup kitchen.

So, eleven years from now, in an attempt to change social attitudes, we will send hundreds of our citizens into a country where making love to their spouse is a crime punishable by execution. Wonderful.

[6]: http://www.insideworldfootball.biz/worldcup/bids/qatar/8894-cameron-believes-qatar-world-cup-can-change-attitudes-towards-homosexuality – this resource is no longer available