Thursday, May 02, 2013
OT: The Soccer Thread, May 2013
(bbtf)
This is it, the biggest month of the year for soccer. Some key games/dates:
May 2nd: Europa League semifinals—Benfica v Fenerbahce and Chelsea v Basel
May 4th: Final day of the season in England’s second division. Wolves look done but Barnsley will attempt to escape the drop. Meanwhile, Nottingham Forest and Leicester City will try to snatch the last play off spot from Bolton while Hull needs a win to secure automatic promotion or risk losing it to Watford.
May 8th: Chelsea v Tottenham
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‹ First < 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 > Last ›It is what it is, but I find it illustrative the difference between how Messi and Ronaldo each handle their vote. Messi votes for his teammates (Iniexta, Xavi and Aguero) and Ronaldo finds an excuse not to vote so a teammate can vote for him. (They're both captains and so each entitled to vote but you're not allowed to vote for yourself.) Bocanegra voted Messi/Ronaldo/Falcao and Klinsmann voted for Messi/Pirlo/Ronaldo. Steven Gerrard tossed a third place vote to his old buddy Xabi Alonso.
Really?
I'm surprised by that. Obviously nobody can understand any of that over the TV, but I'd think live you could at least pick out one voice from the crowd and figure out what they're saying.
Charlie Hunnam beating the #### out of people then signing that could have been great black comedy. Missed opportunity.
Interesting note: ESPN may be abandoning the England market.
In my experience it can be tricky to figure out what a crowd is saying. I don't know how repetitive the songs are but I would think it's more difficult to figure out lyrics as they are going along. It's not like there is a lot of the rhythmic type chanting (e.g. "let's go Red Sox let's go" or "Bobby...Bobby...Bobby") that is pretty easy to follow.
And I would not know "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles" (or "I'm forever blowing ballgames")
I'm guessing they are being proactive to the expected revenue losses of not having the traveling Beckham (and possibly Donovan) show. They Galaxy were still a huge draw on the road last year.
There's a Michael Jackson joke around here somewhere...
You'll Never Walk Alone is of course from Carousel, while Bristol Rovers fans sing Goodnight Irene.
Agreed. Very well stated and much better than I did last night with a six pack in me.
I am in the same boat as MCoA. I use a generic home field factor. I analyzed team-by-team home pitch advantages over the past ten seasons and didn't see any evidence that would suggest major differences across teams. Again, it's possible some does exist but it certainly isn't clearly evident in the goals scored data.
What I would really like to understand is how teams style differ based upon opponent and venue. That will have to wait a few years given that we have only 1.5 seasons of Optadata to play with.
Coloccini is trying to force his way out of Newcastle and back to Argentina.
Sergio Ramos suspended 5 games for being Sergio Ramos, basically
Adebayor may back out of playing for Togo now for which he'll face some kind of sanction from FIFA as FIFA doesn't like it when players back out of playing for free at FIFA sanctioned events. He's made a hash of this ACN thing but I actually feel like he's in a tough spot. The Togo FA is clownshoes and he clearly doesn't want to play, but the president of the country got involved and now the whole thing is a mess. My guess is he'll still go play but I don't think Togo should expect a happy, motivated player. I kind of hope he's on the bench tomorrow for Spurs as I don't think his head is right at the moment.
Bild reports Spurs are bidding for Hamburglar striker Heung-Min Son.
Rape their women, enslave their children, salt their fields so nary a blade of grass will grow!
Or maybe not. Having Wolves showcased as they are today is a bit like that Lindsay Lohan feature in yesterday's NYT. Too much light and focus all around.
FWIW, the ITK from Spurs from sources that have seemed reliable the last few years has the club still working for Llorente, Damiao, Moutinho and possibly Will Hughes and Adam Maher with none of them considered likely.
I don't know enough about English postal codes to make much sense of this.
Borussia Dortmund have called a press conference to announce the return of Nuri Sahin. Hmmm. Maybe there's hope Luka will come back home and kiss chicken badge...
Also, West Ham is the second most supported club in "my" postcode from when I lived in London. (Behind Spurs, those bastards.) That's nice to see.
Chelsea target Taison has gone to Shaktar Donetsk. Fire up the Willian to everyone in England rumors.
Why would you need to know anything about UK postal codes. There's a friggin map...
Why would you need to know anything about UK postal codes. There's a friggin map...
I don't have a detailed enough knowledge of Britain's geography to, say, pick out districts in London by sight on that map, etc. It's not a very detailed map.
N17 will forever be true (navy) blue.
Good move for him if only to get out of the clownshow that is Chivas USA.
I think so, too, and if he does well there he'll get noticed in England. Hopefully he'll actually play, though.
No work permit problems, at least. Nuri Sahin's deal is a loan with an option to buy so I assume that means Real Madrid were involved in that deal, too. In other Liverpool news, it looks like they are also going to dump Assaidi almost as quickly as they signed him.
Can't help but feel Villas-Boas would have made much better use of Sahin than Rodgers did. It seems like Rodgers never really rated him and never gave him much of a chance to prove otherwise. I wonder if Sahin was actually a player he wanted to roll the dice on and it just didn't work out or if that loan was an opportunity for positive arbitrage pushed down from the higher-ups.
I don't recall if there was any legit interest in Sahin from Tottenham over the summer or whether that was just paper talk and Mourinho running his mouth a bit. I suppose Spurs may just not have been interested, now or in the summer, but I think Sahin would have been a nice fit - especially when Dembele went down. I certainly would have been happy if Spurs had added him on an 18-month loan.
Wasn't he, like, the Bundesliga player of the year, like, two years ago?
Would a "I didn't know/forgot X was on (or still on) Y" team be cheaper and better than QPR?
The Spurs blogs tend to think AVB didn't rate him. I like him and he could have really helped Arsenal who were definitely in for him. Ah well. I'm watching St. Etienne and Toulose now to see what the big deal about Moussa Sissoko is. He's a big guy and plays higher up the pitch than I imagined. He's employed a very similarly to the way Everton use Fellaini this year. He definitely looks like a PL player...
edit: Oh yeah, and the soon to be in-laws bought me soccer cards for Christmas. I hope I get a Nicklas Bendtner card! Gonna open those suckers up tomorrow during QPR-Spurs.
It reminds me of Nate Silver's college football popularity map, which had an awful methodology that he should be embarrassed for. Both are pretty much worthless. Fans of say, Wigan, tweeting their enjoyment of Chelsea being bounced out of Champions League proves nothing.
How could you miss him? Seven appearances for Liverpool in the league, none since early November. Subbed off in all of them.
Seems like Gerrard's renaissance and Rodgers' obvious preference for the familiar (and expensive) Joe Allen simply doomed Sahin from day one. On the other hand, if you can't displace Jordan Henderson from the starting eleven it does raise some questions.
Green also insisted that if Rangers were denied entry south of the border, PremierLeague side Swansea and Championship side Cardiff should then be booted out of England. He said: "People say you are not allowed in the English league – well let's then kick Cardiff and Swansea out, because they are playing in a different country.
"People are saying Wales is fine but Scotland is not. We cannot have a situation where one of the Union is annexed by the football bodies but Wales can join. It's rubbish."
I think it's hilarious that after 90 years, people still complain about Welsh teams in the English football pyramid.
(This Toulose-St. Etienne game is entertaining, BTW)
Which speaks volumes about Italian politics.
Heath, Morgan and Sinclair on the same team? Sheesh. Maybe US Soccer just wanted to make sure Sinclair didn't injure Morgan and Heath.
Anarchy is a kind of reform...I just keep thinking Berlusconi is about to go to jail and then the next day I see he's still a major player in Italian politics. He is a ####### magician.
Non-nosebleed NHL and NBA tickets are very expensive as well.
€15 is incredibly cheap. That's minor league sports, community theater shows here. Are all sorts of entertainment tickets cheap in Germany, or just the Bundesliga tickets? Edit: or are those just the supporters' tickets?
That's in the CBA, 5% each year.
Well there you go.
Where are you seeing that?
It's a joke based on the women's allocation.
They said they planned to balance the women's teams. I don't know enough about the Mexican players to be sure if they did that or not. But Portland's defense would have to be pretty crappy to give back as many goals as they're likely to score.
*Turns around, sees joke that whooshed by him*
It's the supporters' tickets, but there are a lot of them. Even the top ticket for a club like Frankfurt would be less than 60 euro for all but "gala" matches against Bayern or Dortmund (cheaper on a season ticket basis).
For what it is worth, opera tickets in Frankfurt are only marginally more expensive. And there are more Bundesliga teams which are better than Eintracht than there are operas that are better than Frankfurt.
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