Cornered Identity
Last week I shared a story about the globalization of soccer on display in the World Cup. In short, the professional leagues in Europe are so rich and powerful, that their preferred style of play has influenced coaching and soccer instruction across the globe, all the way down youth academies. Additionally, the best youth players leave their homes at younger and younger ages to develop and play in Europe. Big picture countries have less and less of a stylistic identity to how they play the game.
With perhaps one exception, per Rory Smith and Allison McCann’s interactive story in The NY Times (Smith and teams World Cup coverage has been excellent throughout): Corner kicks.
Stuart Reid has been tracking corner kick strategies for some time now, and he’s found that countries have trends when it comes to corners.
Per Smith:
The more corners he has dissected, though, the more he realized something. Soccer is now a resolutely globalized game. Ideas spread around the world in the blink of an eye, transmitted almost instantaneously along well-worn trade routes. And yet one area remains relatively untouched, and still proudly, defiantly local. Reid can, sometimes, tell where a team is from just from the way it attacks or defends its corner kicks.
There are practical explanations for quite a lot of soccer’s most enduring clichés. Northern European teams, for example, may well traditionally play a more direct style than those from the south of the continent because their fields tended to be wetter, muddier and generally less suited to an artful passing game.
Climate, average height of players, offensive and defensive philosophy (zone vs. man), and more: when it comes to corner kicks, a national soccer identity can be found.
There’s much more to the story, with really excellent graphics to show the different approaches. Excellent read! – PAL
Source: “Can You Tell a Country by Its Corner Kicks?” Rory Smith and Allison McCann, The New York Times (12/5/22)
716 Feet
The first time I read this story, I thought, “Wow, talk about bad luck.”
Camille Herron broke a record for a 100-mile run. Months later, it was revealed that the course wasn’t quite 100 miles in length. It was 716 feet short. A race director made a slight change to the course made three years prior for safety reasons. After Herron broke the record, the course was re-measured, and that’s when they found it coming up short.
Tough break. And that’s where I was going to leave it, but then I re-read the story, and I think this story – and how it’s told – is a good example of how we consume stories much of the time. A crazy tidbit and not much more. A quick nugget we can pass along in conversation.
But George Ramsay didn’t give us the basics beyond the headline (or maybe his editor cut it):
- What world record did Herron break? A women’s record for 100-mile, the overall world record. What record? I assume it’s the overall world record, but it’s never flat-out written.
- What was the safety hazard that caused the change to the course 3 years ago, and why in the hell wouldn’t race coordinators re-measure the distance after making a change to the course?
- (To a lesser degree) Would her pace have been enough to break the record even with the extra 716 feet (don’t know – 200+ yards in a minute after 99+ miles of running is a pretty good clip)
Big picture: this lady ran 100 miles to break a record, only to have someone make it all for not because they didn’t measure the course. But the story stops short on several basic points that would flesh out this story beyond a headline. We got the who and the what, but it’s pretty light by way of the why, and how. Interesting story to share in terms of how we write about news, very little in the – PAL
Source: “Camille Herron put her ‘heart and soul’ into breaking the 100-mile world record. But officials now say the course was too short,” George Ramsay, CNN (12/7/22)
Duh, UFC
What the hell? On November 5, Darrick Minner fought Shayilan Nuerdanbieke. Anyone close, knew Minner had a knee injury leading into the fight. Bets came flooding in on Nuerdanbieke winning in the first round, which he did.
It was clear folks had inside info. A bunch of betting sites stopped taking bets on the fight, the line swung pretty wildly within hours, and investigations were launched pretty quickly.
Minner’s trainor for the fight was James Krause. Krause used to fight, and bets on a lot of fights, which was somehow OK in the UFC until now. Krause also had a UFC gambling podcast, and said that he bets on every fight.
If it seems like a blatant contradiction that someone with such a direct hand in manufacturing the outcome of fights would be allowed to bet on the results of those fights, well, the UFC finally agrees with you. After the promotion allowed this sort of thing for years—a loophole that led to grim headlines like “UFC Fighter Who Bet and Lost on Himself Gets Cut on His Birthday”—UFC Chief Business Officer Hunter Campbell sent a memo to the roster in October announcing that “fighters, training teams, family members, and others that have access to inside information” would no longer be allowed to gamble on fights.
I can’t believe something so stupid was going on in the UFC. Of course, as Patrick Redford points out, finally banning such practices won’t stop trainers and fighter from betting on fights, especially when the fighters earn such a small percentage of the cut.
UFC fighters are not unionized, get only a 16 percent revenue cut as of 2019, and don’t have real healthcare. If a fighter on the fringes of the roster only makes $22,000 for appearing in a fight, that is not nearly enough to stop them from taking a dive and earning more money doing so.
We all know that a league can get into trouble real quick as soon as viewers question the validity of the outcome. We’ll see how a relatively young professional league handles it. – PAL
Source: “The UFC’s Treatment Of Its Fighters Created The Conditions For The James Krause Scandal,” Patrick Redford, Defector (12/7/22)
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