The mathematics of the long ball

[super_pig]

you can apply stats to the weather but you still can't forecast it correctly

 

[PokerBlade]

It's a results business. If you get a result, you did it right. Either by fair means or foul. If it upsets the theatre-goers then y'know, too bad.

Leave narrow-minded philosophies in the past.....where they belong......with the..er..dinosaurs.

With the Philosoraptors?

 

[Pinchy]

There are generally held principles in football, but its not as simple as saying that one way of playing is 'statistically more successful' than another, likewise an alternative hoofed variety of football can't be totally dismissed because it is 'statistically less likely to be successful' - the majority of all statistics will be relative and dependant on not just the style of play adopted by one side, but also the style adopted by the opposition, which creates a huge amount of variability.

It's nothing to do with statistics. It's to do with how the clubs who have won and entertained down the years play the game.? Not fucking Hoof that's for sure. It really isn't difficult. The best teams "play football" "the right way" Those phrases are in constant use in the professional game. They never mean Hoof and Hope. For fucks sake, Hoofers, have a think for once...

 

[Pinchy]

Interesting read. I suspect you can apply statistics to football but they will need to be much more complex than the number of passess theory which just felt wrong to me when it was advanced by Taylor/Bassett/Coppell in the 80's.

Thanks for posting

To his credit, Coppell learned the lesson. His Reading team that romped the league played proper football.

 

[Barney]

long ball , pass pass pass if its winning football & gets us outa this league who really givs s fuck

Pinchy. He gives a lot of fucks actually.

 

[PokerBlade]

It's nothing to do with statistics. It's to do with how the clubs who have won and entertained down the years play the game.? Not fucking Hoof that's for sure. It really isn't difficult. The best teams "play football" "the right way" Those phrases are in constant use in the professional game. They never mean Hoof and Hope. For fucks sake, Hoofers, have a think for once...

Which is, of course, a matter of statistics.

 

[Pinchy]

We will have to agree to disagree on this one TD

Yes. Everyone is entitled to their own standards. I dare say you're pretty comfortable with yours?

 

[Tyler Durden]

There are generally held principles in football, but its not as simple as saying that one way of playing is 'statistically more successful' than another, likewise an alternative hoofed variety of football can't be totally dismissed because it is 'statistically less likely to be successful' - the majority of all statistics will be relative and dependant on not just the style of play adopted by one side, but also the style adopted by the opposition, which creates a huge amount of variability.

100% correct.

But it's very difficult to explain to certain folks that reality doesn't shrink itself to fit their agendas.

 

[Barney]

Score goals by any means necessary vs. Score goals by playing in a certain, passing on the floor style only.

I'll pick the first. It gets you more goals and wins you more games.

Which is the point of the game called football the last time I checked.

 

[Tyler Durden]

Score goals by any means necessary vs. Score goals by playing in a certain, passing on the floor style only.

I'll pick the first. It gets you more goals and wins you more games.

Which is the point of the game called football the last time I checked.

I've just checked, and yes, Association Rules appear to back this up.

Turns out that you don't get awarded extra points for looking dainty.

Well who woulda thunk it eh?

 

[JJ Sefton]

To his credit, Coppell learned the lesson. His Reading team that romped the league played proper football.

And his Palace team got to a Cup final.

 

[Pinchy]

Pinchy. He gives a lot of fucks actually.

I do, mate. It's the "beautiful game". That means something. Those who favour alehouse football can watch it every Sunday morning. No problem.

I prefer to be awestruck at the sublime talent of those who can play the game in a way that I never could, as opposed to grunting "gerritintbox" in support of a team of limited triers.

I shall never subscribe to the lowest common denominator philosophy of despair that says any old grotesque, unimaginative shite will do, as long as you win. The proponents of such a parochial, redundant, discredited view, fail to recognise the blindingly obvious truth that 'any old shite' will, by definition, fail more often than it succeeds. It's hardly contentious, is it?

The irony, of course, is that the Hoofers continue to peddle this abject nonsense at a time when our team is winning by playing some very good football.

Only in S2....

Kick it Long; Kick it Hard; Kick it High.

 

[Tyler Durden]

And his Palace team got to a Cup final.

Doesn't count apparently. They didn't pirouette their way to Wembley you see....

 

[Barney]

I do, mate. It's the "beautiful game". That means something. Those who favour alehouse football can watch it every Sunday morning. No problem.

I prefer to be awestruck at the sublime talent of those who can play the game in a way that I never could, as opposed to grunting "gerritintbox" in support of a team of limited triers.

I shall never subscribe to the lowest common denominator philosophy of despair that says any old grotesque, unimaginative shite will do, as long as you win. The proponents of such a parochial, redundant, discredited view, fail to recognise the blindingly obvious truth that 'any old shite' will, by definition, fail more often than it succeeds. It's hardly contentious, is it?

The irony, of course, is that the Hoofers continue to peddle this abject nonsense at a time when our team is winning by playing some very good football.

Only in S2....

Kick it Long; Kick it Hard; Kick it High.

Sorry but I have to strongly disagree with anyone who proudly favours a specific style of play over results.

 

[Pinchy]

Which is, of course, a matter of statistics.

History. It tells its own story. The argument was won and lost a long time ago. Hoof lost.

Quite why the S2 Hoofers are so fervent about something so grotesque that suffered a welcome death decades ago, I struggle to comprehend. I blame Diplodocus Dave.

Still, they are entitled to their standards; I've got mine and I'm content.

 

[Tyler Durden]

Sorry but I have to strongly disagree with anyone who proudly favours a specific style of play over results.

Any normal, well-adjusted individual would.

Unfortunately, every court has its jester.

 

[Pinchy]

Sorry but I have to strongly disagree with anyone who proudly favours a specific style of play over results.

You continue to not "get it". Proper football gets results. It's not one or the other. It's two sides of the same coin. History is unequivocal about that. Check the record books.

There is no conflict. Only in S2....

 

[Tyler Durden]

The good thing about dinosaurs is that they were an evolutionary upgrade from invertebrates....

Whoops, off-topic.

 

[Barney]

You continue to not "get it". Proper football gets results. It's not one or the other. It's two sides of the same coin. History is unequivocal about that. Check the record books.

There is no conflict. Only in S2....

View attachment 20454

Score goals by any means necessary vs. Score goals by playing in a certain, passing on the floor style only.

^^ Of course you favour the latter? What you have never been able, and still can't seem to grasp is that the latter scores you LESS goals and thus wins you LESS games. That is not subjective, an unfortunate truth for you is that that is a cold hard fact.

So it begs the question, why choose the option that gets you less goals and wins you less games?

 

[PokerBlade]

History. It tells its own story. The argument was won and lost a long time ago. Hoof lost.

Quite why the S2 Hoofers are so fervent about something so grotesque that suffered a welcome death decades ago, I struggle to comprehend. I blame Diplodocus Dave.

Still, they are entitled to their standards; I've got mine and I'm content.

What we're talking about is how to interpret history. We know we can express the standard of a team statistically: that's what the league table is. The discussion is only as to the depth of the inferences can we make from the data. Without considering which teams have won the most games (a statistical analysis), how would you even know which ones told the story, so to speak?

 

[DronnieBlade]

Why have Spain dominated the world of football in the recent past ?

Did they have 11 genuinely all time greats on the pitch and were just kind of lucky at this particular moment in time ?

Why have England, by comparison, failed so miserably ?

The answer is 100% down to the culture in which young elite players are coached from an early age.

In England, we go down the route of moulding athletes in to footballers. In Spain, bluntly, they do not. This is a fundamental difference in ethos and is indisputable. What's also indisputable is the comparisons in what are ultimately the fruits of your labour.

England has over the last 20 years fallen so far behind its scary. The reasons why are there and clear for all.

To suggest a possession based game doesn't work is so far off the mark it's scary how any person of sound mind could possibly conclude otherwise.

Now, to add balance and going back to the days of John Beck, the venerable Lord Bassett and Bergen Blades Norwegian pals, it IS possible to play direct football and for said style to be somewhat effective. Its just less effective overall.

So what the OP has said is fundamentally sound in its premise, but like most theory, it's never 100% bang on.

UTB

 

[DronnieBlade]

Score goals by any means necessary vs. Score goals by playing in a certain, passing on the floor style only.

^^ Of course you favour the latter? What you have never been able, and still can't seem to grasp is that the latter scores you LESS goals and thus wins you LESS games. That is not subjective, an unfortunate truth for you is that that is a cold hard fact.

So it begs the question, why choose the option that gets you less goals and wins you less games?

Utter, total, complete bollocks.

Less goals ? Perhaps this is right, although I remain sceptical and would need a lot of convincing.

Less points ? Hog wash !!

IMHO.

UTB

PS Just to be clear, Im with Mr Pinch on this one.

 

[Harry's Game]

You continue to not "get it". Proper football gets results. It's not one or the other. It's two sides of the same coin. History is unequivocal about that. Check the record books.

There is no conflict. Only in S2....

View attachment 20454

Dinosaurs ruled the earth for over 250 million years, they were quite successful actually. Humans have o key been around for around 1 million, and we are already on the way out.

 

[DronnieBlade]

Have the S2 Hoofwaffe been bothered to actually read the excellent OP ?

Mr Reep got it wrong !!! Setting English football backwards many decades in the process (see my prior post for the why this is so).

Or do you still prefer to contend otherwise ???

UTB

 

[DronnieBlade]

Here at FiveThirtyEight, we tend to think statistics can add to our understanding of sports. (What a surprise!) From the more mature sabermetric movements of baseball and basketball to growing ones in soccer and hockey, evidence-based examination has led to new thoughts and ideas about the games we love.

But there can also be a dark side to analytics. Among other potential pitfalls, interpreting the numbers incorrectly can lead to terrible decisions or encourage habits that are hard to break, particularly given the added weight that conclusions carry if they appear to emerge from hard data. For an example, look no further than the state of English soccer after it began using what appeared to be a scientific strategy.

In the latest installment in our documentary podcast series Ahead Of Their Time, we look at Charles Reep, the father of soccer analytics — and a guy who made one big, glaring mistake that changed the course of English soccer for the worse. But in order to arrive at his very wrong conclusion, he first had to radically transform the way people thought about consuming a soccer match.

There was no Opta back in 1950, no Total Shots Ratio, no Expected Goals. But there was Reep, who took it upon himself to attend every Swindon Town F.C. match that season — sometimes with a miner’s helmet on his head to better illuminate his notes — and meticulously scribble down play-by-play diagrams of how everything went down. More than 60 years before player-tracking cameras became all the rage in pro sports, Reep was mapping out primitive spatial data the old-fashioned way, by hand.

Poring over all the scraps of data he’d collected, Reep eventually came to a realization: Most goals in soccer come off of plays that were preceded by three passes or fewer. And in Reep’s mind, this basic truth of the game should dictate how teams play. The key to winning more matches seemed to be as simple as cutting down on your passing and possession time, and getting the ball downfield as quickly as possible instead. The long ball was Reep’s secret weapon.

“Not more than three passes,” Reep admonished during a 1993 interview with the BBC. “If a team tries to play football and keeps it down to not more than three passes, it will have a much higher chance of winning matches. Passing for the sake of passing can be disastrous.”

This was it: Maybe the first case in history of an actionable sports strategy derived from next-level data collection, such as it was. And Reep got more than a few important folks to listen to his ideas, too. It took him a few decades of preaching, but Reep’s recommended playing style was adopted to instant success by Wimbledon F.C. in the 1980s, and then reached the highest echelons of English soccer — channeled as it was through the combination of England manager Graham Taylor and Football Association coaching director Charles Hughes, each of whom believed in hoofing the ball up the pitch and chasing it down (and now seemed to have the data to back up their intuition). The long ball was suddenly England’s official footballing policy.

The trouble was, Reep’s theory was based on a fatally flawed premise. As I wrote two years ago, when discussing Reep’s influence on soccer analytics:

Reep’s mistake was to fixate on the percentage of goals generated by passing sequences of various lengths. Instead, he should have flipped things around, focusing on the probability that a given sequence would produce a goal. Yes, a large proportion of goals are generated on short possessions, but soccer is also fundamentally a game of short possessions and frequent turnovers. If you account for how often each sequence length occurs during the flow of play, of coursemore goals are going to come off of smaller sequences — after all, they’re easily the most common type of sequence. But that doesn’t mean a small sequence has a higher probability of leading to a goal.

To the contrary, a team’s probability of scoring goes up as it strings together more successful passes. The implication of this statistical about-face is that maintaining possession is important in soccer. There’s a good relationship between a team’s time spent in control of the ball and its ability to generate shots on target, which in turn is hugely predictive of a team’s scoring rate and, consequently, its placement in the league table. While there’s less rhyme or reason to the rate at which teams convert those scoring chances into goals, modern analysis has ascertained that possession plays a big role in creating offensive opportunities, and that effective short passing — fueled largely by having pass targets move to soft spots in the defense before ever receiving the ball — is strongly associated with building and maintaining possession.

It probably wasn’t entirely Reep’s fault when England flamed out at Euro 1992, or when they failed to qualify for the 1994 World Cup. But it couldn’t have helped that they were playing a misguided style, informed by well-meaning but faulty statistical principles.

Ultimately, Reep was a cautionary tale of the damage that can be done when stats go wrong. But he was also light-years ahead of his time for tracking stats in the first place. Even though his conclusions were wrong, his instincts were right. Now, national and club teams across the globe pay for massive amounts of data that, in one way or another, come out of the tradition of soccer analytics that Charles Reep helped start. As far as legacies in the game go, you could do worse.

This is part of our new podcast series “Ahead Of Their Time,” profiling players and managers in various sports who were underappreciated in their era

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-one-mans-bad-math-helped-ruin-decades-of-english-soccer/

As good an OP as I have ever had the priveledge to read. Bravo Sir.

My cap suitably doffed.

UTB

 

[SouthEssexBlade]

Have the S2 Hoofwaffe been bothered to actually read the excellent OP ?

Mr Reep got it wrong !!! Setting English football backwards many decades in the process (see my prior post for the why this is so).

Or do you still prefer to contend otherwise ???

UTB

I think the experience of Blades supporters is contrary to this finding. The only relative level of success was gained under Bassett and Warnock, both advocates of the principals of Reep, and especially Charles Hughes. That can cloud the judgement somewhat on it not being effective and winning.

The odd trophy for the likes of Wimbledon, Palace and to a certain extent Leicester (though I'd argue that their tactics last season were far removed from those of Hughes) doesn't make the quoted passage in the OT incorrect. The majority of trophies won at domestic, european and world level were done so by possession based tactics.

 

[Tyler Durden]

Have the S2 Hoofwaffe been bothered to actually read the excellent OP ?

Mr Reep got it wrong !!! Setting English football backwards many decades in the process (see my prior post for the why this is so).

Or do you still prefer to contend otherwise ???

UTB

Except that nobody has advocated a soley long-ball approach once on here, but some of you are too blinkered and fanatical to see that.

Basic logic indicates that the conditions on a match by match basis dictate the approach you take. This is very simple logic, and also 100% correct.

 

[DronnieBlade]

I think the experience of Blades supporters is contrary to this finding. The only relative level of success was gained under Bassett and Warnock, both advocates of the principals of Reep, and especially Charles Hughes. That can cloud the judgement somewhat on it not being effective and winning.

The odd trophy for the likes of Wimbledon, Palace and to a certain extent Leicester (though I'd argue that their tactics last season were far removed from those of Hughes) doesn't make the quoted passage in the OT incorrect. The majority of trophies won at domestic, european and world level were done so by possession based tactics.

Very good point. Certain fans are blinkered by this, which is unsurprising. And explains why certain fans crave the "good old days" when we played a certain way and, relatively speaking, achieved more.

But the sound logic of what the OP has stated is, to my mind at least, beyond refute and challenges wholeheartedly what a large section of our support still believe in.

UTB

 

[DronnieBlade]

Except that nobody has advocated a soley long-ball approach once on here, but some of you are too blinkered and fanatical to see that.

Basic logic indicates that the conditions on a match by match basis dictate the approach you take. This is very simple logic, and also 100% correct.

See my post #51. Starting with the "To add balance" bit !!

UTB

 

[SouthEssexBlade]

Very good point. Certain fans are blinkered by this, which is unsurprising. And explains why certain fans crave the "good old days" when we played a certain way and, relatively speaking, achieved more.

But the sound logic of what the OP has stated is, to my mind at least, beyond refute and challenges wholeheartedly what a large section of our support still believe in.

UTB

Football, like life, evolves and changes and the older element on here like me, remember the days of Harris when we played a quick passing game. At the moment the Klopp inspired gegenpress is tactic of the moment. Interestingly, one of the ways being advocated to counter this is to play more of a long ball game, putting the ball high into the pressing teams half to switch the point of pressing, so a gegen-gegenpress!

Other things to take into account is the skill and quality level of players. With limited resources, limited tactics are available and a way of achieving far more than the sum of the parts was the Bassett way. I've said elsewhere we have a total dearth of qualified coaches in England compared to Spain, Germany and Italy.

England 1,400 coaches

Italy 2,300 coaches

France 3,400 coaches

Germany 7,000 coaches

Spain 15,500 coaches

Given those numbers of coaches, there must be plenty of kids getting into the professional game who have had limited contact and time with suitable qualified people. Given that, a limited technical ability in our player isn't that surprising.