Money Ball

Can Spain beat the Dutch playing Dutch Football

“I am Dutch,” Cruyff said last week to El Periódico in Spain, where he lives. “But I will always defend the football Spain play.”

That is an easy transition for him because the soccer Spain plays is downright Dutch, and it can trace its roots to Cruyff. At the height of his playing career in 1973, Cruyff joined Barcelona and played there five years, winning the Spanish championship and the Spanish cup. He had even greater success when he coached Barcelona from 1988 to 1996, winning four league titles and the 1992 European Cup.

He also helped establish methods used at the club’s acclaimed youth academy, La Masia, where a third of the current Spanish team learned a style of play that was neither Spanish nor Dutch, but which is internationally appealing and very effective....

The Spanish style is based on the Dutch system of “total football,” developed at the Amsterdam club Ajax, where Cruyff learned the game. It requires every player on the field to be a playmaker, as a dribbler or passer, depending on what the situation requires.

Open sections of the field were not gaps to be traversed with long passes or frantic runs forward; rather, they were areas to mount an organized, well-fortified attack with keen passing and combination play. That is the sort of play Spain has used here to dominate possession on its way to the final after losing to Switzerland, 1-0, in its opening match.

“I think Spain is the country playing the best football in the past few years,” Netherlands Coach Bert van Marwijk said Saturday. “I’ve been the coach of the national squad for two years now, and during that time, it has crossed my mind that I would love to play Spain, and now it is happening.”

He added: “Both teams have their own style, and they do resemble each other. Right now, Spain has executed better.”

-A Dutch Great Helped Transform Spain’s Game

More Ideas on Improving Soccer- Use Two balls

This time from Rick Bookstaber of all people;

-Use two balls. Having two balls in play will increase the number of shots, and spread out the defense. The balls can be color coded, with one ball being worth two points and the other ball one point.

-Add a goal tunnel. Have a corrugated metal tube that runs into the goal from beyond the goalie area. If someone can kick the ball into the tube, it is an automatic goal, since the goalie cannot defend it. New and entertaining strategies can be added with this feature. For example, players can be "tunneled" by being slammed against the sharp metal edges of the tube, thereby increasing the physical component, and with it, the entertainment value of the sport.

Assorted World Cup

Understanding Italian football part II - Furbizia

Perhaps nothing has been more influential in determining the popular perception of the Italian game than furbizia, the art of guile. For it is no overstatement to say that Italians enjoy a reputation as the dirtiest players in the game and, dryly put, as cheaters.

Investment Banks and the World Cup

Competition Description: World Cup 2010 - Take on the Quants

The Vuvuzela Externality

Soccer Done Right;

To remove these bizarre incentives, soccer should follow the ice hockey approach to penalties, after correcting for the difference in team size (six players for hockey vs. 11 for soccer) and game length (60 minutes for ice hockey vs. 90 minutes for soccer).

They think it’s all over: National identity, scoring in the last minute, and penalty shootouts

The Carbon Footprint of the 2010 World Cup

Gamesmanship and Collective Reputation

The Diving Champions of the (Football) World

While the anecdotal (and video) evidence against Italy is strong, it would be useful to have a statistical measure of diving on the basis of which international comparisons could be made. One possibility is to use data on fouls suffered. For instance, in the latest game, Italy was fouled 23 times while New Zealand suffered just 10 fouls. Either New Zealand is an unusually aggressive (or clumsy) team, or a number of the "fouls" suffered by Italy were simulated.

Back to the Future in the soccer World Cup: Chile wins 1-0 or 3-1?

Now onto more substance about the evolution of soccer: historically, the 1962 World Cup is an important turning point, since it marks the advent of modern defensive strategies in soccer. Until that World Cup, the average scoring had always exceeded 3 goals per game. In the 1962 World Cup, the goal scoring dropped significantly below 3 goals, to 2.78 goals per game, never to recover.

Defensive strategies have further taken hold. Nowadays we would be satisfied if we were witnessing ‘a mere’ 2.78 goals per game. In the seven World Cups between 1980 and 2006, the average had already dropped further to only 2.53 goals per game.

World Cup 2010

Our favorite blog for World Cup is Goal from NYT

Parenting Advice from Gladwell's Outliers

Parents and Society matter!

Yoga for bloggers

Yoga for Computer Users: Healthy Necks, Shoulders, Wrists, and Hands in the Postmodern Age

The Award for protesters in China

One in year jail for 79 year old illiterate lady- and electricity was also cut from her apartment.

Meanwhile Chinese youth embrace Communism;

Parenting Advice from Economists

Winning is Everything

Winning isn't Everything;

Joshua Gans is 'over the moon' because his daughter won a sports event. With some qualifications he asserts winning is everything. Its a very American attitude and I don't agree at all particularly in relation to kids sport where I think the key objective for the vast majority of kids is to participate - to enjoy participating in a healthy activity. Assuming Joshua's type of elation feeds back into the incentives influencing participation decisions by youth it seems to me unhealthy for those who don't really need to win and don't in fact win. The key reward from sport is to the individual in terms of enhanced individual physical potentiality not their ability to rank themselves ahead of other competitors.

Nor, for that matter, am I overly concerned with the signalling function of education - the important issue is to add value not to order students 1,2,...N. Again the ordering is irrelevant because it does not map into something that reflects significant value in any field of life. From an individualistic perspective the point is to realise individual potential not to be able to rank yourself ahead of the other guy.

Assorted Olympics

China 2008 olympic medal tally by population

Olympics at Sports-Reference.com

The Glory of Just Showing Up

Parenting advice from Michael Phelps' Mother

As he entered public school, he displayed what his teachers called “immature” behavior. “In kindergarten I was told by his teacher, ‘Michael can’t sit still, Michael can’t be quiet, Michael can’t focus,’ ” recalled Ms. Phelps, who was herself a teacher for 22 years. The family had recently moved, and she felt Michael might be frustrated because the kindergarten curriculum he was getting in the new district was similar to the pre-K curriculum in their old district.

“I said, maybe he’s bored,” Ms. Phelps recalled saying to his teacher. “Her comment to me — ‘Oh, he’s not gifted.’ I told her I didn’t say that, and she didn’t like that much. I was a teacher myself so I didn’t challenge her, I just said, ‘What are you going to do to help him?’ ”

In the elementary grades at their suburban Baltimore school, Ms. Phelps said, Michael excelled in things he loved — gym and hands-on lessons, like science experiments. “He read on time, but didn’t like to read,” she said. “So I gave him the Baltimore Sun sports pages, even if he just read the pictures and captions.”

She will never forget one teacher’s comment: “This woman says to me, ‘Your son will never be able to focus on anything.’ ”

His grades were B’s and C’s and a few D’s.

It was a tough period. Ms. Phelps and her husband, a state trooper, were divorcing. She had just gone back to school to get a master’s degree to become an administrator, she said, and at the same time she had to be the 24/7 parent.

Michael grew like crazy, but not evenly — his ears looked huge, and when he ran, his arms swung below his knees. (He was on his way to being 6 feet 4 inches tall with an arm span of 6 feet 7 inches.) Kids bullied him, and when he whacked one on the school bus, he was suspended from the bus for several days....

At age 9, Michael was put on Ritalin, a stimulant used to treat hyperactivity.

His mother thinks it helped a little. “He seemed to be able to focus longer,” she said. “He could get through homework without moving around so much.” She said he was still a middling student. “It might have raised some C’s to B’s,” she said. But if a homework assignment had to be at least four sentences, she said, “he’d just do four sentences.”

After two years, Michael asked to get off the meds. He had to go to the school nurse’s office to take a pill at lunch, she said, and felt stigmatized. “Out of the blue, he said to me: ‘I don’t want to do this anymore, Mom. My buddies don’t do it. I can do this on my own.’ ”

“I was always stern as a parent,” she said, “but from Day 1, I included my children as part of the decision process. So I listened.” After consulting with Dr. Wax, Michael stopped medication.

-Phelps’s Mother Recalls Helping Her Son Find Gold-Medal Focus

Kick the Balls

Kick the Balls: An Offensive Suburban Odyssey
by Alan Black

Realted;
Swearing Festival

Photo of the Day

Thousands of volunteers took part in the Olympic torch ceremony on a section of the Great Wall of China

The Idea that is America at its best

In a pointed gesture, the U.S. Olympic team has voted Lopez Lomong, a member of the track team who gained American citizenship in 2007 after fleeing Sudan and spending a decade in a Kenyan refugee camp, as its flag bearer for the opening ceremony in Beijing.

-Sudanese refugee voted American flag bearer

Ms. Economy calls Olympics a `Nightmare' for China

Elizabeth Economy Calls Olympics a `Nightmare' for China
Elizabeth Economy, director of Asia studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, talks with Bloomberg's Tom Keene about pollution in Beijing, preparation for the Olympics, which begin Aug. 8, and criticism of China's government.

Photo of the Day

World Swamp Soccer championships

Link of the Day

Understanding Uncertainty

The Golf Sacrifice

In a rather obsequious and fawning interview with the US newspaper Politico and Yahoo News, Bush disclosed that he was enjoying a game of golf in August 2003 when he got word that the United Nations building in Baghdad had been bombed.

Bravely, Bush decided to make what in his mind he no doubt considered a major sacrifice: He put his clubs away for the duration.

"I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal," Bush said.

World's greatest creative Thinker?

Edward de Bono

Why businesses took up lateral thinking;

In business there is a bottom line- you’ve to think.
In politics and academic world you’ve to prove you’re right, there is no reality test.

De Bono on improving penalty kicks in soccer;

De Bono’s solution is to leave the game as it is, but to change the scoring system. “Why not make it so that every time the goalkeeper touches the ball, half a goal is scored? If a goal is scored in the normal way, that would be a full goal, of course. But if you used a ‘half-goal for a touch’ system, you would get games with a constantly fluctuating score that would satisfy the demand that the American public seems to have. I’ve tried to get the football authorities to try it, but they won’t hear of it”.

Galatasaray wins Turkish League

Şampiyon Galatasaray