More Tweets... | |
The groups for the opening round of Euro 2016 are set! Among the compelling match-ups we have in store are Italy v Belgium, Spain v Croatia, and Germany v Poland. Additionally we have Ukraine v Northern Ireland, Hungary v Iceland, and Slovakia v Russia.
No, those last fixtures are not qualifying matches, but with 24 teams competing in the final tournament in France next summer we might as well consider the group stage to be a continuation of the qualifiers and there's really no need to pay much attention until the round-of-16. This means however that we are deprived of the drama of strong group play, where each match is critically important. Now that the top 4 third place teams make it through the stakes are much lower for the top powers; teams can afford to slip up once or twice and still go through.
24 teams is too many.
From 1996 to 2012 the final tournament saw 16 teams. This was just enough to see most of the traditional powers represented along with a few surprise teams, making for compelling first round matches that mattered. Every group was a "group of death". The closest thing to such a group this time consists of Belgium, Italy, Sweden, and the Republic of Ireland. Such a group in prior editions would have been considered weak.
Before 1996 only 8 teams qualified for the finals, and that was including the host nation. A place there was tough to get, the qualifiers were brutal. Although to be fair, that was before the break up of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia as well as the incomprehensible admission of the likes of Andorra and San Marino into the mix, all of which effectively added 50% more teams to the process. And from the tournament's inception in 1960 to 1976 only 4 teams made it, but the Euro wasn't as serious a competition then.
The 2020 Euro is due to take place not in one host nation but across Europe, in disparate cities such as Bilbao, Baku, and Bucharest. They might as well expand the field to 32 teams for that to make the first round more competitive, but better would be to scale back to 16. -- Phil Ploquin, December 13th 2015 [ ] |
|
The All Blacks have done it! New Zealand has won the 2015 Rugby World Cup, becoming the first team to win three Rugby World Cup championships. I had questioned whether New Zealand's reputation as the completely dominant rugby team on the world stage was really deserved, since both Australia and South Africa had as many championships as they did, but indeed now they have proven that it is true - New Zealand are the greatest, and the rankings prove it.
The Kiwis did it in style, defeating their fiercest rivals one after another. The group stage was a breeze with only eventual fourth place finisher Argentina offering credible resistance. In the quarter-finals they demolished four-time finalists France, then convincingly beat the Springboks in the semis, and then to round it off perfectly they dispatched the Wallabies in the final.
Congratulations also then to Argentina for reaching the semi-finals, and to Wales, Scotland and Ireland for reaching the quarter-finals. England had tough luck being drawn in the dreaded Group of Death and were unable to best either Australia or Wales. Congratulations too to Japan for their shock victory over South Africa, though it proved insufficient for a place in the quarters, but should provide great encouragement for the 2019 Rugby World Cup set to take place in Japan.
Thank you New Zealand, congratulations! -- Phil Ploquin, November 3rd 2015 [ ] |
|
The qualifiers for Euro 2016 come to a close this week with each team playing their final two matches. The establishment is mostly already qualified with Germany, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Belgium and England almost guaranteed to be in France next summer. Joining them in emphatic fashion are Austria, the Czech Republic, and Iceland (Iceland!!) The expanded field of 24 spots for the final tournament means we have traditionally second and third tier teams poised to qualify as well with Wales, Northern Ireland, Norway, Slovakia, and Albania all with very realistic chances of qualifying.
Most notably missing are The Netherlands who will need substantial help from the Czech Republic if they are to even secure the playoff spot. But even more shocking is Greece's failure. Although their adversaries were not top tier, there is nothing particularly shameful about being eliminated by Romania, Northern Ireland, Hungary and Finland. Being eliminated by the Faroe Isles on the other hand, that is another story.
The Faroe Isles record in competitive matches is 11 wins, 10 draws, and 103 losses and now two of those wins have come at Greece's expense, with the Faroese winning both the home and away fixtures of these qualifiers. The Faroese, along with the likes of San Marino, Andorra, Liechtenstein, and now Gibraltar, are traditionally the whipping boys of these tournaments, at best earning a couple of draws or the odd win against a second/third tier team such as Lithuania or Macedonia. But to knock off a top tier team? Unheard of.
But the Greek national team has an odd history. After being non-competitors for all of world footballing history, second tier at best, they came out of nowhere in 2004 and won the European Championship in Portugal, defeating the hosts in the final. It was shocking but also upsetting to football aficionados because they won in such a cynical manner, winning a string of matches 1-0, each time scoring a counter-attacking goal against the run of play while absorbing relentless pressure and near-misses, committing egregious foul after egregious foul. It was anti-football at its worst and it worked.
The generation of players that comprised this 2004 team, players such as Kostas Katsouranis and Georgios Karagounis, went on to lead Greece to qualify for almost every World Cup and Euro afterwards, lasting until their round-of-16 exit at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, which ended with a lost penalty shoot-out. But it's all over now.
Things are no better with Greek clubs, but then again they never have been. The pinnacle for Greek clubs in Europe was when Panathinaikos reached the final of the Champion's Cup in 1971. A Greek club has appeared in the quarter-finals only seven times since 1956 and none since 2002. Olympiakos made it out of the group stage in 2014 but lost in the round-of-16. No Greek club has ever won the Europa League or any of its predecessor tournaments, either.
So the Greek people will have to look elsewhere for respite as they endure the economic crisis. Let us hope their national team can retool with a new positive approach and qualify for Russia 2018. -- Phil Ploquin, October 4th 2015 [ ] |
|
New Zealand is to international rugby what Brazil is to international football. They are the best and everybody who doesn't follow the sport knows it, even when it's not true. The layperson hears "World Cup", they think Brazil. For rugby, it's New Zealand.
Brazil play football in their famous yellow jerseys with a reputation for playing in a style known as "samba" (though that has not been true since the 1980s.) Their players all have neat nicknames like Pelé (aka Édson Arantes do Nascimento) and Hulk (Givanildo Vieira de Souza) or they go by their first names as Ronaldo and Neymar do. New Zealand's rugby team performs the Māori war dance known as "The Haka" before each match and wear the intimidating colors described by their nickname, the "All Blacks."
It's all very entertaining to fans who are not actually interested in the games themselves but unfortunately, the numbers only marginally justify the romantic narrative that Brazil and New Zealand are crushingly dominant at the football and rugby World Cups, respectively, if at all.
Brazil has won five football World Cups, which is only one more than Germany and Italy have won. Since 1974 Germany has won the World Cup three times while Brazil has only won it twice, which is the same number Argentina and Italy have won. And if we perform statistical analysis of overall cumulative performance, we find that Brazil are only minutely better than Germany in all time World Cup play but substantially worse since 1974, with Argentina and Italy not far behind them.
Likewise in rugby, New Zealand has won two of the seven World Cups played so far (the first one in 1987 and the most recent one in 2011), but so too have Australia and South Africa won two. Statistical analysis shows that now, with the 2011 title, New Zealand is in fact the best ever, but only very slightly with Australia right there with them.
Things are different when you look at national team records for competitions other than the World Cup. Brazil has won only eight Copa América titles while Uruguay has won fifteen and Argentina has won fourteen. It's not even close, Brazil is only the third most successful team in South American competitions. However for rugby, there is absolutely no question that the All Blacks are the most dominant team of all time but when the World Cup comes around they more often than not fail to live up to their status of overwhelming favorites.
The upcoming edition of the Rugby World Cup in England will either prove or disprove New Zealand's worthiness as rugby icons to the world. They must rise to the occasion and win their third World Cup and take a clear lead over their rivals. The illusion of Brazil's dominance in world football was thoroughly shattered by Germany in 2014. A similar defeat by the All Blacks to Australia or South Africa would be very damaging as well, with England and France also capable of performing the feat.
Update October 21, 2015: The 2015 Rugby World Cup -- Phil Ploquin, October 21st 2015 [ ] |
|
Serena Williams has been all alone at the top of women's tennis since 2002. Serious competitors have come and gone in brief flashes, but overall she has been thoroughly dominant. Justine Henin, Kim Clijsters, and Maria Sharapova have all been great players in their own right, but have not offered Serena anywhere near the competition that some of the earlier great women's players had. Serena's sister Venus was her last great competitor, the two having played four consecutive Grand Slam finals against one another, from the 2002 French Open to the 2003 Australian Open. When Venus was on top she had the likes of Martina Hingis to contend with, also dominant for a time. Lindsay Davenport and Jennifer Capriati were also very strong at that time.
Steffi Graf was alone at the top from 1987 until 1996 with only Monica Seles to challenge her but Seles' career was tragically disrupted by a crazed fan. Before Graf we had Martina Navrátilová who was dominant between 1978 and 1989 and engaged in a fierce rivalry with Chris Evert who herself was dominant between 1973 and 1985.
To be considered the greatest of all time however, Serena has some catching up to do to. ATP points-wise she is still 15,000 points behind Chris Evert who with 69,060 has the most ever. A Grand Slam title earns 2,000 points so Serena would have to win 8 more titles to surpass Evert (that's at least two years!), or have several years of strong performances reaching at least the semi-finals each time. Serena is only fourth at the moment with her 53,900 points. Navrátilová and Graf are ahead of her with 66,025 and 62,290 points, respectively. Only Steffi Graf has more titles than Serena does (22 to 20.) Serena has already appeared in more Grand Slam tournaments than Evert did (59 to 56) but Evert was prolific in every single appearance, reaching at least the semi-finals 52 out of her 56 tries, including 36 trips to the final with 18 of them titles.
Who will be Serena's successor? At one point it seemed it might be Caroline Wozniacki but she has been disappointing at Grand Slams so far. Nobody else is really on the horizon at the moment.
Update July 12th: And that makes it 21 titles for Serena! She currently holds all four titles now! -- Phil Ploquin, June 9th 2015 [ ] |
|
There was a time when only the teams that finished in first place of their domestic leagues played in the European Champions Cup, which is now called the Champions League. That means that you never had both Real Madrid and Barcelona playing in the most important tournament in Europe, you had only the one that finished first in La Liga the year prior. There was great incentive to finishing in first place at home, the domestic leagues really did matter. Finishing first was not merely for bragging rights, but counted dearly for the fate of teams in Europe. Real Madrid were European champions in 2014, but does anybody even know how they did in 2013 to get there? Actually they finished second that season, behind Barcelona of course, but who cares? Nobody. Nobody in Spain remembers either because it doesn't matter. They both played the Champions League the next year and they're pretty much guaranteed to do so every single year, unless they finish worse than fourth place at home.
Of course it's not just Spain. Who cares who won the Premiership in 2011? It was Manchester United, by a mile, but the team that finished second that year, Chelsea, won the Champions League in 2012. It used to be that English clubs were so dominant that whichever one won the Premiership was pretty much guaranteed to win the Champions Cup. English teams won every year for six years in a row, starting with Liverpool in 1977 and 1978, Nottingham Forest in 1979 and 1980, Liverpool again in 1981, and Aston Villa in 1982. In that time you can pretty much bet that had we had the format we have today, all four semi-finalists every year would have been English.
Now this doesn't mean that the teams that finished second, third, or even fourth in their leagues were kept out of prestigious European competitions altogether. There was the UEFA Cup for them, and it mattered. Now it's called the Europa League and it's worthless. It's so worthless that the teams that don't make it out of the group stage of the Champions League are just dumped into wherever the Europa League stands and participate in that as a consolation prize. That's what happened to Chelsea in 2013, they fouled up in the Champions League, got dumped into the Europa League, and won that. Big deal, I doubt their supporters even care.
There was also a third competition, also worthwhile, called the Cup Winner's Cup. As the name implies it was for each nations' cup winners, unless that team had also won their league that year and then it was the runner-up who played. The last one was in 1999 because at that point it was just becoming embarrassing.
The quarter-finals for both the Champions League and the Europa Leagues for the 2015 seasons are set now. In the CL we have the likes of Real Madrid, Barcelona, Bayern Munich, Juventus and PSG whereas in the Europa League the best we can come up with are Napoli, Wolfsburg, and Sevilla. Who cares? Not me. -- Phil Ploquin, March 20th 2015 [ ] |
|
Typically we evaluate a quarterback's effectiveness by only considering his passing game, using the standard Passer Rating formula:
 As you can see, this formula considers pass completions, yards gained, touchdown passes, and interceptions versus pass attempts. It ignores rushing, which is then best expressed as rushing yards per game. Here is a clip of the full ranking, which we can also tweak to give only a certain range of years and minimum number of pass attempts: (updated for the 2014-2015 NFL Season:) Full ranking...Aaron Rodgers and Russell Wilson are so high up because they make so few mistakes, they throw very few interceptions. Intuitively, we'd expect Eli Manning, Brett Favre, and Dan Marino to be in the top 10 of this list while we wouldn't expect Steve Young or Philip Rivers to be so high up. Eli Manning has been Super Bowl MVP twice, yet his numbers leave him at #43 in the ranking. Brett Favre and Dan Marino (#22 and #24, respectively) were very reliable quarterbacks and extremely popular but they made a lot of mistakes. Explore the full rankings with game by game analysis on your Android device with the ScoreShelf Quarterback Passer Ratings app from the Google Play Store (totally free, and no ads)  -- Phil Ploquin, February 8th 2015 [ ] |
| |
| | |
| |
