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Search: ' Darren Bent'

Stories

Simon Grayson looks to calm Sunderland chaos ahead of opening Derby test

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The Black Cats’ signings have been solid rather than spectacular as they look to steady themselves in the Championship, but off- and on-field problems persist

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From the archive ~ Three England youth stars who never lived up to expectations

Playing for England at youth level doesn’t always herald a glittering future. In June 2003 we looked at the stuttering careers of Kevin Gallen, Stephen Hughes and Darren Caskey

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The Numbers Game

318 NumbersWhy everything you know about football is wrong
by Chris Anderson and David Sally
Viking, £12.99
Reviewed by Barney Ronay
From WSC 318 August 2013

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This book didn’t have an easy start in life. At first glance, and for the first 100 pages or so, it is hard to look beyond the instant wrong turn, the unhesitating literary hari-kari, of that terrible title. Yes. Everything you know about football is wrong. Everything. Wrong. All of it. Presumably this includes all the bits you may have picked up from reading Soccernomics and its imitators, not to mention the many articles, columns and blogs to have addressed already the central conceit of The Numbers Game – the idea that football is a sport still mummified by cliche, folk wisdom and superstition; and that it is only via the forensic scalpel of the insistent academic outsider that this tapestry of mediaeval idiocy can be swished away to reveal The Truth beneath.

It is an approach that speaks very clearly to the way football is now consumed, a sport that has long since evolved at its top level into a sprawlingly incontinent mass media event. To be interested in football is not so much to support a team, to seek the connections and consolations of old-school fandom, as to enter an ongoing and irresolvable mass argument. True understanding can only be reached through wider reading, more zingily up-to-date stats. So much so that at times modern football appears to be less a form of entertainment as a kind of strident shared academic discipline, a mob-handed codification of the pub bore dynamic, and the idea that what is important in all this is to be right.

If The Numbers Game suffers at points from the fact that it must gear itself towards its natural readership, the winning-an-argument-at-work group, then there is also a fascinating and highly readable book in here. The authors Chris Anderson and David Sally are described as “a football statistics guru” and “a baseball pitcher turned behavioural economist” (aren’t we all darling) and together they have some interesting and original arguments to make, expertly illustrated with stats, graphs and a broad sphere of reference.

This is essentially a book about “the inner truth” of football’s numbers, albeit the attempt to stretch this into an absolute truth is at times a little gauche. Why don’t all teams attempt to perfect the long throw, given its statistical success, the book demands, suggesting an obsession with aesthetics and “beauty” is behind this omission, when in fact it is as much to do with the more tangible tactical demands of rhythm and speed, a coherent and non-wishy-washy requirement for quicker, less random restarts. Barcelona can also produce some pretty convincing stats on this point.

Quibbles aside The Numbers Game is an illuminating experience, with some excellent passages – the Darren Bent analysis (surprisingly effective) is fascinating, as is the deconstruction of Chelsea’s hire and fire policy. And if there is some unintentional humour in the recurrent deification of the “heroic” Roberto Martínez – everything I know about football may be wrong but I do know that Wigan have since been relegated – then this is simply a reminder that football remains a game where the numbers, like the rest of us, must follow at one remove.

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Just be yourself

Thom Gibbs on footballers’ love affair with video games

On Manchester United’s impeccably marketed, sickeningly luxurious and unimaginably profitable summer tour of the US the squad were kept busy. Rafael da Silva caught salmon at Seattle’s Pike Place fish market, Patrice Evra and Park Ji-sung were taught how to make deep dish pizza in Chicago and the squad visited the floor of a glass-blowing factory, with Alex Ferguson the only visitor who looked remotely interested in being there.

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World Cup 2010 TV diary – Group stages

Relive four weeks of statements of the obvious from the pundits, daily complaints about the wobbly ball and over-emphatic pronunciations of Brazilian names

June 11
South Africa 1 Mexico 1
“It’s in Africa where humanity began and it is to Africa humanity now returns,” says Peter Drury who you feel would be available for film trailer voiceover work when it’s quieter next summer. Mexico dominate and have a goal disallowed when the flapping Itumeleng Khune inadvertently plays Carlos Vela offside. ITV establish that it was the right decision: “Where’s that linesman from, that football hotbed Uzbekistan?” asks Gareth Southgate who had previously seemed like a nice man. "What a moment in the history of sport… A goal for all Africa,” says Drury after Siphiwe Tshabalala crashes in the opener. We cut to Tshbalala’s home township – “they’ve only just got electricity” – where the game is being watched on a big screen which Jim Beglin thinks is a sheet. Cuauhtémoc Blanco looks about as athletic as a crab but nonetheless has a role in Mexico’s goal, his badly mishit pass being crossed for Rafael Márquez to score thanks to a woeful lack of marking. The hosts nearly get an undeserved winner a minute from time when Katlego Mphela hits the post. Óscar Pérez is described as “a personality goalkeeper” as if that is a tactical term like an attacking midfielder. Drury says “Bafana Bafana” so often it’s like he’s doing a Red Nose event where he earns a pound for an irrigation scheme in the Sudan every time he manages to fit it in.

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