blogjou

Sir Alex' last few seasons at Manchester United

Reading the analyses Sam performed during his time working at Opta, it is clear that he made good use of their extensive data sets. An article he wrote in 2013 about Manchester Unites’s shot conversion was particularly revealing. During Alex Fergusons last few seasons at the club, United had fewer shots than their title rivals, but they scored from more of the chances they created. Using ‘expected goals’ Sam showed that United scored more because they were shooting centrally, in positions that were more likely to result in a goal. Howver, he also suggested that even accounting for their better shooting position, their success was unsustainable.

Sam’s prediction proved correct. The next season, under new manager David Moyes, United’s shoot conversion dropped dramatically and they finished 7th in the Premier League. To analysts looking at United underlying numbers this change in fortune did not come a big surprise.

Is it really the referees only?

I very much doubt that FIFA will redraw the penalty area. Instead, referees already attempt to compensate for its poor current design. 61% of the penalties are awarded in the 18 yard by 20 yard area found by extending forward from the six-yard box to the edge of the penalty box. The other 39% are awarded in the two 18 yard by 12 yard areas on either side. That makes the probability per square yard of bein awarded a penalty in a central area 2.1 times greater than the probability of being awarded one on the outer edges. Penalties on the edges of the box are exceptions rather than the rule.

I personally think that also defenders act way more carfully at the edges where there is no reason for a high-risk tackle.

In America, alas, beauty has become something you drive to...

In America, alas, beauty has become something you drive to, and nature an either/or proposition - either you ruthlessly subjugate it, as at Tocks Damm and a million other places, or you deify it, treat it as something holy and temote, a thing apart, as along the Appalachian Trail. Seldom would it occur to anyone on either side that people and nature could coexist to their mutual benefit - that, say, a more graceful bridge across the Delaware River might actually set off the grandeur around it, or that the AT might be more interesting and rewarding if it wasn´t all wilderness, if from time to time it purposely took you past grazing cows and tilles fields.

Fashion was moving on...

Fashion was moving on. American holiday makers were discovering the seaside. The White Mountain hotels were a little too dull, a little too remote and expensive, for modern tastes. Worse, they had begun to attract the wrong sort of people - parvenus from Boston and New York. Finally, and above all, there was the automobile. The hotels were built on the assumption that visitors would come for a fortnight at least, but the motor care gave tourists a fickle mobility. In the 1924 edition of New England Highways and Byways from a Motor Car, the author gushed about the unrivalled splendour of the White Mountains - the tumbling cataracts of Franconia, the alabaster might of Washington, the secret charm of the little towns like Lincoln and Bethlehem - and encouraged visitors to give the mountains a full day and night. America was entering the age not just of the automobile but of the retarded attention span.

The State Senate of Illinois...

SPRINGFIELD, ILL. (AP) - The State Senate of Illinois yesterday disbanded its Committee on Efficiency and Economy ´for reasons of efficiency and economy´.

• Des Moines Tribune, 6 February 1955

About Bill Shankley's immortal words

It was the former Liverpool manager Bill Shankley who wpoke the immportal words, ‘Football is not a matter of life and death… I’s more important than that.’ These words are often interpreted as conveying how strongly fans feel about their team, or to explain the obsessions of players and managers. But they can be read in other ways. When Shankley spoke them in a TV interview in 1981, he was partly expressing regret that he was unable to properly enjoy life beyond football. He was describing an addiction to football that had clouded other parts of his life.

The secrets of the analysts

Premier league analysts were even more cautious than René when they spoke to me. As I talked to them about mathematical methods for analysing player tracking data on order to improve tactics they were very keen to hear my ideas, but they were not so keen to talk on the record about what they were currently doing. Howver, my overall impression remained the same as I described at the end of Chapter 9. The main reason that clubs don’t let talk their analysts in detail about player-tracking data isn’t because they are worried about their secrets will be revealed. Instead, they are worried that the opposition will find out that they don’t have any secrets to reveal. While maths is increasingly used in scouting, its potential uses in tactical development remain largely unexploited.

The first people to venture deep into the woods from the east...

The first people to venture deep into the woods from the east (the Indians, of course, had got there perhaps as muc as 20,000 years before them) weren’t looking for historic creatures and passages to the west or new lands to settle. They were looking for plants. America’s botanical possibilities excited Europeans inordinately, and there was both glory and monet to be made out in the woods. The eastern woods teemed with flora unknown to the old world and there was a huge eagerness, from scientists and amateur enthusiasts alike, to get a piece of it. Imanine if tomorrow a spaceship found a jungle growing beneath the gassy mountains of Venus. Think what Bill Gates, say, would pay for some tendrilled, purply-lobed piece of Venusian exotica to put in a pot in his greenhouse. That was the rhododendron in the eighteennth century - and the camellia, the hydrangea, the wild cherry, the rudbeckia, the azalea, the aster, the ostrich fern, the catalpa, the spice bush, the Venus flytrap, the Virginia creeper, the euphorbia. These and hundreds more were collected in the American woods, shipped across the ocean to England and France and Russia, and received with greedy kenness and trembling fingers.

If there is one thing the AT teaches...

If there is one thin the AT teaches, it is low-level ecstasy - something we could all do with more of in our lives.

For all its mass, a tree is a remarkably delicate thing.

For all its mass, a tree is a remarkably delicate thing. All of its internal life exists within three paper-thin layers of tissue, the phloem, xylem and cambium, just beneath the bark, which together form a mois sleeve around the dead heartwood. However tall it grows, a tree is just a few pounds of living cells thinly spread between the roots and leaves. These three diligent layers of cells perform all the intricate science and engineering needed to keep a tree alive, and the efficiency with which they do is one of the wonders of life. Without noise or fuss, every tree in a forest lifts massive volumes of water - several hundred gallons in the case of a large tree on a hot day - from its roots to its leaves, where it is returned to the atmosphere. Imagine the din and commotion, the clutter of machinery, that would be needed to a fire department to raise a similar volume of water to that of a single tree. And lifting water is just one of the many jobs the phloem, xylem and cambium perform.

They also manufacture lignin and cellulose, regulate the storage and production of tannin, sap, gum, oils, and resins, dole out minerals and nutrients, convert starches into sugars for future growth (which is where the maple syrup comes into the picture), and goodness knows what else. But because all this is happening in such a thin layer, It also leaves the tree terribly vulnerable to invasive organisms. To combat this, trees have formed elaborate defense mechanisms. The reason a rubber tree seeps latex when cut is that this is its way of saying to insects and other organisms, ´Not tasty. Nothing here for you. Go away.´ Trees can also deter destructive creatures like caterpillars by flooding their leaves with tannin, which makes the leaves less tasty and so inclines the caterpillars to look elsewhere. When infestations are particularly severe, some trees can even communicate the fact. Some species of oak release a chemical that tells other oaks in the vicinity that an attack is under way. In response, the neighbouring oaks step up their tannin production the better to withstand the coming onslaught.

By such means, of course, does nature tick along. The problem arises when a tree ncounters an attacker for which evolution has left it unprepaired, and seldom has a tree been more helpless against an invader than the American chestnut against Endothia parasitica. It enters a chestnut effortlessly, devours the cambium cells and positions itself for attack on the next tree before the tree has the faintest idea, chemically speaking, what hit it. It spreads by means of spores, which are produced in the hundreds of millions in each canker. A single woodpecker can transfer a billion spores on the flight between trees. At the height of the American chestnut blight, every woodland breeze would loose spores in uncountable trillions to drift in a petty, lethal haze onto heighbouring hillslides. The mortality rate was 100 per cent. In just over thrity-five years the American chestnat became a memory. The Appalachians alone lost four billion trees, a quarter of its cover, in a generation.

A great tragedy, of course. But how lucky, when you think about it, that these diseases are at least species specific. Instead of a chestnut blight or Dutch elm disease or dogwood anthranoce, what if there was just a tree blight - something indisciminate and unstoppable swept through whole forests? And in fact there is. It’s called acid rain.